The fight-or-flight reflex is always lurking just below the surface. When things get sufficiently stressful, our hormonal system dumps enormous amounts of adrenaline into our bloodstream, and—BOOM—suddenly we’re ready for action.
That adrenaline serves a purpose: it elevates your heart rate, makes you much stronger, more pain tolerant, and able to ignore injury. If you ever have to lift a car off a child, you don’t want to be calm. Instead, you want to be mad, scared, enraged—whatever it takes to get into that adrenaline-soaked state of high arousal to lift the damn car with your bare hands.
But that superhuman strength comes at a cost; as adrenaline floods your system, you lose a significant amount of fine motor control and higher brain function. Take whatever IQ you started with and cut it in half.
This episode of The Strenuous Life Podcast is an excerpt from the audiobook version of Perseverance, Life and Death in the Subarctic which you can check out anywhere you get books including the links below:
The Strenuous Life Podcast with Stephan Kesting