What is the fight-or-flight (FOF) Response?
“Stress is essentially the rate of all the wear and tear caused by life.”, The Stress of Life, by Hans Seyle, M.D., (McGraw Hill,1978) Stress is anything that puts the body in fight-or-flight (FOF) mode causing an increase in heart, respiratory and blood pressure rates, and moving blood away from your digestive organs and into large muscles in preparation for a “fight or flight”. In FOF, your body is in a state of red alert or readiness, as it gets ready to run from that big’ol tiger, or to fight competitively for that big business deal. The technical terms for FOF are “activation of the sympathetic nervous system” or “autonomic arousal.” Of the two conditions of stress, acute stress and chronic stress, either may come from biophysical or psychosocial stressors or both. If a person under stress who is on FOF does not discharge the arousal by actually fleeing or fighting in response to that stress (and many modern stresses cannot be run from or fought), the readiness to act is stored ch
