Humans are unique among animals in that the danger doesn’t have to be clear and present to elicit a response—we can anticipate it; we can remember it; we can conceptualize it. And this capacity complicates our lives dramatically. “The mind is so powerful that we can set off the [stress] response just by imagining ourselves in a threatening situation,” writes Rockefeller University neuroscientist Bruce McEwen in his book The End of Stress as We Know It. In other words, we can think ourselves into a frenzy.
