68 | www. Char l es tonPhys i c i ans . com | www.Hea l thL i nksChar l es ton . com Several years ago, while on a routine neighborhood walk near his home in Greenville, Tommy Lewis Neal came upon a large mastiff at the edge of an unfenced front yard. The dog was standing motionless and silent among a crowd of people, and Neal had the sudden urge both to flee and to stay put because “I was a stranger and this dog looked almost as big as me.” “My first thought was to run, but I knew he would chase me,” Neal recalled. “So I walked right by him, pretending not to notice, as if I belonged with the crowd and the neighborhood. Luckily the dog never moved, growled or acted in any way aggressive – but in my mind I was running from him as hard as I could.” Neal’s experience is what psychologists call fight or flight – the immediate impulse that happens when someone comes upon a potentially threatening encounter or situation. Whether you know it as acute stress, adrenaline rush, sudden anxiety or even kill-or-be-killed in extreme cases, fight or flight in all forms not only happens to us far more often than we think – but it can have significant effects, both good and bad, on our long-term health. “I don’t know if people are more stressed now than they ever were before,” said Dr. Daniel Greenberg, associate professor and chair of the Psychology Department at the College of Charleston. “Certainly there are stressors now that weren’t around a hundred years ago, but there were stressors back then that aren’t around today. In the long run, chronic fight-orflight responses typically have more of an effect than one or two extreme events – such as encountering the proverbial tiger in a dark forest and somehow managing to escape.” THE HEALTH TOLL OF FIGHT OR FLIGHT By L. C. Leach III
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