Fight or flight?

Reader question:

Please explain “fight or flight moment” in this sentence: “It’s that fight or flight moment, and I took the fight.”

My comments:

In this quote, the speaker, in a moment of danger, chooses to fight, not to run.

Fight or flight, you see, refers to the animal instinct to make a quick decision in a moment of danger.

In the wild, when a gazelle spots a cheetah, for example, it runs away immediately. The gazelle chooses to run and flee the scene because the predator is overwhelming in strength. An elephant, on the other hand, may choose to fight the cheetah instead, especially if it’s a young and small one and hunting alone. The elephant likes its chances. Therefore it chooses to stay and fight instead of taking flight, or rather jogging off.

Anyways, that’s what happens in a fight-or-flight moment. A decision has to be made and made quickly. The decision is actually made by instinct and rather subconsciously, as a matter of fact. In other words, the fight-or-flight response is knee-jerk and kind of automatic.

Humans have retained this animalistic trait or instinct. Although humans have developed a far superior system of rationalization to that of lower animals, in a life or death moment, the fight or flight response mechanism still reins supreme.

And that’s a good thing. That’s a good thing because in those moments, there’s often no time for rational thought at any rate.

So, in short, to fight or not to fight is the question and our speaker chooses to fight – and apparently survives to tell the tale.

All right, here are more media examples of “fight or flight”:

1. A man who was attacked in a parking lot didn’t give in to demands for his money. Instead, deputies say he stabbed his attacker in the neck.

When financial advisor Jason Bennett returned to Merrill Lynch Sunday night, he became the victim of an ambush-style attack.

“They were struggling, and in an attempt to get the suspect away from him, he was trying to grab some money out of his truck to just get the suspect to flee,” said Sgt. Mark Young of the Lee County Sheriff’s Office.

Deputies say Bennett’s attacker was Willie Lee Jones.

“[Bennett] grabbed a knife and decided to defend himself, stabbed the suspect in the neck,” Young said.

Bennett later identified a bleeding Jones as his attacker. He is recovering at Lee Memorial Hospital.

Young says there’s no hard rule on when to fight and when to take flight. While in this case, the victim made the decision that led to the arrest of his attacker.

“It’s not worth losing your life over, whoever it is,” Young said.

The detective said what Bennett did is not necessarily the answer for everyone.

“I don’t recommend it per se, however on the flip side of that coin, you can’t tell someone they can’t defend themselves. They have every right to defend themselves when they’re under attack,” Young said.

He says in most cases, a victim is better off to give the suspect money or property.

“It’s fight or flight syndrome. When someone is put in that situation, everyone is going to react differently. Some fight, some flight,” Young said.

- Fight or flight decision different for everyone, NBC-2.com, October 16, 2007.

2. The “fight-or-flight response” is one of those ideas self-help authors have wrenched with gusto out of its scientific context, with predictably messy results. The worst example of this happened to quantum physics (visit quantumjumping.com for exciting tips on how to use the theory of multiple universes “to pick up new skills… like painting [or] photography”). By contrast, and however much it’s been distorted, fight-or-flight remains a useful way of seeing our tendency to react like startled animals when faced by stress. Speaking broadly, the prefrontal cortex – the reflective part of the brain – shuts down and the amygdala, the lizard brain, which is responsible for our animal instincts, takes over. Steeled for combat or readying for escape, we switch into “survival mode” – useful for running away from predators, but a misery-inducing approach to the manifold minor stresses of modern life.

There’s an element of fight-or-flight involved, arguably, not only in angry encounters, but whenever we find ourselves doing things we “know” we shouldn’t. Impulse buying, procrastination and compulsive eating can all be seen as ways to escape some feeling we’d rather not experience. The problem with self-help’s usual antidotes, though, is precisely that survival mode is unreflective: in its grip, you can’t possibly recall that 15-step plan for building better habits, or that clever technique from that book on neurolinguistic programming. Which is why I love the aggressive simplicity of what Tony Schwartz, writing on the Harvard Business Review’s website, calls The Golden Rule of Triggers: “Whatever you feel compelled to do, don’t.” Instead, he says, take a deep breath, and “feel your feet” – a distraction to pull yourself out of your head.

We’ve all had occasion to tell ourselves or others to “take a deep breath” or to “count to 10” before exploding in rage. What Schwartz’s rule removes, though, is the need to reflect on whether or not we’re in such a situation. Instead, it recommends learning to interpret any sign of compulsive behaviour as an indication that the action is probably unwise. Rather than battling compulsion, it co-opts it as a warning system.

There’s still a small element of contradiction here: in the unthinking heat of survival mode, you can’t stand back enough even just to see that you’re acting compulsively. But the complete takeover of your brain by fight-or-flight usually lasts only a split second – enough time for the finger to reach for the mouse button, say, but not quite long enough to press it and send that ill-considered angry email. The crucial moment is the next split second, as reflective thinking kicks back in and you dimly perceive that you're acting compulsively. The Golden Rule of Triggers may be stupidly, laughably simple. But in that tiny gap between the total grip of survival mode and doing something you’ll regret, simple rules are all you’ll be capable of following.

- This column will change your life: The Golden Rule of Triggers, by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, June 4, 2011.

3. Measuring the brain activity of Republicans and Democrats while they played a game has revealed striking differences in each group’s cognitive functioning. The findings, appearing in the journal PLOS ONE, are the result of collaborative research by neuroscientists from the University of Exeter and the University of California, San Diego. They suggest that being a Republican or Democrat changes how the brain functions.

The experiment used brain activity data taken from 82 subjects while they played a simple gambling game. Exeter’s Dr. Darren Schreiber said that while Republicans and Democrats do not differ in the risks they take, there were “striking differences in the participants’ brain activity during the risk-taking task.”

Specifically, the Democrats showed much greater activity in the left insula, a region associated with social and self-awareness. Meanwhile Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala, a region involved in the body’s fight-or-flight system. The results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk.

The researchers say that such brain activity profiles can be used to predict whether a person is a Democrat or Republican with 83 percent accuracy. By comparison, the longstanding traditional model in political science, which uses the party affiliation of a person’s mother and father to predict the child’s affiliation, is only accurate about 70 percent of the time.

The model also outperforms models based on differences in genes. “Although genetics have been shown to contribute to differences in political ideology and strength of party politics, the portion of variation in political affiliation explained by activity in the amygdala and insula is significantly larger, suggesting that affiliating with a political party and engaging in a partisan environment may alter the brain, above and beyond the effect of heredity,” Schreiber said.

- Republicans’ brains wired for fight-or-flight, ScienceAGoGo.com, February 13, 2013.

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.