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. |