Thread: Adrenaline paradox

Adrenaline is essentially used for fight or flight response in living organisms. But in this era how many events that we face in our dailly lifes needs a fight or a flight? On the other hand I think that the results are devastating for us. Any idea about this? Wonder what others think about this inspection.

Well it's very important for women. The majority of women aged less than, say, 40 have to deal with the possibility of a variety of threats every time they set foot on public transport or into a work or social setting.

Getting a little hit of adrenaline every time someone ogles or 'pats' various parts of your body or makes suggestive or threatening remarks or gestures means you're just that little bit better prepared to sidestep or shout or run or get out of there as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, the adrenaline response is fight, flight or freeze - which often is the most likely response when mr nastybreath is leaning over your bus seat trying to get a better look and you've got nowhere to go.

If you look through the casualty rates for 2009 in Canada, there are a decent amount of collisions. From personal experience, my, "fight, flight or freeze" reaction kicks in when I'm in the car (driver or passenger) and another driver does something dangerous near me. For some people, they'll freeze and not know what to do, while others will try their best to avoid the incoming danger. If this system were not present, it's questionable whether the statistics would be higher. There are also less dangerous situations that trigger this response, such as adelady's examples of an unwanted person patting somewhere. The list of daily examples where this response is needed goes on and on.

For some people, they'll freeze and not know what to do, while others will try their best to avoid the incoming danger.

When it comes to driving, it's all about training. I remember vividly a bloke giving a talk on driving our fleet cars. Apart from rules and regulations, he gave some general safety advice - many of us had to do a fair amount of country driving. He described a head-on, multiple fatality accident that he'd examined. The most important feature was that it was a straight road, and the two cars showed long, straight, skid marks where both drivers had obviously braked heavily while driving straight towards each other. His take on it? They froze.

His advice? Use your eyes. You will naturally tend to steer in the direction you look. If either one of these drivers had looked away from the approaching car and towards the side of the road they could have steered themselves away from the collision course. So we were encouraged to ensure we constantly moved our eyes, not just to check rear vision, but to reduce the tendency to lock on to the straight ahead mode. This also meant that we would be less inclined to drive while tired - as soon as you notice that your driving habits are sluggish or changed in some way .... stop driving.

Well this is exactly my point. I am saying that adrenaline is the number one spoiler of human nature in our contemporary lives. Adrenaline does not adjust your body to do some skillful manoeuvres while you are trying to avoid a car accident. What it is doing is to prepare your body to run or fight by increasing your blood pressure, blood glucose and opening your pupils to see more and increasing your excitability of nervous system which causes tremors in your muscles and you can not think logically and so on. What I am trying to say is that it reduces your own control over your brain and your body just to maximize your energy for crude actions. Thanks god it takes about 5-10 seconds to reach out to your brain from your surrenal gland and meanwhile you can just pull your car out from the accident.

If you hang around bars and drink a lot the reaction will pay dividends.

Adrenaline does not adjust your body to do some skillful manoeuvres while you are trying to avoid a car accident.

I'm not convinced. Adrenaline is very useful if you're trained to deal with the situations in which it's likely to be provoked. Just look at those people on the 10 metre diving platform. Most of us would freeze up there. These people are trained to know what to do and to use the edge that adrenaline can give you - when you know what you're doing.

Same thing goes for other less physically threatening situations. I've never forgotten my coach telling me when preparing for a concert how to deal with the dry mouth and shaking hands that go with real 'nerves' (otherwise known as the classic signs of an adrenaline rush). "If you're not nervous, it's a sign of disrespect to your audience." In other words, learn to live with it, make the most of it.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of athletes and performers and racing drivers and ski jumpers and the like learn to do the same.

When I was in a sales role I would drive to meetings with some favourite rip-roaring piece of pop music playing, so that when I went into to see the client I was fired up: positive, confident, ready to save this guy from the fiendish hands of the competition. Without that adrenaline supercharge I would have been wishy washy and made far fewer sales.