Daniel Levitin Quotes

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.

Stress is never a given. There are people who get divorced amicably. There are people who pack up and move with no emotional toll. There is no stressor 'out there' in the world. We experience stress - or we don't - depending on what we believe.

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?

Anxiety is a kind of fuel that activates the fight-or-flight part of the brain in me. It makes sure that a velociraptor isn't around the corner and that you do as much as you possibly can to survive. Because Hollywood has a lot in common with 'Jurassic Park' and its primeval-dinosaur universe.

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

An animal so poor in spirit that he won't even fight on his own behalf is already an evolutionary dead end; the best he can do for his breed is to crawl off and die, and not pass on his defective genes.

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

We have nightmares because our brain is running simulations to put us in jeopardy to see what we'll do or to acclimatize us to that idea that something bad could happen. It's just how human beings are wired because the entire time we were evolving we had to jump quick or the leopard would get us or whatever it was. It's Darwinian.

People around the world now complain about stressors everyday, and the word shows up throughout professional and lay literature. But in reality there is no such thing as a stressor. Why not? Because nothing has the inherent power to provoke stress.

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.

Closer to a fight, I can really feel my heartbeat in my chest. I can hear it beat through my mouth, this 'gunk, gunk, gunk' rhythm.

As nature discovered early on, vision is one of the most powerful secret weapons of an intelligent animal to navigate, survive, interact, and change the complex world it lives in.

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.

Every field has its pressures and stress factors.

Stress happens. In different ways, we all hold unnecessary tension in our bodies all day long. Shoulders, neck, wrists, hips, hamstrings, back, oh my!

I get anxiety and distressed from external stimuli quite easily, so if I'm in a constant state of self-protection, it's exhausting.

In the right circumstances, terror is good. It makes you focus.

I grew up reading thrillers, science fiction, fantasy - you name it - and one day I asked myself if there was a reason why a fear of spiders was so common. Was there something buried deep in our evolutionary history that made being scared of spiders a survival instinct?

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.

First you have to witness that you are stressing out: Oh, my trigger is here. The news is stressing me out or This line is so long. Let yourself feel it. You don't want to spiritually bypass these problems. Give yourself a couple of minutes to sit in the feeling. Acceptance sets you free from the stress of expectation.

Fear, in evolution, has a special prominence: perhaps more than any other emotion it is crucial for survival.

Is it useful to feel fear, because it prepares you for nasty events, or is it useless, because nasty events will occur whether you are frightened or not?

I do think that procrastination evolved in humans for good reasons. If you're trying to stay alive as a human being on the savanna 20,000 years ago, worrying about what's right behind that bush is a lot more important than worrying about what might happen three weeks from now.

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.

There's something about the human brain, that it actually has a predilection towards negativity, which served us really well when we lived in an environment that was very threatening.