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This is not solely about mental health. It is about getting the insight that people suffering from chronic diseases, or maybe many other illnesses, can benefit from thinking of us as mammals with full-blown survival instincts. The message is: of course you can become better, maybe even close to normal.
In the next few posts, we will be looking at each of the primary stress responses fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, in turn. Here I begin with the fight response or instinct, and the setting where I see this active in modern life: at work.
Fight as a way into chronic diseases
The fight instinct is actually the most interesting because people cannot see it in themselves.
Fighting responses were the original biological instinct when the neighboring tribe wants to invade your village, then you must fight for your life and for your family.
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It can also be used when being attacked by a predator/lion when it's smaller so that you can defeat it. It's the old way of how we build this stress for physically fighting to resolve a dangerous situation. In modern life, especially in your job life, there's a lot of this fight instinct being activated. Being a perfectionist, having a hard deadline, multitasking, having lots of rules about how fast and well you must do this task, how many roles you must take on, and the ambition of having a better job with more responsibilities and power.
I see so many people in modern life caught in fight stress, and the chronic symptoms and suffering this can cause, including high blood pressure, tinnitus, problems sleeping at night, or waking up during the night several times.
A lot of people say “I'm not stressed”, but if you start to dig into this they are actually caught in fight stress. No one can see, that it's actually leading to chronic stress, but that's where diseases start after long-term stress.
The problem is today you cannot complete the stress response by physically fighting because you can’t say to your manager, that you won't do the job, you cannot say that he’s too much, and you cannot smash him in the face, you cannot run from the job, you can’t even show aggression or that you are angry, so it's very difficult in most jobs to complete this fight stress cycle and cool down again.
So the result is the adrenaline it produces lingers and builds up in your brain and body, causing low dopamine levels and other health problems long term:
Indeed, I think it's the modern world's biggest problem how to get rid of this job stress. I think everyone must find their own way to do it. Maybe get another job maybe have a talk with the boss, that this is too much. But in the here and now, you can maybe take a break, run around the building, or take the stairs and burn off some of the surplus adrenaline.
I don't think we are born to work 40 hours a week. Like the Chimpanzees in the documentary, we are born to work [hunt, gather, forage, expand territory] for a couple of hours, have a long break, be social, and then go back and work again. Still, it's only a few modern jobs that allow you to have a more calm work life with plenty of rest and recuperation time.
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If you want to support me and Gary’s [Gary Sharpe's Articles], the Member’a Area is a way with a monthly payment at $16 and can also be a gift for a loved one with a disease or who is stressed. It has taken Gary 7 years of his own struggles and life experience, and me 5 years of experimenting with clients and test cases, researching survivor stories, and studying to acquire this knowledge. We need to find out if this knowledge is welcome in the world (and we need to start employing people so that we can make more content.)
The Fight Instinct, and how it Influences Chronic diseases