Fight or flight?

A timeless dilemna

I should think that everyone would have experienced negative emotions sometime in their entire life. It could be the stress of preparing for an exam, it could be the concomittant shame that comes along with failure, it could be the soul crushing sadness when you lose someone you love. This array of negative emotions can be said to be part of the human condition. Now in life, given the fact that suffering and thus negative emotion is inevitable, it would make sense for us to regard negative emotion not as a matter of if, but a matter of for what?

To explain more I need to first delve into the two distinct group of individuals that differ in their reaction to negative emotion. Much like how when we encounter a dangerous situation we are put into a fight or flight response, where we could either confront the threat courageously in an attempt to neutralise it or to escape from the scene with the hopes of living to a another day, the way that we react to these negative emotions do certainly draw some parallels. I would say that for most people they would fall into the “flight” category. Whenever we experience a bit of resistance, a bit of hardship, a bit of discomfort in our lives, do you perhaps instinctually whip out for your phone for a quick scroll in instagram, or are you perhaps an avid gamer at heart. Whenever life is being particularly overbearing and difficult, do you escape to the safe and blissful yet ephemeral confines of your video game virtual reality? Do note I use the word “escape”, because that precisely encapsulates what these individuals are doing: Escaping. Escaping from their troubles, escaping from their worries, escaping from the unpleasant moments in life. Yet I should think that this escaping endeavour of yours is ultimately doomed to fail. No amount of video games will be able to whisk you away from your troubles, or convert your problems into a thin puff of smoke. It is also plausible that the problem you are running away from grows larger day by day as you ignore it.

Perhaps in looking for inspiration we need not look further than children stories that we have grown up with. In the rather simple yet insightful story called “don’t ignore the dragon”, we follow a child as he encounters a small dragon in his home. When he confronts his mother about the fact that there is a dragon, the mother insists that this dragon is nothing but a figment of imagination. The story progresses where the child repeatedly tells his mother about the dragon, only to be dismissed as false. As a result the dragon grows and grows until it becomes so big that it starts ravaging the entire home. Only once the characters of the story recognised the existence of the dragon did it shrink back to its original small form. The moral of the story is: Don’t ignore your dragons because they will grow, and they will bite you in the arse in the future.

I hope that I have established quite clearly why running away from your problems probably isn’t the best idea to have. But this begs the question of whether fight is the way to go when encountering problems? I believe what this “fight” entails would be voluntarily attempting to solve the problem at hand instead of burying your head in the sand and hoping that the storm will pass, for unlike the storms produced by mother nature, these storms of ours are here to stay. In fact that will grow larger and ever more severe as you hesitate and fret about dealing with it. As such the only logical followup from this would be to depart from the superficial comfort of modern day degeneracy, and to face the issue head on. I believe that this boils down to mindset. It goes without saying that words have power, and the words that you attribute to things can influence to a large degree how you perceive them. If you categorise hardship as problems, you will naturally experience this inclination to run away. But if you were to adopt a different lens, to view your hardship as challenge waiting to be overcome, as opportunity begging to be exploited, you would naturally bring a comparatively more forthright, go-getter, courageous attitude. Perhaps that is all that we need to transition from the flight mode to the fight mode.

In a nutshell, we are often times presented with two choices: flight or fight. Ultimately, choosing the path of least resistance is folly and we would do well to avoid it.