What is Excitement: Butterflies in the stomach?

You look at a love interest and there are butterflies in your stomach. The result for a test you performed well on is awaited, you feel excited. You are sitting in class, thinking about the party scheduled for evening. Such things make us feel excited, happy and in high spirits. Highly energised atoms jumping from one energy state to another are labelled as excited.

What is this excitement? Why do we feel this tingling in our feet, our awareness is heightened, and there are butterflies in our stomach?

Excitement

The word excitement roots back to Latin word excitare, meaning rousing, energised. Common synonyms of the word are elated, zing, spark, enthusiasm and many more. On a baseline graph, excitement can be denoted as an upraised level, an elevated state.

A common misconception related to excitement is that it is something positive. Not always; excitement is an arousal in the awareness and activeness level, which can also have negative connotations. For example, waiting for your competitor to present their product after yours also is a state of excitement. This upraised level of awareness, sensation and energy can now be directed towards positive elation, confidence or in a negative manner that is nervousness and anxiety.

Behind this feeling of elation, this aroused mental state, there is an array of events going on in the body physiologically, activating and deactivating different systems, portions and pathways in the body.

Physiology

The butterflies in the stomach and heightened arousal resulting in this state of excitement, the rush one feels, can primarily be attributed to the fight or flight response. This is an evolutionary mechanism which prolongs our survival, and also involved in survival of the fittest. The flight refers to escaping from a situation, or fleeing from it. For example, a person scared of dogs will be excited when they see the dog. This upraised level gets transformed into fear and shivers running down the spine, feeling numb. The person when choosing to turn their steps back marks their flight response. Alternatively, when the person faces the situation, and decided to not let the dog get the best of them, and they try to cross from the side of the road, having in mind that in the worst case scenario, they can run. This is the fight response that is, tackling the stimulus and not escaping from it.

The fight or flight response is controlled by the autonomic system of the nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is a part of the peripheral nervous system which contains the nerves stemming out of the brain and spinal cord, bringing and taking messages to and fro from the brain to the extremities and the limbs, and vice versa.

The autonomic nervous system controls all the internal organs which are not under our voluntary control, such as the heart, gland, digestive organs etc.

During this fight or flight response, the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems of the autonomic nervous system get activated. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the feeling of excitement, in which the heart rate increases, blood flow to the limbs increases in case of running or to provide strength, the pupils widen to infer more visual information, hearing sharpens., there is sweating, heavy breathing as to increase oxygenation in blood, and then its flow etc. This is can be understood as heating up of the body, or boiling of the water, which has bubbles arising, or excitement.

On the other hand, the parasympathetic system is the exact opposite of this. It deactivates the activated body, returning it to a state of normalcy, or cool down, like the cooling water after it has boiled. The heart rate decreases, body temperature returns to normal, resuming the digestive process, decreasing the size of the pupil etc.

How does it happen?

When we perceive the stimuli in our environment, the sensory signals are interpret by the brain in less than a fraction of a second and they are labelled in terms safe or unsafe, depending upon the familiarity of the stimuli, based on the schemas developed in the memory. Now, in the unfamiliar or seemingly unsafe environment, the body becomes aware, via the autonomic nervous system so as to prolong the survival. Depending upon the stimuli further on, the information from the brain and spinal cord is relayed to other parts of the body.

This is a whole intricate web of series of functions: the adrenal glands producing adrenaline, release of cortisol-the stress hormone, activation of the neural pathways and the necessary sympathetic and parasympathetic system, which effects the other systems like digestive, the muscular, respiratory and cardiovascular.

Consider the following situation: it is 3 pm now, and you have an interview scheduled with a potential employer at 4pm. You have not prepared well for the interview, your documents are not organised and you haven’t gotten ready yet, so you might end up late. You are in a state of frenzy. Somehow, you manage to make it in time before the interview. You sit there with your hands shaking, filling with sweat, you turn head at every sound you hear, and maybe it is your name, worst kinds of scenarios running through your head. Your name is called, and in your trip into the room with anxiety. You are continuously tapping your pen and stuttering with the questions. The interview is over and you are headed home, thinking about how bad your interview was, and you might probably end up unemployed. But you feel calmer than before.

The journey from activation to deactivation of the sympathetic system can be seen, along with the calming down by parasympathetic system. Along with these physiological components during the activation of your sympathetic nervous system, there is and added psychological stressor such as negative thoughts, worst case scenarios, feeling down etc.

A simple trick to sometimes hack such situations of flight or fight are reverse techniques. Feeling too excited around your crush and want to prevent your cheeks form reddening? Deep breathe. This activity mimics the parasympathetic system, which calms the body down. Feeling drowsy while studying and want to get active? Jog on the spot for 60 second, or work out, increase your heartbeat. This is mimicking the sympathetic nervous system which will increase wakefulness and energy.