How To Stay Calm Under Pressure: The Neuroscience of Fight or Flight

Jump to: What is Fight or Flight? | What Happens to the Body During Fight or Flight? | Managing Our Stress Response | Different Ways to Stay Calm | How Healium Helps

Stress and anxiety have become a normal part of our everyday lives, so knowing how to stay calm under pressure is more important than ever. When we encounter stressful situations in work, school, or in our personal lives, we can tend to feel panicked or feel overwhelmed. During this time, our bodies go through a process known as fight or flight to help us cope with our current circumstances. 

This blog will dive deep into this stress response and help you find the best ways to navigate it.

What Is Fight or Flight?

The fight or flight response is an acute stress response or survival response that refers to a physiological reaction our bodies go through when we are face-to-face with something that is either physically or mentally terrifying. 

While it does have other bodily manifestations, the stress response always begins in the brain. When a triggering event occurs, our senses send information to our amygdala — the part of our brain that’s responsible for emotional processing.

Our amygdala then interprets the images we see and the sounds that we hear. When it perceives that we are in danger, it will automatically send a distress signal to our hypothalamus (also known as the command center of our brain). 

Once the hypothalamus recognizes the danger, it will communicate to the rest of our bodies what we need to do — either we fight or we flee. 

What Happens to the Body When Our Fight or Flight Kicks In?

Our fight-or-flight response takes place when the hypothalamus activates our sympathetic nervous system. It does so by sending specific signals to the adrenal glands through our automatic nerves. Once our adrenal glands receive these signals, they will respond by releasing a hormone called epinephrine (more commonly known as adrenaline) into our bloodstream. 

As adrenaline circulates through our system, it gives rise to numerous physiological changes that we commonly associate with being stressed. Our hearts will beat faster than normal, muscles tense, pupils dilate, skin becomes pale, and blood pressure goes up. 

When we feel these changes, we may start to breathe more rapidly. In doing so, we can inhale more oxygen, which can increase our alertness and make our senses of sight, hearing, and touch much sharper. 

At the same time, the adrenaline will trigger the release of fats and glucose (blood sugar) into the body through the bloodstream to supply energy. This energy will help us take action if ever our bodies decide to fight or flee. 

It may seem like so many things are happening to our bodies when we go through fight or flight, but all these changes happen in quick succession! Before we even realize what’s happening, our bodies would have already adapted to the changes.

Because of this, it’s important to recognize the early signs of stress in our daily life, whether it be faster heart rate, more rapid breathing, or trembling. When these signals appear, we need to start to look for ways to calm down and relax our bodies.

The Importance of Managing Our Stress Response

Although the fight or flight response is a natural bodily reaction to dangerous situations or environments, it is not healthy to be in this state for long periods. If we allow ourselves to be constantly in a state of stress, our bodies can trigger the release of ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone). This will travel back to our adrenal glands and prompt the release of cortisol. 

When we attain high cortisol levels due to stress, we can encounter numerous physical or psychological problems. Long-term or chronic stress will often result in insomnia, anxiety, depression, gastrointestinal issues, and substance dependence. 

In some cases, our stress can lead to eating disorders and the development of certain health conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, asthma, strokes, heart attacks, and even Alzheimer’s disease.

To avoid reaching this extreme, it’s imperative to learn how to stay calm under pressure and stress and seek out tools that interrupt the stress response.

Best Ways To Stay Calm and Reduce Stress

Staying calm and reducing stress can be a challenging feat, but with these techniques in mind, we can learn how to better manage our responses and keep stress at bay. 

Physical Activity

One of the ways to manage our fight or flight response is to participate in physical activity. Exercise can help reduce the build-up of stress in many ways. For example, if we decide to take a walk when faced with a tense or nerve-wracking situation, we deepen our breathing and relieve the muscle tension in our bodies.

In addition, movement therapies like mindful movement meditations, tai chi, yoga, and pilates can combine physical exercise with mental focus to help both our minds and bodies to remain calm. 

Social Support

Another great way to keep stress at bay is to confide in friends, relatives, spouses, co-workers, and even professionals. Each of them can provide a support system and build a social net where we can safely share our worries and concerns without any prejudices. 

While there’s not a lot of concrete medical explanation for why surrounding ourselves with people can help alleviate stress, many believe that when we do, we get the emotional support we need to keep calm and level-headed in times of crisis or chronic stress.

Mindfulness and Meditation

Besides these options, a great technique that can help us during stressful times is mindfulness and meditation. Mental exercises like tranquil visualizations, repetitive prayers, affirmations,  or a combination of all three can counter stress responses effectively. 

In an interview, Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar said that meditation and mindfulness do not only reduce stress but also change our brains.

In her studies, she found that people who meditated for at least eight weeks showed thicker posterior cingulate, an area of the brain which is primarily involved in self-relevance and mind wandering. Moreover, the same individuals also developed their left hippocampus, temporoparietal junction, and pons. 

The left hippocampus is responsible for learning, memory, cognition, and emotional regulation. The temporoparietal junction is associated with empathy, compassion, and perspective-taking. The pons is an area of the brainstem where many regulatory neurotransmitters are created. 

Lazar concluded that by meditating and practicing mindfulness, these critical areas of the brain become more developed, which in turn allows the person to react to pressure and stressful events more calmly.

Take Relaxation to a Whole New Level with VR and Neurofeedback

It is possible to further enhance the effectiveness of mindfulness and meditation by using VR and neurofeedback. More specifically, Healium VR combines meditation exercises and EEG headbands to see how brain waves change in real time. 

After every session, users receive a score and see their  overall performance. With continuous usage, users familiarize themselves with the makeup of the electrical activity in their brain, which can help them self-manage stressful fight or flight situations as they arise. 

For more information on how Healium works, check out the video below!

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About the Author

Sarah Hill, a former interactive TV news journalist at NBC, ABC, and CBS affiliates in Missouri, gained recognition for pioneering interactive news broadcasting using Google Hangouts. She is now the CEO of Healium, the world’s first biometrically powered VR channel, helping those with stress, anxiety, insomnia, and other struggles through biofeedback storytelling. With patents, clinical validation, and over seven million views, she has reshaped the landscape of immersive media.