54 | www.Ups tatePhys i c i ansSC . com | www.Hea l thL i nksUps tate. 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. “The body is an incredible system; anxiety is our body’s most primitive way to tell us that something is wrong,” Bon Secours St. Francis psychiatrist Dr. Lee Blackmon explained. “Our heart rate picks up, our stomach is in knots, the body gets tight. Our body warns us.” Dr. Blackmon, who specializes in management of anxiety, panic, depressive and trauma and stressor-related disorders, offers this comparison to best explain the toll that fight or flight symptoms have on health: “We are often told not to rev a car engine for a long time because it is not sustainable – the engine will break down. Imagine the human body with fight or flight engaged a lot. The body is not designed to be in that heightened state.” In a society like ours, being in survival mode is not hard to understand, Dr. Blackmon said. Day in and day out, people go to stressful jobs to make ends meet. In addition to work stress, there often is stress at home. THE HEALTH TOLL OF FIGHT OR FLIGHT By L. C. Leach III
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