The Fight-or-Flight Effect (Pros & Cons)
The Good and Bad of our Threat Response through the Lens of Evolutionary Psychology
Context:
When we feel threatened, we feel ready to attack or flee… but not really much else. This process was dubbed in the 1920s as our Fight-or-Flight Response [1] [2] by American physiologist and chairman of Harvard’s Department of Physiology, Walter B. Cannon (1871–1945). [i] While Cannon’s work focused on our body’s balancing mechanism — or homeostasis (a term Cannon himself coined) — and the interplay between our emotions and our physiological responses, it wasn’t until the discovery of the hormone cortisol where we truly began understanding the many positive and negative potentials of our fight-or-flight response. [ii]
Beneficial Use:
Over yonder hills, a cougar [3] stalks towards you and your friends. In a breakneck process beginning with our senses, moving through signals sent and received by our hypothalamus and amygdala, and ending with a rush of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, [4] our body completely transforms:
- Our heart rate and breathing accelerate to provide increased oxygen to our muscles (making us faster and stronger)
- Our peripheral vision sharpens (to detect adjacent predators) while our pupils dilate to see better in the dark (to spot hidden danger)
- Our blood thickens (to prepare clotting for potential injuries)
- Our immune system circulates more effectively (to fight potential infection) [iii]
- Our skin activates our sweat glands (to keep us cooled off for heated activity)
And so on. We’re also even more primed to detect threats than usual. Everything about this trait is adaptive for handling threats — whether you’re planning on outrunning that puma [5] or slap the whiskers off its snout. Everything about this evolutionary response prepares us for danger.
But what if the danger isn’t real?
Detrimental Misuses:
All good things come at a price. When our body is beefed up for either fighting or fleeing, we are losing out on other essential processes. Broadly speaking, everything outside a threatened response — sleep, sex, digestion (all the fun things) — are sorely disrupted. Our homeostasis is disrupted by allostasis — the regulation that arises out of anticipatory needs. [iv] If we remain in this state too long, we enter what American neuroendocrinologist Bruce S. McEwen (1938–2020) and psychologist Eliot Stellar (1919–1993) termed Allostatic Load (some call it ‘allostatic overload’)— a gradual “wear and tear” on the body after continuous stress. [v]
Let’s zoom-in on the processes: Muscle-bound blood vessels dilate while the vessels responsible for digestive, reproductive, and immunological processes constrict. The long-term effects of being in this ‘fight or flight’ state include cardiovascular problems [vi] (consider the stress of that elevated heart rate), sexual problems (including potentially pre-term childbirth [vii]), physical and cognitive degeneration, [viii] and increased mortality amongst older adults. [ix]
Muscle-bound blood vessels dilate while the vessels responsible for digestive, reproductive, and immunological processes constrict. The long-term effects of being in this ‘fight or flight’ state include cardiovascular problems [vi] (consider the stress of that elevated heart rate), sexual problems (including potentially pre-term childbirth [vii]), physical and cognitive degeneration,[viii] and increased mortality amongst older adults. [ix]
Take a second look at those symptoms: Decreased libido, stomach problems, increased heart rate. These are both the long-term symptoms of General Anxiety Disorder and the immediate effects of a panic attack, both predicated on the conscious or unconscious perception of threat.
Acceptance:
In the Japanese Anime, Dragon Ball Z (one of the greatest shows of all time), the warrior-protagonist Son-Goku occasionally uses a maneuver he learned called a Kaio-ken to help him in life-threatening situations. In this state, his strength, speed, and senses improve substantially [6] — but at a cost. Sustaining Kaio-ken is immensely taxing on the body, occasionally causing the user’s body to collapse. Sound familiar?
The fact is that we have finite resources to maintain our immediately helpful fight-or-flight transformation. This is most problematic when we are unable to ‘shut-off’ our body’s flight-or-fight response. If we maintain this perception that we are under threat, even unconsciously, we are less likely to resume our body’s typical homeostasis.
From a humanistic standpoint, we can relate allostatic load back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where our higher order needs like love and belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization cannot be met when we feel that our physiological and security needs are not being met. [x]
If the major detriments arise from our unintended prolonging of allostasis, then the trick must be to learn to shut it off. But how? Well, much the same way we normally destress: Bettering our sleep quality, [xi] finding a sense of meaning in our lives, [xii] maintaining health through a healthy diet and physical exercise, decreasing drug consumption, [xiii] and maintaining social relationships. [xiv]
It’s clear, then, that creating a healthy routine is one of the best ways in which we can reduce the risks from enduring allostatic load, while also tapping into our fight-or-flight should we actually need it. Perhaps this is overly philosophical, but it seems one must properly define their secure state — socially, environmentally, physiologically — in order to accurately differentiate it from the times in which we are under threat. In securing a routine balance, we are less likely to tap into our kaio-ken state when it isn’t yet needed.
