As you step up to the podium to deliver your CPD session, you start to feel it: you’re lightheaded and sick to your stomach. Your mouth is dry. Your hands are shaking.

These physiological symptoms are a sign that the so-called “fight or flight” reflex is kicking in, preparing your body to either run away from the perceived threat, or to confront it. For most of us, it is hard to see it as anything other than a hindrance - a reaction that hampers our performance.

But what if we could learn to see the positive side of this response? What if we could learn not only to control it but to channel its effects in such a way that it would enhance rather than impede our performance?

Wendy Suzuki, an international authority on neuroplasticity and a professor at New York University, believes it is possible for us to do just that. In her new book, Good Anxiety: harnessing the power of the most misunderstood emotion, she argues that if we were to develop a better understanding of the evolutionary roots of the fight-or-flight response - and, in the case of teachers, pass that understanding on to pupils - it would help us all to more effectively navigate our day-to-day worries and feelings of stress.

So, what exactly is so “good” about fight or flight? The first thing for us to recognise, Suzuki says, is that this response is a normal and necessary part of how humans respond to stressful situations. “It is part of the stress response, a normal physiological response that evolved millions of years ago to protect us from the lions and cougars that might attack us,” she explains.

The trouble is, the culture we now live in has led to this useful response being activated far more frequently than it ever was in the past. “The difference is that, today, our threat response remains abnormally high relative to our ancestors,” Suzuki says. “We have a 24-hour news cycle and social media to constantly bring up worrisome things, whether it’s wildfires or the pandemic.”

In schools, there is a raft of anxiety-inducing “threats” on top of this, for teachers and students, including accountability, workload, exam pressure and more. This has led to our fight-or-flight response being triggered more often than we would like - usually in harmless situations in which attacking or running away would do us no favours.

Unfortunately, when fight or flight kicks in, we still experience the physical symptoms that come with it, regardless of whether the threat is real or not.

So, what is happening in our bodies during fight or flight? The response is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, Suzuki says, which is “characterised by increased heart rate, increased respiration and blood is pumped to your muscles to [fuel your ability to] run away. Lots of the ‘stress hormone’, cortisol, gets released to help you run faster or fight harder.”

In the past, these effects would have helped us to survive. But when the sympathetic nervous system gets triggered in response to everyday stress, it can create all kinds of undesirable outcomes. Consider, for example, a student who is about to sit an exam.

“We know that high levels of stress and anxiety will decrease neurotransmitters like noradrenaline and dopamine, which fuel the amygdala, the brain area that’s important for the threat response,” Suzuki says. “And that stress and anxiety also blocks the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for executive decision making, focus and attention. You want a beautifully functioning prefrontal cortex when you are writing your exam, there’s no question about it.”

Turning the fight or flight response to your advantage

Is there anything that we can do to stop fight or flight from kicking in, or to at least mitigate its negative effects? Suzuki says that there is a simple answer that lies in understanding how our bodies have evolved to manage low-stress situations. The nervous system that comes into play in this case is the “rest and digest” system, otherwise known as the parasympathetic nervous system. “This decreases your heart rate and respiration, and this is what we need to activate in order to manage anxiety,” she says.

So, how do we go about doing that? While it is not possible to “consciously decrease your heart rate”, it is possible to activate your parasympathetic nervous system through simple techniques, such as deep breathing and increased movement. “Moving your body stimulates the release of the feelgood neurotransmitters: dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline,” Suzuki says. This might be as simple as going for a short walk outside.

Breathing exercises (see box, above) may also be useful here, as they help to regulate the increased respiration that has been triggered by the stress response.

These are techniques that “even the youngest schoolkids” can learn to apply, Suzuki says, adding that they can easily be integrated into everyday school life through initiatives such as the Daily Mile.

“I love the idea - the whole class goes out, including teachers, and you can walk as fast or as slow as you want, but you do it every day,” she says. “It becomes a social, bonding thing. It’s certainly an anxiety-lowering activity and kids can do it very easily.”

While understanding how our bodies respond to stress is key to recognising how to counteract its negative effects, Suzuki believes it is also important to talk more about anxiety and to shift perceptions away from seeing it as something wholly undesirable. She suggests that we need “a new insight on ‘negative’ emotions”, where we see all emotions as useful if they are at a “sweet spot”. For example, a little bit of short-term stress can actually improve our performance. “So, for me, at the right level, anxiety has motivated me to give the best talks that I have ever given because I’m a little bit afraid,” Suzuki says.

Another benefit to the stress response is that it can help our brains to form memories, with obvious implications for learning.

Writing previously in Tes, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath explained how the interplay between the neurochemicals cortisol and Arc (activity-regulated cytoskeleton-associated) proteins - both of which are released during a stress response - supports memory formation. “Whenever a stress response is triggered, cortisol floods into the hippocampus and begins damaging neurons,” he wrote. “This damage, in turn, triggers the release of Arc proteins, which flood into the hippocampus and ‘battle’ cortisol: essentially, keeping it occupied to avoid further neuron damage.

“By first damaging then bolstering the memory gateway, the stress mechanism ensures that we form deep, durable memories for short-term stressors.”

The key phrase here is “short term”. In the longer term, stress has the opposite effect on our capacity to form memories.

“During long-term stress (days, weeks, months), cortisol remains in the hippocampus and stores of Arc proteins eventually run dry,” noted Cooney Horvath. “Once this occurs, cortisol has free rein and begins killing cells within the memory gateway.

“By first damaging then killing the memory gateway, the mechanism ensures that we do not form deep, durable memories for long-term stressors.”

This is something we need to bear in mind when considering how to harness the power of our fight-or-flight response. While it is helpful to think about anxiety in less negative terms, we also need to be able to recognise when it is becoming detrimental - and to get better at applying those strategies that allow us to counteract stress in the longer term.

According to Suzuki, though, all this still starts with changing how we perceive fight or flight. To learn more about managing it, we first need to be able to talk more openly about it. “I’ve found that people are really ashamed of their anxiety,” she says. “[But] it’s something to deal with openly and we know that there are direct, science-based approaches to understanding it and addressing it at different levels - before it’s happening, during the bout of anxiety, and in preparation for these big events where you’re worried that anxiety might affect your performance, like exams.”

In other words, we need to teach students to approach the stress response not as something to fight against or run away from but as something to work with - just another part of who we are. “At its core, anxiety is a protective mechanism, even though it does not feel protective or helpful at all,” Suzuki says. “We need to get back to that core protective element.”

Christina Quaine is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 1 October 2021 issue under the headline “Tes focus on...Fight or flight”