Why can’t we trigger our own fight or flight response, purposefully, on command?
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Because it’s a function of our brain. And since you are your brain, your brain knows what you know.
You can’t trick yourself.
I think to a small extent you can make yourself produce adrenaline, but I don’t know why you would do that. Just think about something awful or large heights.
This will be a bit winding but I promise it’s relevant to your question.
I would argue that you can’t do anything purposefully. What I mean by this is that your question is somewhat loaded in the sense that it pre-supposes that it’s possible to do something purposefully. You could say this in another way as you as a thinking agent chose to do something in accordance with your internal desires.
The problem with this presupposition is that there isn’t actually any evidence to indicate that you actually can choose to do anything. For example, we are aware of only two processes that drive everything in nature. One is causality, which is that something doesn’t change unless acted on by something else, or the domino effect. The other is randomness like in the case of radioactive decay. This may not ultimately be random, we just don’t have any evidence for a non random cause currently.
So what does this mean? Well, if any of us have agency or autonomy and are able to actually choose our actions then that fundamentally requires some kind of mechanism that would allow us to arrest those natural processes of causality and randomness in order to assert our own desires. Despite many experiments, there has been zero evidence to suggest that there’s any mechanism that allows for this and so the logical conclusion is that we don’t actually choose anything. It’s all just the result of completely natural causes that we have no control over.
So for the same reason that you don’t choose to do anything, you also can’t choose to alter your brains bio chemistry in order to trigger a specific response.
For someone with panic disorder you don’t want this. Adrenaline also comes with a crippling feeling of doom and dread when there’s nothing for the adrenaline to be used for.
You kinda can. You just need to go through something so traumatic that everytime you think about it in the future your bodies fight or flight response is activated. I really don’t recommend it.
You absolutely can.
The emergency treatment for a severe asthma attack is a shot of epinephrine. I learned at a young age that I could fake it and make my body release adrenaline and stop an attack.
They used to think control of the sympathetic nervous system was completely unconscious but that’s not true. People like Wim Hoff have taught volunteers how to control their sympathetic system through breathing, and there are studies on it.
>Hitherto, both the autonomic nervous system and innate immune system were regarded as systems that cannot be voluntarily influenced. The present study demonstrates that, through practicing techniques learned in a short-term training program, the sympathetic nervous system and immune system can indeed be voluntarily influenced.
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>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4034215/
So I would argue that it’s more about self control and practice than being something that’s impossible to control.
Take up running, it more or less kicks in once your mind takes over your body’s will to go on
>Why can’t we trigger our own fight or flight response, purposefully, on command?
We can trigger our own fight or flight response and with a little practice you can likely do it on command. I sometimes accidentally do it to myself when I am getting tired at night – it is not a pleasant experience though so I try to avoid trying to figure out how to do it on purpose. I honestly don’t know why so many people in this thread seem to think that you need a real actual threat to trigger fight or flight. Could it be that I have trauma from my youth that I don’t remember that lets me trigger my fight or flight response with the right train of thought?
For what it is worth, most people have probably triggered their fight or flight response at least a couple of times in their lives – the most common trigger (if the memes are to be believed) is when you have soap in your eyes and you get the feeling that someone is behind you and you start to freak out trying to wash your eyes as quickly as possible so you can face the threat.
People always mention fight and flight, but never freeze. I once remember I saw a dog running at me full speed and I froze for like 6 seconds before I registered what actually was happening and then I decided to go with flight (and thank God I did that I almost got bitten in my Achilles tendon and I felt the force of the bite in the air even though it didn’t hit me).
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