The evolution of fight or flight emotions

Spiritual and religious groups often speculate upon where fear, hate, anger...and a host of so called "negative thoughts and emotions" come from. They are in reality related to ancient programs built into human nervous systems to help people to survive - albeit antiquated and even dangerous within the modern context!

To set the stage for today's brief feature, let us start with a short exercise, which you may participate in if you choose to. It is also OK to skip this exercise if you want to.

Common themes in different situations:

What do you feel when you briefly think of any of these commonly publicized scenes or scenarios?

·         Home foreclosures

·         Fatal car accidents

·         Shark attacks; including within the popular movie, Jaws

·         Knife attacks; including within the movie, Psycho

·         Homeless people starving and /or freezing in cold weather

·         911

·         The day president Kennedy was assassinated

Back to the present!

While each of these highly popular themes within the media are very different in action and context, there is a common denominator which connects them all. Regardless of if someone may feel fear, anger, hate of any other common emotion, they are all related to survival! At some level of the nervous system, very different fears, such as being eaten by a Great White and the fear of running out of food, money or toilet paper are related!

Ancient parts of the survival system:

At very primitive levels, deep within the human nervous system, there are mechanisms which help us to pay attention, confront the situation at hand or run away. The sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system was designed in part for just this purpose.

A related part of the glandular, or endocrine system, called the HPA axis (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) is part of the survival based design.

Newer revisions to the design:

In the highly evolved (well kind of) human species, the "survival design" has some newer hardware and software in the form of a cerebral cortex. This part of the brain helps humans to categorize, compute in the form of thinking,  make decisions and start to take actions.

This part of the survival system will find the common ground between very different situations, has routines which connect what happened in the past with present day possibilities, and will switch the older parts of the brain into action as needed. It is so smart that it can imagine possible scenarios based upon situations which we were not directly involved in or which were based upon the imagination of others.

Reprogramming the survival system:

Fortunately, natures designers are so smart that humans are thinking of new ways to become  better fit within the context of modern life. 

Note: reprint of my material