How the body responds to conflict and aggression

The Human Response To Conflict and Aggression- How the body responds to conflict and aggression

An individual’s mind should be thought of as two separate parts. These two parts are the:

• Emotional part

• Rational part

The emotional part is simply the one that feels whereas the rational part is the one that thinks.

How the emotional and rational parts work together

These two parts work ordinarily work together in tandem, with the vast majority of the time, they are perfectly balanced. The easiest way to describe this balance is to think of these two sides of the brain as a perfectly balanced set of scales. Whenever an individual becomes particularly upset or feels threatened the emotional part of the mind quickly dominates and because of this the emotional part of the brain quickly dominates the rational part. This will make an individual lose much of their ability to rationalise, to make an informed or rational decision.

If an individual becomes seriously threatened they could experience the most primitive and extreme emotional response which is known as the flight or flight response. The fight or flight response has evolved from mankind's earliest survival. It is a natural animal instinct that was necessary for survival. Although as time has progressed, and these dangers are far less, humans will still respond in this way should they feel suitably threatened.

What happens when you feel threatened?

When the fight or flight is triggered, adrenaline is released in the body, which will increase greatly when the heart rate quickens, which in turn pumps blood into the larger muscles throughout the body. The individual’s eyes open wide to absorb as much information as possible and focus solely on the threat, the hearing fine tunes to the threat, the thought process becomes more emotional therefore lowering the rational thinking of the individual, and the individual’s ability to perform complex physical skills is seriously impeded. The result of this is the body is geared up for action which would be for the individual to run away (Flight) or Fight.

With both flight and flight, the individual may strike or lash out as an instinctive response to a real or perceived threat. This lashing out may be used for the individual to escape the threat and go into flight mode. This is evident when an individual may feel trapped in by a situation and need to escape from it. If the flight response is impeded the individual would have to revert to fight in order to be able to escape.

A purely instinctive response

It is important to note that how the body responds to conflict and aggression is a purely instinctive human response. This simply means that if the individual is naturally a fighter they will always take to fight. If it is the individual’s natural instinct to take flight during a highly emotive situation or confrontation. then the individual will always try to take flight from the situation. It would not matter what training or preparation an individual undertakes to try to prevent them from either fighting or taking flight, the natural instinct of the individual will always take over and the individual will naturally revert back to this primitive response mechanism to a highly emotive situation.

How the body responds to conflict and aggression

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