Understanding the Brain's Survival Response A Deep Dive

It's like it asks itself this question does this feel like a past threat And if for any reason any part of your body says yes everything changes in an instant Everything suddenly becomes only about survival And so the very moment that your amygdala detects That threat real or perceived it sends a distress signal to all the areas of your brain Think of it like somebody sees smoke in a building and they pull the fire alarm and now every part of that building is reacting to that alarm Well that's what happens in our brain as well So this signal reaches a small structure in our brain called our hypothalamus Yeah which then activates our body's emergency response system which is our sympathetic nervous system to prepare us for action whether it's fight flight freeze or fawn