Your Bionic Body

When you feel stress, you are feeling your body react to tension, anxiety or an emergency. A stressor is something that causes stress. Your body, like Annie's, responds to an emergency in a very physical and very helpful way. It prepares to fight it. Annie's stress caused these immediate reactions in her body:

Obviously, in some situations, stress is helpful. It protects you by allowing you to think and act quickly when in danger. These bodily changes are part of your body's fight or flight syndrome. Stress can prepare your body to fight the danger, or to run from it.

Was the stress Annie felt pos/five or negative?

Can you think of any times when you might have experienced the fight or flight syndrome?

· Annie's brain signaled her adrenal glands (on top of each kidney) to release a chemical called adrenaline. Adrenaline is a stimulant; it gives your body an extra rush of energy.

· • Adrenaline caused her heart to beat faster so it could pump more blood around her body.

· Annie's blood pressure (the force of blood pumping through the arteries) went up. That means that blood began speeding to the organs that really needed it.

· Once she saw the danger, it took only a fraction of a second for Annie's sleepiness to disappear. Immediately, she became super-alert. (That's why everything seemed to happen in slow motion.)

· Annie's senses became sharper.

· Since her digestive system was not important at that moment, Annie's body shut it off temporarily. This gave the rest of her body more energy.

· Her breathing sped up, because Annie needed more oxygen.

Imagine a deer, grazing peacefully. If its keen senses suddenly warned it that a mountain lion was approaching, the deer's, fight or flight syndrome would prepare it within a split second. Immediately, adrenaline would give the deer a rush of energy, and blood would be sent to its leg muscles so that the deer could run. (If the deer meets with a less dangerous animal, these same changes would have helped the deer stay and fight.)