Notes:
[1] This is also called acute stress response or hyperarousal.
[2] It should also be noted that there is a ‘freeze’ option, closely associated with the defense mechanism of dissociation. Though having the opposite effect as fight-or-flight, it is equally evolutionary: Blood pulls away from the limbs — to decrease the odds of bleeding out — while your body is flooded with opioids to keep you as calm, unfeeling, and distanced from whatever undesirable event you cannot fight back or escape from.
[3] A mountain lion, not an older temptress seeking a youthful man.
[4] Also known as epinephrine.
[5] Good luck. Pumas can sprint up to 50 miles per hour, nearly double the fastest speed a human has even clocked. Stay tuned.
[6] It is worth mentioning that the kaio-ken is defined as increasing a warrior’s ‘ki’ — a Japanese word that translates to many things including ‘heart’ and ‘mind’.
Works Cited:
[i] Walter Bradford Cannon (1915). Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear, and rage. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. p. 211.
[ii] Clegg, B. (2020, January 27). Cortisol & Hydrocortisone. Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.chemistryworld.com/podcasts/cortisol-and-hydrocortisone/8647.article#/
[iii] Dhabhar, F. S., Miller, A. H., McEwen, B. S., & Spencer, R. L. (1995). Effects of stress on immune cell distribution. Dynamics and hormonal mechanisms. The Journal of Immunology, 154(10), 5511–5527.
[iv] Sterling, P., & Eyer, J. (1988). Allostasis: A new paradigm to explain arousal pathology. In S. Fisher & J. Reason (Eds.), Handbook of life stress, cognition and health (p. 629–649). John Wiley & Sons.
[v] McEwen, B. S., & Stellar, E. (1993). Stress and the individual: Mechanisms leading to disease. Archives of internal medicine, 153(18), 2093–2101.
[vi] Gillespie, S. L., Anderson, C. M., Zhao, S., Tan, Y., Kline, D., Brock, G., … & Joseph, J. J. (2019). Allostatic load in the association of depressive symptoms with incident coronary heart disease: The Jackson Heart Study. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 109, 104369.
[vii] Olson, D. M., Severson, E. M., Verstraeten, B. S., Ng, J. W., McCreary, J. K., & Metz, G. A. (2015). Allostatic load and preterm birth. International journal of molecular sciences, 16(12), 29856–29874.
[viii] Seeman, T. E., Singer, B. H., Rowe, J. W., Horwitz, R. I., & McEwen, B. S. (1997). Price of adaptation — allostatic load and its health consequences: MacArthur studies of successful aging. Archives of internal medicine, 157(19), 2259–2268.
[ix] Karlamangla, A. S., Singer, B. H., & Seeman, T. E. (2006). Reduction in allostatic load in older adults is associated with lower all-cause mortality risk: MacArthur studies of successful aging. Psychosomatic medicine, 68(3), 500–507.
[x] Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346
[xi] McEwen, B. S. (2006). Sleep deprivation as a neurobiologic and physiologic stressor: allostasis and allostatic load. Metabolism, 55, S20-S23.
[xii] Lindfors, P., Lundberg, O., & Lundberg, U. (2006). Allostatic load and clinical risk as related to sense of coherence in middle-aged women. Psychosomatic Medicine, 68(5), 801–807.
[xiii] McEwen, B. S. (2008). Central effects of stress hormones in health and disease: Understanding the protective and damaging effects of stress and stress mediators. European journal of pharmacology, 583(2–3), 174–185.
[xiv] Seeman, T., Glei, D., Goldman, N., Weinstein, M., Singer, B., & Lin, Y. H. (2004). Social relationships and allostatic load in Taiwanese elderly and near elderly. Social science & medicine, 59(11), 2245–2257.
Samuel Armen is an author, educator and activist. Orphaned after Armenia’s Gyumri-Spitak Earthquake in 1988 and adopted by Armenian-Americans based in New York, he makes it his life goal to give back. Currently, he divides his time between psychology research for his book (Acceptance), teaching ELA & AP English Language and Composition in the top public high school in Brooklyn, creative writing guest lectures at The Russian Armenian University in Yerevan, uplifting members of his community through digital advocacy, and publishing poetry. His works have appeared in The Showbear Family Circus (Aug. 2020), Dreamers Creative Writing (Nov. 2020), The Raw Art Review (Winter 2020), Prometheus Dreaming (October 2021), Hey, I’m Alive Magazine (November 2021), Beyond Words Magazine (February 2022), Wingless Dreamer (February 2022), and Allegory Ridge (Spring 2022).
