At this very moment you’re thirsty and hunting for something to drink. So you start walking towards the drinks machine at school. As you drink you hear your teacher say those frightening words: “Could I see you for a moment in the classroom, please?”

You can almost feel your blood pressure rise as you walk to your English class. She’s always picking on you. What can it be this time? You think of the test you did last Friday. Now your mind is racing, your heart is pounding, and your forehead is pouring with sweat. In situations like this you will often feel like running away but you may also feel like hitting someone on the nose.

Your teacher asks you to go into the class. “Here it comes,” you think. But what you hear is: “Well done. Your test was excellent.” You can hardly believe your ears.

Our fight or flight response is designed to protect us from tigers that would have once hidden in the woods around us, threatening(威胁) our survival. At times when our survival is threatened, there is no greater response to have on our side. When activated(刺激), the response causes stress hormones to pump through our body.

When we face very real dangers to our survival, it is invaluable. However, few of the “tigers” we face in our lives cause a serious physical threat to our existence. They cause us no end of stress, triggering(引发) the full activation of our fight or flight response. They tend to cause us to overreact to the situation in a counterproductive (事与愿违的) way. It is counterproductive to hit someone (the fight response) or run away (the flight response).

By recognizing the symptoms, we can begin to take steps to handle the stress overload. By learning to recognize the signals of fight or flight activation, we can avoid reacting excessively (过度地) to events and fears that are not life threatening. In doing so, we use this extra energy to help ourselves, borrowing the beneficial effects in order to change our emotional environment and deal productively with our fears, thoughts and potential dangers.

There is certainly evidence that actors experience a combination of their real self with their assumed characters. For example, Benedict Cumberbatch said, “My mum says I’m much more impatient with her when I’m filming Sherlock.”

Mark Seton, a researcher at the University of Sydney, has even invented the term “post-dramatic stress disorder” to describe the lasting effects experienced by actors who lose themselves in a role. “Actors may often prolong (延长) habits of the characters they have role-played.” he writes

A recent finding doesn’t involve acting, and it shows that just spending some time thinking about another person seemed to rub off on the volunteers’ sense of self led by Meghan Meyer at Princeton University. Across several studies, these researchers asked volunteers to first rate their own personalities, memories or physical features, and then to perform the same task from the perspective (视角) of another person. For example, they might score the emotionality (情绪性) of various personal memories, and then rate how a friend or relative would have experienced those same events.

After taking the perspective of another, the volunteers scored themselves once again: the finding was that their self-knowledge was now changed —their self-scores had changed to become more similar to those they’d given for someone else. For example, if at first they had said the term “confident” was only loosely related to themselves and then rated the term as being strongly related to a friend’s personality, when they came to rescore themselves, they now tended to see themselves as more confident.

“By simply thinking about another person, we may adapt our self to take the shape of that person” said Meyer and her colleagues. That our sense of self should have this quality might be a little discouraging, especially for anyone who has struggled to establish a firm sense of identity. Yet there is an optimistic message here, too. The challenge of improving ourselves— or at least seeing ourselves in a more positive light— might be a little easier than we thought. By role-playing or acting out the kind of person we would like to become, or just by thinking about and spending time with people who have the kind of features we would like to see in ourselves, we can find that our sense of self changes in desirable ways.

“As each of us chooses who to befriend, who to model, and who to ignore,” write Meyer and her colleagues, “we must make these decisions aware of how they shape not only the structure of our social networks, but even our sense of who we are.”

As is often the case, when we wake up feeling sleepy and with dark circles under eyes, many of us often make a decision: “I’m going to bed earlier tomorrow!” we are so determined. 【小题1】 We are still absorbed in what we are doing without realizing it is already too late the next day. This behavior is called “bedtime procrastination” (睡眠拖延症), and results from lack of self-control and our body clock.

【小题2】 According to a study carried out by a group of health psychologists, 53 percent of the 2,400 participants said they didn’t follow their sleep schedule, delaying it at least twice a week. They delayed bedtime because they couldn’t stop doing other trivial things (琐事), which were keeping them up in the first place.

People who generally have trouble resisting temptations (诱惑) and following their intentions firmly are also more likely to delay going to bed. They find it hard to control themselves. 【小题3】 Our body clock also plays an important role when it comes to bedtime. Those who get up late are more likely to postpone their bedtime than those who wake early every morning. Night owls would go to bed late at the very beginning of the weekday, even though they had to get up early for work and school. 【小题4】

Therefore, if we want to cure our bedtime procrastination, the intention to go to bed earlier is not enough. 【小题5】 We should have a clear understanding that bedtime procrastination is a big problem. The choices we make could turn out to be pretty important for our health.