Fight-or-Flight

 

Body's "Fight-or-Flight" in Greenstone

   It was a cloudy day in Greenstone. The Gosp River flowed as it always did—dense, persistent, and slow—carving its quiet path through the heart of the town.

Around ten in the morning, Professor Helen Carter walked through the hallway of Oakfield High School, a stack of questionnaires pressed against her chest. The psychology teacher was headed to her office to finalize the last details of a study she'd been developing for months—one that explored how people respond when faced with a challenge. Do we confront it head-on, or do we find ways to slip around it? In scientific terms, it was an investigation into the fight-or-flight response. But for Helen, it was something deeper: a mirror of how we choose to live.

Her design was elegant in its simplicity. Each of her two classes would represent a different experimental condition. In the first group, students would be asked to solve a series of impossible riddles—What occurs once in a minute, twice in a moment, but never in a thousand years?—within a strict time limit, encouraged to keep trying until the bell rang. In the second group, students would receive the same riddles, but with a crucial difference: the option to "skip any question that makes you uncomfortable." Helen's hypothesis was straightforward. Even in the absence of real danger, the human body and mind might still show signs of fight or flight.

That afternoon, the experiment began. Both classes were tested simultaneously—Helen proctored one group herself, while Dr. Marcus Owan, a colleague from the school's psychology department, supervised the other. The classroom smelled faintly of chalk and rain. Outside, restless leaves trembled under the wind. In Class A, the students worked in silence, tension thickening the air. Helen watched as some leaned forward, biting their pencils, heart rates subtly quickening. Others frowned but persisted, refusing to surrender. In Class B, however, the mood was lighter. A few students skipped questions immediately, whispering, "What's the point?" Others laughed nervously, visibly relieved to sidestep the pressure.

When the bell finally rang, Helen collected the papers carefully. She thanked the students and smiled—that gentle, unreadable smile teachers wear when they know something the class doesn't yet.

That night, alone in her office at the Greenstone Education Centre, she entered the data into her computer. What she found was both predictable and quietly fascinating. The students who faced the riddles without escape routes showed measurable stress—but also higher persistence scores in follow-up tasks administered later in the week. Those who had avoided the hard questions displayed less immediate stress—but were significantly less likely to engage when presented with a second challenge.

Helen leaned back in her chair, watching raindrops trace their way down the window. Across the river, the lights of the town shimmered faintly—the bakery, the small library, the bus stop near the Stone Bridge. The whole of Greenstone seemed like a living metaphor for her results. Some people fight through the storm. Others quietly drift around it.

The following Monday, she gathered both classes in the assembly hall. "Sometimes," she began, "the hardest battles are not with others, but within ourselves. When we avoid discomfort, we also avoid growth." She paused, letting her gaze move across the rows of young faces. "What I learned from all of you this week is that courage isn't about fearlessness—it's about staying in the room a little longer."

The students clapped politely, though a few smiled with a strange spark of recognition.

As Helen walked home through the evening mist, crossing the Stone Bridge over the Gosp River, she realized something unexpected. Her experiment wasn't just about them—it was about her, too. For months she had postponed submitting her paper to the Greenstone Institute of Behavioural Science, fearing it wasn't perfect enough, wasn't ready. That night, she opened her laptop and clicked submit.

For the first time in a long while, she felt what her students must have felt in that classroom—that tremor between fear and resolve—and she smiled.

Because sometimes, the only way to understand the fight-or-flight response is to stop running.

Toni Font, Aberdeen 23/10/2025