What is the difference in responding and reacting?

What is the difference in responding and reacting?  While at first glance it might just seem like semantics, the impact of each in your life can be huge. You see reacting is an instinctual behavior centered in the reptilian brain. While responding is a conscious choice involving input from the more evolved brain or the part of the brain that sets us apart from animals.

The reptilian brain, or reactive brain, gets involved when we are triggered from something we view as a possible threat. This could be the guy who cuts us off on the highway, the person in a meeting that doesn't agree with our opinion, or merely someone who doesn't share the same belief as us because it challenges our own belief system.

While this flight or fight thing was great millions of years ago because our survival was at stake, chances are our reactions to things now are not really threats to our safety at all. Someone is not going to stab us to death in a meeting with a Dry-Erase pen. So all to often, we find ourselves reacting in an emotional way to something that really isn't a threat at all. This leads to us feel stressed, fearful, and angry. It also causes us to not use our thinking brain to work and brainstorm the best possible solution to any given problem or challenge.

Is there a way to stop this? Not really, but there is a way to handle it. The way to know if we are reacting or responding is to be self aware. We need to recognize if our thinking process is working or not. If it's not, then whatever we say, we will be reacting and probably end up doing or saying something that causes more issues than it solves. The best thing to do when that happens is take some deep breaths or even walk out of the room until our adrenaline has dissipated and we have move back into a thinking state. From there, we can make much better responses because we are using our thinking ability, the big brain, instead of our emotional reptilian brain.