Do you wonder how will you respond in a zombie crisis? Think you will be all calm and cool like some action hero?
Not if your cunning little brain kicks in with some hardwired survival
mechanisms.The amygdala takes over when you
experience a terrifying situation and orders a bucket load of
hormones to get dumped into your bloodstream. So powerful can this
reaction be, that Daniel Goleman coined the term “amygdala hijack”
in his 1996 book Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more
than IQ.
And hijack the brain it does,
inhibiting rational thought while creating the freezing, fleeing, fighting and fawning
response.
Keeping the amygdala under control is not easy. One option is to get drunk. Turns out alcohol can suppress the
amygdala. However being blind drunk raises it own issues. Apart from poor fashion choices and
crashing the car, guzzling alcohol while under stress is thought to increase the chance of developing Post-Trauma Stress
Disorder (PTSD).
Bite off more fear than you can chew
Mr Rimsky
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