The FIVE Stress Responses, Part I: Fight, Flight, & Freeze Explained

Ever wondered why you snap in anger, spiral into anxiety, or completely shut down when things get overwhelming? Because your nervous system is under threat and trying to keep you safe.

In this episode, I break down what’s actually happening inside your brain and body when you get triggered. Part I goes in-depth into the fight, flight, and freeze responses—three natural, physiological responses to stress. (Stay tuned for Part II where we’ll cover two other, even more important ones for women!)

Crucially, stress responses are NOT personality flaws. They’re automatic survival strategies your brain and body use to protect you, and they’re essential for understand for human behavior and relationships. You can’t afford not to know this—especially if you’re a mother.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• Stress responses are not bad — they are survival strategies.
• You don’t overreact because you’re flawed. You overreact because your nervous system is protecting you.
• It doesn’t matter if a threat is real or perceived; the biochemical stress process in your body is the SAME.
• Understanding stress responses helps you understand ALL human behavior like never before.
• This has sooooo many implications for parenting because too few parents realize their child’s “misbehavior” is simply an underdeveloped nervous system having a big threat response. When you maintain (instead of sever) emotional connection, a child’s behavior usually resolves on its own.
• How things like compulsive cleaning, mom rage, avoidance, overworking, and lack of executive functioning are often “F” responses in disguise

FOR SO MUCH MORE:

Book a free consult to get to the root of your stress so it no longer sabotages you—or your relationships: https://tidycal.com/solutionsforsimplicity/free-consult)

Get on the waitlist for the next round of my 6-week program, Moms Made NewTM so you can learn to work with (instead of against) your nervous system and help your whole family flourish: https://solutionsforsimplicity.myflodesk.com/mmn-waitlist

HOMEWORK:

Consider which, if any, of the three responses discussed so far (fight, flight, or freeze) best depict how you tend to handle your stress. Do you get angry? Do you escape into something that takes your mind off what's wrong? Or do you shut down, feel paralyzed by indecision, and go numb? Share your thoughts with me via email through the link in the show notes or DM me on Instagram @solutionsforsimplicity. 

COMING UP NEXT:

Join me back next Tuesday at 5am Eastern to learn the remaining two—arguably even more important—stress responses. (If you’re an oldest daughter, people pleaser, or high-functioning overachiever, you cannot afford to miss these!)

CONNECT WITH AMBER: Website | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn 

Ready to finally get to the root of your problems and change your life FOR GOOD? Book your free 60-minute consult to learn more about working 1:1 with Dr. Amber.

