On Little Shots of Adrenalin

In the grand scheme of things, there’s basically never been a better time to be alive in human history than right now (unless you were a straight, white, Christian man, in which case the 1950s were probably pretty swell). Most of the problems that have plagued humanity for eons have been more or less solved: I’ve got glasses for my shitty eyes, grocery stores full of food to make up for my non-existent hunting skills, water piped in to my living space because I have got tostay hydrated, and a motorized vehicle because I’m too tired to walk and too lazy to catch and train a horse. But, without all those struggles, without the daily worry of being mauled to death by Sabretooth Tiger or whatnot, you’ve really got to learn to appreciate those moments when you feel most alive, those moments when your body gives you a little shot of that sweet sweet adrenalin.

It’s pretty easy to think of adrenalin filled situations: you’re up to bat with the bases loaded and two outs in the bottom of the 9th inning of game 7 of the World Series down a run, you’re about to pitch your million-dollar idea to all those capitalist pigs on Shark Tank, you’re trapped in Nakatomi plaza without your shoes as German Ultranationalist terrorists hold your wife Bonnie Bedelia hostage. But all those situations are bigger, rarer, and more filled with Bruce Willis than what I’m thinking about.

When I talk about little shots of adrenaline, I’m talking about the moment when you’re lying in bed, scrolling through Instagram or Reddit or whatever, when the unthinkable happens: you drop your phone…straight towards your face. Instantly, your body reacts like woolly mammoth is charging directly at you. You feel a surge a strength, your senses sharpen, time seems to slow down…and then the phone bonks you on the nose and you feel like an idiot. But that rush, that surge of adrenalin reminds you that you’re alive.

I’m talking about that moment when you’re carrying boxes or laundry or priceless artifacts down a flight of stairs and you kind of forget how many stairs there are but you’re pretty sure that you’re at the bottom and you reach out your foot towards what you assume is solid ground, only to realize there are more stairs. That instant when your foot is flying through the air, seemingly untethered to reality, floating like Sandy Bullock in Gravity, your body hits you with another one of those unbelievably choice doses of adrenaline. 

In that moment, you feel like you could run a five-minute mile, punch Mike Tyson in the face, finally do a cartwheel that isn’t weak, sloppy, and terrible, and then your foot makes contact with the next step and all that adrenalin seems to melt away from your body as you convince yourself that you really do know how to walk down stairs like an adult.

So, what about you? Do you love or hate those moments when your body remembers its fight or flight response when it absolutely didn’t need to?