“Emergencies always create a considerable need for increased electrical activity in the brain. Nature has gifted us with the fight-or-flight response, to help us quickly focus in potentially dangerous situations. The strong physiological arousal of the heart, lungs, and sympathetic nervous system leads to a dramatic change in psychological states. Our perception, behaviors, attitudes, and emotions are all altered. This type of attention is very different from what we normally use. It causes us to act like a revved-up animal with a big memory bank. The scales of attention become tipped toward the external environment, causing an overfocused state of mind. Anxiety, worry, anger, pain, suffering, frustration, fear, and even competitive states of mind induce high-range Beta waves to predominate during the crisis. In the short term, this serves all organisms well. There is nothing wrong with this narrow, overfocused range of attention. We “get the job done” because it affords us the ability to accomplish so many things. However, if we remain in “emergency mode” for a long time, high Beta knocks us far out of balance, because maintaining it requires an immense amount of energy—and because this is the most reactive, unstable, and volatile of all brain patterns. When high Beta becomes chronic and uncontrolled, the brain gets juiced up beyond the healthy range. Unfortunately, high Beta is terribly overutilized by the majority of the population. We are obsessive or compulsive, insomniac or chronically fatigued, anxious or depressed, forcibly pushing in all directions to be all-powerful or hopelessly holding on to our pain to feel utterly powerless, competing to get ahead or victimized by our circumstances.”