Transcript

0:00

This might just be the most important podcast episode you ever hear. Whether you've heard of stress responses before or not, the way I'm going to unpack them will fundamentally shift how you understand what's going on in your body when you get stressed out. Welcome to More Time for Mom. where overwhelmed moms get science-backed strategies to overcome the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy. I'm your host, Dr. Amber Curtis. Ready to make more time for you? Let's dive in. Let's get three things clear. First, stress responses are not bad. They are simply a solution that your brain and body are offering you in the face of real or perceived threat. Secondly, they are not a choice. They are a default response that gets immediately triggered when you feel threatened. But third, stress responses are not personality types. You are not destined to always respond to stress the same way you always have. Stress responses are simply automatic nervous system strategies for survival. Before we begin, I want to remind you of the three most crucial motivations every brain has. Number one, to keep you alive and safe, both physically and socially. Number two, to conserve energy. And number three, to avoid pain and seek pleasure. These are your brain's three jobs at all times, which means your brain is constantly preoccupied with looking for threat. It's literally designed to get activated. And threat isn't just a real life or death risk, like being chased by a tiger. Threat can mean rejection, disapproval, conflict, overwhelm, loss of control, emotional intensity, chaos. Yet stress is an inescapable part of life. Of course, it comes in different forms and different levels of severity, but this is so key. The biochemical process in your body is the exact same, regardless of whether a threat is real or perceived. The goal of every stress response is the same. It's your nervous system's way of reducing the threat, regaining control, and restoring safety. You have to know that because it makes all human behavior rational when you step back to consider what quote unquote threat that nervous system was perceiving that sent it into a particular stress response. This isn't just important for you to know for yourself, it's essential for understanding everyone around you, especially if you're a parent, because you want to be able to identify whatever underlying threat might be causing your child to act out in ways that are annoying or even unacceptable to you, yet are simply an indication that their nervous system is freaking out. If we only consider the behavior, we are more likely to respond in ways that shut the child's emotions down and perpetuate even more of a stress response, rather than maintaining emotional connection and helping them co-regulate to come out of their stress response. The behavior will almost always fix itself once the perceived threat and the stress response subside. Even if you're not a parent, this is truly so key to understanding every single person you know. Once you understand these five default stress responses, you will start seeing them everywhere around you, plus catch yourself whenever you start to slip into one. I clearly get so fired up about this. No one teaches you this stuff in school. And the older I've gotten, I am personally convinced it's way, way, way more important than reading, writing, or arithmetic. This is human behavior and relationships 101, and it should be the number one thing people learn before they ever interact with each other, let alone get married and have kids. Let's go ahead and get into it. There are five default stress responses. They are also sometimes referred to as the F responses. You have probably heard the big ones like the fight or flight response, but we're going to talk about all of them so that you can really understand their differences and identify which one you tend towards. The first and most well known is the fight response. This is a nervous system state of major sympathetic activation where your body gets mobilized to overpower the threat. You feel supercharged. Your adrenaline and cortisol shoot up. It feels like a rush of energy, of heat. Your jaw might tighten. Your heart rate speeds up. You feel this sense of urgency and irritation. You're impatient and you just have to fight back against the threat right now. Of course the fight response can provoke a physical reaction. This is what I often see in my boys where they have an argument and they just start punching each other or wrestling around in frustration. But the fight response doesn't have to be physical. It can be verbal or emotional. Here's the truth. Underneath this response, your nervous system is simply trying to regain control, competence, certainty. The fight response says, if I dominate this situation, then I'll be safe. That kind of response could be warranted and really helpful if you were actually trying to, say, fight off a dog that ran up and was trying to attack you. But in a lot of human interactions, it's anything but helpful. And so the downside, the shadow side, as we say, is that it often exacerbates and perpetuates conflict. It can really cause a lot of physical, if not psychological, harm to others. It breeds a lot of resentment, and as all these stress responses do, it ends up making things worse because it often only escalates the situation. In marriage, this can look like criticism, having a controlling tone, speaking harshly, even being verbally abusive. In motherhood, it looks like snapping, yelling, over-disciplining, saying, because I said so, engaging in power struggles. And then so many women come to me because they wrestle with mom rage where they've tried to be nice and patient and they try and let a lot of things go until they just erupt in anger. And then they feel so awful and guilty. and can't forgive themselves for how they acted in that moment when they were so stressed out. Again, we are not here to say this is right or wrong. We're here to understand what the nervous system was going through and perceiving that makes someone act out in a fight response. The second stress