Choose your Fighter
“You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.”
- Alan Watts
Zoochosis is the term for a sort of psychotic break that many animals experience while in captivity. From ida.org, “Stated plainly, zoochosis is mental anguish made visible by abnormal behavior, and it’s a common indicator of poor welfare”. Animals show elevated rates of pretty much every negative behavioral pattern while in captivity; aggressiveness being one of them. Entering fits of fury in response to essentially nothing, things can get disturbing very quickly.
It’s dark, but it only makes sense, right? I mean, imagine if it were us. Imagine if we were removed from the environment that our brains and bodies were built for, forced to sit in an artificially illuminated room for hours on end, and quickly sedated when we start to freak out a little bit because of it. Wouldn’t we have to expect some mental anguish and abnormal behaviors? If we look at ourselves and the environment we’ve created through the same lens as those studying animals in zoos, could it help explain some of our strange tendencies?
For instance, the way we drive says a lot about us. The scatterbrained will be distracted and move quickly. The anxious, with sweaty palms, will respond to the slightest impedance as though it were a threat to their life. The cool and calm will move that way. And the rudely impatient folks (commonly called assholes) will gladly risk everyone’s lives to be 5 minutes earlier than their ETA. I’ve always found that symbolic, by the way– a Corvette speeding around a Toyota only to stop at the same red light. Poetic, almost. But, I digress. The point I’m making is that all of these human qualities, being scatterbrained, anxious, cool and calm, and even rudely impatient, are entirely normal. We’ve been those things forever. But, it isn’t until you take these creatures (us) and place them in an unnatural environment, that you see normal traits expressed in abnormal ways.
In other words, take that anxious person who has a very sensitive fight response (normal) and put them in a metal box traveling 70mph on the way to a larger box where they will sit for eight hours (unnatural), surround them with others doing the same, and you get pretty intense reactivity (road rage). It could be as simple as someone not allowing us to change lanes, resulting in a missed turn, and we enter this fit of fury as if doing so would be more productive than simply finding a new route. Empathy and reason go out the window along with our middle fingers.
Of course, it isn’t just on the road. It’s when the restaurant gets our orders wrong. It’s when our favorite team loses. It’s when the cleaner misses a spot. It’s when our favorite shirt shrinks in the dryer.
It’s easy to brush this kind of thing off as human nature because, well, it is. It’s human nature combined with a maladaptive environment; anger, fear, worry, defensiveness, sadness… the emotions aren’t new. The environment is.
So, what are we to do about this?
Big picture? I don’t know. But, I do know that if I can zoom out for a second— if, when I feel an intense emotion in a not-so-intense situation, I can recognize what’s happening. Then, I have a bit more control. Not necessarily over my anger, but over my fighter– over the way I respond. Sometimes all it takes to start the snowball effect of change is noticing. If I practice this repeatedly, I won’t feel as strongly about mostly inconsequential things. I’ll find that many of those assholes moving too slowly in the left lane are just people moving at a speed that I don’t like. It’s not them.
