I've seen 2 trees fall in the forest on their own. Once was close to the shore of Buntzen lake near Vancouver BC. I heard it before I saw it and was near by. It startled me and I thought a large animal was charging me, oops. The other time was in the marshy part of a lake in Maple Ridge and a ways away so I didn't get scurred.

There is almost certainly a relationship between stress and tilt, but to describe is as fight or flight is at best naive and at worst just wrong.

Stress occurs when our perception of environmental demands exceed our personal coping resources. In a poker room, those demands include the quality of our opponents, our chip standing the relative amount of money to be won, and so on.

Our coping resources are equally diverse, from our ability to play poker, to our ability to manage our emotions.

Once our perception of environmental demands exceed our coping resources, we will experience a stress response that will begin to consume our physiological resources. Heart rate and cortisol will increase, with resources diverted from "non-essential" body systems such as immune functioning.

Once our body is in stress mode, it prepares us for a physical challenge, but not a cognitive one. Think taking an exam or attending a job interview - whoever performs well when they are stressed? The poker room is no different. Once you become stressed, it's a difficult situation to reverse, but has little to do with fight or flight.

This is a great post. Some of the poker mental coaches should read it.

Best wishes,
Mason

1. Tilt decreases one's ability to act rationally. That is the tilting factor as I see it.
2. When one is up, one tends to become protective. That has often been noted. I compensate that with counter attitudes like then is a good time and be ready to lose if it comes to that. No negative solution for me, just a counter.

The environmental argument on the previous post. They are normal stressor factors and contrary to the opinion given, I see it as a fight-or-leave situation as one is challenged. It is a tilt factor but as another theory says, one needs it but not too little or too much of it. The too-little may not be considered a tilt factor.

It helps to understand the situations and have counters. Anxiety, difficult, fearless less so. Working with anxiety works but is often a matter or years (depends) and the solution is in fighting it in a smart way or then just avoiding it. The latter doesn't get on the top of it (or might be temporarily the best solution) and decrease the anxiety when again faced but one does not need to fight with everything.

There is a big difference between challenge and threat.

Fight-or-flight specifically refers to a perceived threat to survival. Sure, you can stretch this to a poker tournament if you wish, but it's a weak analogy.

Challenge on the other hand infers the agency of choice - we can chose to either accept or decline a challenge. We chose to drive to the poker room. We chose which game to sit in, which seat to sit at and how much to sit down with, and we can chose to leave at any time.

It therefore makes little-to-no sense to say that as a result of all these actions arrived at through conscious choice, that the situation just flips around and becomes a fight-or-flight threat.