With Stress Your Body Has Two Choices

When it comes to dealing with stress, we have the ability to choose to respond in one of two basic ways.

1, We can choose the syntoxic response (the ignoring response)

2, or the catatoxic response (the fight-or-flight response)

For instance; a person could well choose the catatoxic response, let’s say someone is being insulted from two rows back in the theater. When they confront this troublemaker and learn that the man is six-feet-four inches tall and a professional wrestler, they may suddenly reverse their field and choose the much safer syntoxic response, which is simply to ignore this troublemaker.

Again, depending on your experiences and upbringing, one or the other of these responses could easily be ingrained to the extent that you do not need to consciously make a choice. It will be made for you by your own reflexes.

Our response to any stress, no matter how large or small, has been well documented and shows that these choices can come almost automatic for us, regardless of what we would like to have done…