Stress, anxiety, fight or flight

We need to push ourselves out of our comfort zone.

We need a bit of courage or self-assurance to take that next step forwards, and we need some fight in us to deal with the pressure. The more fight we have, the more pressure we can take. If the pressure becomes too much, we want to flee.

People typically talk about ‘fight or flight’ as if they are parallel, when I believe they are sequential. Flight is the stage after fight, when we believe the pressure is too much and we are going to lose. We want to run away, to escape. And that’s when we feel stress – being caught in a situation where we feel we can’t win (rightly or wrongly).

As an HSP (or introvert or something like that), I am very sensitive to stress. I have a very low threshold before pressure turns to stress. I have very little ‘fight’. This makes it doubly difficult for me to leave my comfort zone. I therefore need to work on my confidence.

I think there are people at the other end of the spectrum who have a very high stress threshold – they feel no pressure until they are way out of their comfort zone. To the point that they can find themselves in situations where they are completely out of their depth – and still feel no stress. These people see themselves as ‘risk-takers’, and are proud of their resilience – when really, they are just being reckless.

We need enough resilience to push ourselves – without being so resilient that we push ourselves completely beyond our competence.

– end –

---