Stress and your nervous system
Your body has a built-in alarm
Picture a deer in a field. A twig snaps.
In a flash, its body gets ready to run.
You have that same fast alarm inside you.
It switches on when something feels like a threat.
A scientist named Walter Cannon first named this alarm.
He called it the fight-or-flight response.
The alarm has not changed for thousands of years.
It once helped people run from real danger.
Today it still fires for a hard email or a test.
A zebra escapes a lion. A person finishes a stressful day. Whose alarm turns OFF faster?
“Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers”
Robert M. Sapolsky
The alarm is a bad thing that breaks your body.Tap to reveal
This misses the point. Cannon called the alarm adaptive. It is built in, and it helps the body adjust to changes around it. That helps you survive. The alarm itself is not the problem.
So the alarm is built in. It once kept people alive.
But what happens inside your body when it fires?