Like if someone sneaks up on you, or there’s a sudden loud sound. I would guess there’s a sudden surge of adrenaline, but why do we make sudden movements like jumping?
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Fight or flight response your muscles tense up while you simultaneously take in a deep breath so you can get ready to either fight or run away. You might even reactively scream which both startles whatever is aggressing you and simultaneously alerts any allies nearby that there’s a problem.
We jump when we’re startled because of a stress response that prepares us to fight or flee.
Some people are more jumpy than others because of chronic stress, insomnia, anxiety, genetics, or trauma.
For the same reason an infant instantly learns how to breathe air and three days later instantly know to hold their breath underwater.
Much of ourselves is primitive animal instinct that can rip you out of a faraway dream in the middle of the night and into a physical fight or die situation with an Armored Squirrel (they’re real, look it up) in a second.
We exist only because our ancestors knew how to exist, and the modern world we live in is just one tiny blip in out inherited behavior. A thousand years from now your progeny will still know cilantro tastes like soapy breath mints and avoid them.
This is your fight or flight instinct kicking in.
Go back a few thousand years and surprises generally meant bad things. Something had managed to sneak up on you without you realising, and is in a position of power over you – such as the predator sneaking up on you because you looked like a tasty meal.
To respond to this we evolved a fight or flight instinct. When something surprises us, we subconsciously and instantly react to this to try and keep ourselves safe. So when you get scared and jump, this is the ‘flight’ response kicking in and causing you to move away from the danger.
The alternative is the ‘fight’ response, which is when someone lashes out instead and instinctively tries to get in the first hit and take advantage over the potential attacker.
Generally as humans we don’t spend quite so much time out in the wilderness being hunted by sabertooth tigers as we did thousands of years ago, but we still have a lot of the same instincts to cause funny reactions when something harmless surprises you instead.
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