Gabriel Cohen writes, “Before I moved into my apartment, the previous tenants warned me that a teenager downstairs occasionally annoyed them with the sound of his video games. It turned out that the techno music and beepings were hard to ignore. I tried to be patient but one night, after I was woken up at 2 a.m. and again at five, I reached my limit. Later that morning, I went downstairs and knocked on the door. The kid didn’t answer, though I knew he was home. I rapped harder. Suddenly, the door swung open. Instead of a teenager, however, I was confronted with the sight of a half-naked, heavily muscled and tattooed, fully grown man. (Think Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.) He was wrapped in a towel because I had just gotten him out of the bathtub. He did not look pleased.

As you might have guessed, our “discussion” quickly spiraled downhill. “Why the hell are you banging on my door?” he demanded. I wanted to complain about his rudeness in playing his video games so late and all he could focus on was my rudeness in hammering on his door. After a couple minutes of pointless crosstalk, I trudged back upstairs, mulling over how I had botched the situation. I had let myself be overwhelmed by my instinctive fight-or-flight reaction. Even before the door opened, I had felt my breath tighten and my heart race. By the time my neighbor and I actually faced each other, our brains were already flooding with the hormonal equivalent of Tabasco sauce.

We were both behaving as evolution had programmed us. If a tiger jumped out at our ancestors while they were foraging, they had no time to think about what to do. They had to fight or flee to survive, and they would begin doing one or the other before they even consciously registered the thought tiger. Today, though there are no big cats on our urban streets, if we get into a quarrel, hormones still kick in within milliseconds, stimulating primitive regions in our brains. And our instinctive reactions can easily shove us in the opposite direction from what we ultimately hope to achieve.”

FULL STORY by GABRIEL COHEN, via LIONSROAR.COM