How Your Body Makes Two Choices
People have the ability to choose to respond to stresses in one of two basic ways. They can choose either the syntoxic response (the ignoring response), or the catatoxic response (the fight-or-flight response).
A man could well choose the catatoxic response, for example, when his wife is being insulted from two rows back in the theater. Then he confronts the heckler and learns that the man is six-feet-four inches tall and a professional boxer, he may suddenly reverse his field and choose the safer syntoxic response, which is to ignore the heckler.
Again, depending on your upbringing, one or the other of these responses could easily be ingrained to the extent that you do not need to consciously make a choice. It will be made for you by your own reflexes. Human response to any stress, no matter how trivial, has been well documented to show that these choices come automatic, regardless of what we would like to have done.
