Daylight savings caught us off guard, so my wife and I decided to roll with it. The plan was to make brunch together while watching this video with Megyn Kelly sharing her reaction to the movie Bombshell, which we finally got around to seeing the night before.

My Surface Pro was perched on the counter for viewing, my wife had eggs frying in a big cast iron skillet and I’d just finished preparing a really nice looking salad when I knocked our glass pepper shaker out of my hand trying to put it back in the cupboard. BAM! It shattered in chunks and shards across the countertop, peppercorns scattered along the kitchen floor.

It’s the perception of threat, real or imagined, that engages our stress response. This cascade of biochemical processes triggered by what's known as the HPA axis: Hypothalamus > Pituitary > Adrenal glands.

Picture them as a team of sprinters passing relay race batons. Only the batons are hormones. So these hormones are entering our bloodstream and they're dialing down our digestive and immune system function, dilating our blood vessels to increase blood flow so the heart can pump more blood to the brain, to the skeletal muscles and to the eyes, and it's priming us for fight or flight. Now all of this is working exactly according to plan and, in fact, without the stress response it's highly unlikely that our species would have survived all this long.