Your brain's fight-or-flight response evolved to handle short bursts of danger, but modern stress keeps your amygdala constantly activated. Relationship problems, money worries, and climate anxiety act like endless tigers, preventing your nervous system from ever resetting and impairing how your brain works.
Chapters
So how does our brain respond to stress and what happens to the brain when we undergo long periods of chronic stress?
So when you are feeling a sense of acute stress, so short-term stress, your brain and your body are actually expertly designed to handle these short bursts of stress. For most of us now, it is not really acute short-term stress, but really long-term chronic stressors. And so therefore that amygdala has really taken over, that amygdala where your stress response lives, the fight or flight response is cave person mode. It's focused on survival and self-preservation. That fight or flight response has a really important role. You know, we were all tribespeople, cave people living in the forest. You would see a tiger, you would either fight the tiger or you would run away from the tiger. That's where fight or flight comes from. And now we have lots of metaphorical tigers, relationship constraints, financial constraints, climate disasters, humanitarian crises, everything in the palm of our hands, right? And it's this cascade and onslaught of constant stressors that never really seem to go away. And so those tigers are everywhere, all around us. And so therefore your amygdala, that stress response, kind of always stays on in the background.
