You woke up on Jan 1st 2020 like Hashtag New Year.

New me Bob made yourself a smoothie, started to meditate and then, bam, we're at World War Three names started.

We kept refreshing Twitter.

We watched the news obsessively and honestly, I felt weirdly fascinated by the concept of war.

A variety of psychological studies have found that soldiers who returned from war actually end up missing it.

We all clamour to the cinema tow, watch movies about war, and it turns out there is a reason why it has to do with our shared history and your body.

Archaeologists believe that we were less violent as hunter gatherers because we were more nomadic and we had less possessions.

Essentially, we just had less to fight over.

Now I stay put in my home.

I have things like my phone, which I'm literally in love with, and if anyone does touch her, they shall feel about as humans.

When we started to stay put, create agriculture, build walls and borders, and our populations grew.

That's when the concept of a large scale war actually began, and our physiological response to it created an innate fascination.

Your body is controlled by the brain and nervous system, which is acted on by hormones.

Hormones are chemical messengers released from glands in your body that influenced the nervous system to regulate your behavior and physiology.

If you are experiencing armed conflict firsthand playing call of duty or even just reading about an impending war, your brain will initiate a stress response.

The hypothalamus will release cortical trope in releasing hormone, which acts on the pituitary gland of the brain to release adrenal cortical tropic hormone into your bloodstream.

At this point, the A C T.

H is pumping through your body where it ends up passing through these little adorable adrenal glands that chill on the top of your kidneys.

Thes glands used ta See th signal to now release adrenaline and nor adrenaline into your blood, which act on receptors throughout your body.

Your heart rate increases, your breath quickens, blood vessels constrict, and you experience a feeling that is unsettling and thrilling, known as the fight or flight response designed over years of human evolution.

To protect you from danger, your physical strength is temporarily increased.

Your body has a decreased ability to feel pain and other hormones like cortisol and dopamine are released, which make your attention hyper focused.

The stress response is a natural high, a natural biological process where you become focused, hyper president and amped to fight.

The neuroscientist Jim Boss explained that by activating your arousal and attention systems, stressors can also wake up the neural circuitry underlying, wanting and craving, just like drugs.

Do the stress created by playing call of duty or watching a war movie is a really clever way to target the system.

And the Hollywood Machine does a good job at creating a lot of war movies that feed into this biological urge.

You get to leave the theater and go home and return to home e o Stasis because you're safe and sound, which is one theory why civilians make it a rush from these movies because for the most part will never have to face war.

As for the soldiers who have returned from war and claim that they miss it, the studies show that they have become accustomed to these higher levels of stress and therefore they feel that it's necessary to feel that stressed all the time, their brains will be wanting to seek out these feel good hormones, and this leads them to think that they miss the stress of war.

Although acute stress may lead to a natural high, chronic stress has extremely negative effects on your body, especially due to the hormone cortisol, which over time decreases your immune function, causes impaired digestion, increased nervousness, susceptibility to infection, fear and desensitization.

If stressors are too strong and too persistent and individuals who are biologically vulnerable, it can lead to disease.

Living life is to be in a precious dance with stress, a biological response that the concept of war hijacks.

If people don't understand that the body can actually crave acute stress, then we may end up treating war like a thrilling game.

And if that's the case with our world leaders, then we may all be in danger.

Which is ironic because we evolved the fight or flight response to keep us safe from immediate danger.

But if we don't understand it properly, it may be the exact biological response that leads to another sad, devastating war.

During these precarious times.

It does feel scary so you can share this video with people so they can understand more about what's happening in their bodies.

Thanks for watching, and we will see you next week for a new science video.