JUST PLANE CULTURE
STRESS
of bed in the morning, stress in driving to work and stress in decision making. There is stress in dealing with people, processes, technology and the mechanisms with which we interface on a regular basis. We can even experience stress in our sleep. Stress is built into our brain function in order for us to survive. Normally we can meet stress and deal with its consequences without repercussion. When we were a hunter/gatherer society and living on the plains, we were also a food source for other predators. We were not the strongest or biggest animal on the plain so we adapted survival mechanisms. Stress is one of those survival mechanisms designed to keep us alert. When we scanned the terrain thousands of years ago, our attention was directed to what was out of place. We picked up on what was moving
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01.02 2015
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tress is a part of our daily life. We cannot escape its reach and there is a good reason for that: we need it to survive. Too much of a good thing is not good, either. There is stress in just getting out
By Patrick Kinane
in a still setting or what was still in a dynamic setting. We looked for things to eat or things that could eat us. Have you noticed that when things are running smoothly
that your stress level is almost zero? You remain vigilant but, as soon as something out of the ordinary occurs, you become more attentive to the change? If the change increases to become a threat, then your stress level increases commensurately. If the threat is immediate, we also have the ability to react immediately. If we had to think of this process before reacting, we would be some other animal’s dinner. Stress bypasses the normal thinking-reasoning network so we can react to a threat. You don’t have to go through the thinking-reasoning process to know to pull your hand away from a hot stove top. This is also why we react so quickly to an electrical shock — it’s immediate. There is no time to go through the normal protocol of traveling through the nervous system to the brain to decipher what is happening, decode the information and
DOMmagazine
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