What the surge is doing

Something happens and your mind reads it, fast and without asking you, usually as one of three things. That was deliberate. That was unfair. I am being disrespected.

The body responds within a second or two. Heart, breath, jaw, hands, heat. And attention narrows onto the person, which is the part that matters most, because it is why you can recall their face and their sentence in detail and remember almost nothing else about the room.

That narrowing has a cost. As the arousal climbs, the range of responses you can actually reach shrinks. You do not lose your values. You lose access to them for a period, and they come back afterwards, which is why the shame afterwards is so sharp.