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I had previously written this in the airport in Aruba at one of the internet machines where I had spent too much time on this page and therefore the machine decided to delete my entire entry. As I rewrite it now I have lost the anger and frustration that initially fueled this post.

I initially wrote my response while stranded in the airport at Aruba. I was surrounded by angry, worried, stressed and frustrated individuals whose flights had been canceled due to the weather in Philadelphia. The cancellation of the flight was not what caused the anger it was the lack of additional flights. When people are being rebooked for a flight a week after their initial flight there is obviously going to be anger and frustration. How will some people afford another week of vacation? Not everyone has extra money to do so. This post is not about the anger I felt or the anger the others felt but about emotions. I can only imagine the neurons and action potentials of the hundreds of people in the airport. The frustrated individuals, the bored children, the people that are happy they don’t have to return to work for another week and the airline’s employees that are the messengers of the corporate offices and yet have to deal with so many problems that they have no control over.

In terms of US airways employees, I wonder what is going on in their minds when they tell people they have no way to get someone home for a week or even 10 days (in some cases this occurred). The airlines would not pay for the hotel or food expenses because they claim it was weather related and they did not have to do that. It just makes me think what are anger, frustration, stress, and worrying. If thinking doesn’t actually exist and we are just experiencing various action potentials running through our bodies then what is anger? What is frustration? What is stress? Why do we do it? How do we do it? What types of action potentials dictate stress or frustration? When a US airways employee tells someone they have to stay in Aruba with no place to sleep for another week, what are the action potentials running through their mind? How do they differ from the frustration and anger running through the mind of the airline’s customer?

It seems that our bodies have endured so much “stress” that we have grown accustomed to it? But what is stress? Why is it said that when we have a lot of stress our health worsens and we age faster? If stress is so bad for us why do we do it so often? And why do some people thrive on stress? Some students even need to feel the stress piling on top of them before they start doing their homework or writing their papers. WHY?

How does this make sense? How do stress, frustration, anger, and worrying differ from a neurobiological perspective in our bodies? Do our action potentials occur at different rates, frequencies, or in different locations throughout the nervous system?

What is stress and why can’t we stop feeding off of it?