Chris Mooney Quotes

Most people have two emergency modes. Fight and Flight. But Conner always knew he had three. Fight, Flight, and Screw Up Royally.

The purpose of fear, clearly, is to help you get away - which it does. If your heart rate increases, there is more blood pumping so you can use that blood to fuel your muscles to run away. Oxygen is sent to the lungs so you can run fast. Pupils dilating help you see in the dark. All of that prepares your body to fight or escape.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

I'm interested in how we react when we're heavily pressed. When we're vulnerable and our survival is in question, how do we behave?

I've always been fascinated with adrenaline; it's saved my life more than once, and it's caused me to need it to save my life more than once. One of the most fascinating responses in human evolution, adrenaline sharpens your brain; it sharpens your responses.

There are two kinds of people in crisis situations - those who fight and those who freeze. I'm a freezer, and that's just going by the couple of surprise birthday parties I've had thrown for me.

I tend to panic and fear on a low-grade level every day, but when something really disastrous happens, I kick into super high gear; a kind of transcendent, save-everybody mind-set.

As a human, if you're in a scary situation, you pretty much forget about everything else! You just try and survive.

The only thing that can combat fear is action. And there's two actions. There's fight and flight.

Fight, flight, and screw up royaly.

No one is depressed when they're being chased by a bear.

The brain works fast when it thinks it’s about to be cut in half.

Fear results in fight or flight. Anxiety creates doom and gloom. Fear is the pulse that pounds when you see a coiled rattlesnake in your front yard. Anxiety is the voice that tells you, Never, ever, for the rest of your life, walk barefooted through the grass. There might be a snake...somewhere.

As I became more interested in behavior from the standpoint of neurobiology, the stress-response became really interesting. What stress physiology is about is - when there is a new environmental challenge, how does an individual adapt? It seemed like a natural transition.

We have this amazing ability to turn on the exactly same stress response worrying about a mortgage that a zebra does when it's sprinting away from a lion.

We get stressed out now by having somebody yell at us in the office or by making a mistake or by losing a bunch of money. These aren't problems that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had. They'd get stressed if a lion came to them or a boulder was rolling towards their living quarters. That kind of stress provoked the fight or flight response.

I don't think we should have less information in the world. The information age has yielded great advances in medicine, agriculture, transportation and many other fields. But the problem is twofold. One, we are assaulted with more information than any one of us can handle. Two, beyond the overload, too much information often leads to bad decisions.

People who weren't there can say it was idiotic or shortsighted, but when you're in a moment where horrible things are happening in front of you, sometimes you just need to act on what's best.

I think the American people are bombarded with information from all directions, all day long.

Fear arises sooner than anything else.

There's a mountain of information about us. I mean there's so much. Anyway, I'm not an intelligence person. But I just look at it and it's a mountain of data.

Now, we live in an age where we have so much information that we do tend to overload. The Greeks did too, though.

Shock is shock. Your body goes into shock, regardless of it being real blood or fake blood. The mind sends powerful messages to all the various glands and secretions in the body. It's impossible trying to act it; it just happens. It's a very important question: no acting.

After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.

Fear gives sudden instincts of skill.