response is the flight response. Just like the fight response, the nervous system goes through this major sympathetic activation, but this time it's mobilized with anxiety and a real severe need to escape the threat, to run far away, to try and outrun the predator, and really get to a safe place, whether realistically or metaphorically. in your body. This feels like restlessness, racing thoughts, an urge to multitask, and difficulty concentrating or focusing. You can't sit still. You're so nervous. You have all these thoughts playing over and over in your mind. At the root, The flight response is simply trying to avoid the emotional discomfort of the stressful situation. It's the nervous system's way of saying, if I just stay busy or distracted or can get away from this, I won't have to feel these hard feelings. Again, that could serve you really well if you really needed to run away from a fire or something like that. But in our modern life, having the flight response really leads to anxiety, exhaustion, burnout, and overall just an avoidance of the really maybe hard things we need to do or accept to process the stress and really effectively reduce the threat. In marriage, the flight response can look like avoiding hard conversations, avoiding intimacy, working late or distracting yourself, maybe scrolling or zoning out in Reading or something that you enjoy instead of doing what you don't want to do. It can look like over-functioning and purposely staying busy because that feels easier than feeling the emotions associated with the threat. In motherhood, it looks like hyper-productivity, constant cleaning, maybe over-scheduling your kids in lots of different activities, going into anxiety spirals where you are ruminating and mulling over so many things all the time, or believing that if you could just get everything done, then the stress would disappear instead of recognizing what is really at the root of your perceived threat. The third F response is freeze. Unlike fight or flight where the nervous system gets activated, the freeze response is experiencing a dorsal vagal shutdown where the nervous system kind of collapses and immobilizes you because the threat feels like too much to handle and your brain subconsciously thinks you couldn't win if you were to fight and you don't maybe have a good chance of running away or maybe there isn't anywhere to run away to. So you just collapse. Your body might feel heavy or numb, very tired. Your brain might feel foggy. Maybe you dissociate. Your mind could go blank. The freeze response is the nervous system subconsciously saying, if I just shut down, I won't feel the threat. In the most extreme cases, this explains why a trauma victim might not have fought back or ran away or screamed for help. Her body literally shut down and went immobile. A very real experience that so many women end up in, especially when you're under chronic stress for a prolonged period of time, is functional freeze, where you literally can't get your brain to think or to act. You're just checked out. Maybe you're going through the motions and checking off the boxes of what you most need to do, but inside your nervous system is stuck in a numb state, unable to activate yourself enough to snap out of it. This can not only lead to disconnection with your loved ones, it can also turn into depression or learned helplessness. In marriage, this might be going quiet, stonewalling the other person, really withdrawing emotionally and just refusing to engage or interact with the other person. In motherhood, this can look like feeling frozen and overwhelmed, not being able to start projects, let alone execute them to completion. It can be not having the energy to care, or just emotional flatness where you're not really feeling great joy, but you're also not letting yourself feel real grief or pain or distress. Again, none of these are wrong or better or worse than another. It's just that they are your nervous system's way of trying to handle the stress of a real or perceived threat in that moment. At this point, I want to point out that fight, flight, and freeze are the original, more well-known stress responses. The first two were proposed in the early 1900s by stress researcher Walter Cannon, and then the concept of freeze emerged in the 1990s when Stephen Porges proposed polyvagal theory. And so this freeze response has really been expanded by trauma researchers who are trying to better understand what happens in the body when we get thrust into survival mode beyond just fight or flight. Altogether, what these three stress responses have in common is that they are all physiologically grounded, as opposed to the other two F-responses that are more learned adaptations. This is all so much to take in and it's so, so important. So rather than overwhelm you, I'm going to leave this episode here for now to let you digest all we've covered so far. Definitely join me next episode to understand the two more recently identified stress responses that, spoiler alert, tend to be what so many high-functioning women default to when stressed. Your homework for this episode is to consider which, if any, of the three responses discussed today, fight, flight, or freeze, best depict how you tend to handle your stress. Do you get angry? Do you escape into something that takes your mind off what's wrong? Or do you shut down, feel paralyzed by indecision, and go numb? Reach out to me by email using the link in the show notes to let me know what your default stress response is. As always, you are so invited to book a free 60-minute consult so that we can talk about this in more detail and then come back next Tuesday at 5 a.m. Eastern to find out the other, arguably even more important stress responses that every woman needs to know. Until then, remember nothing you do, not even your default stress response, changes how wonderful and worthy you are. Have a great day. I know more than anyone how precious your time is, so the fact that you spent it listening to this podcast means the world. Make sure to subscribe, and if you got value out of this show, I would be so honored if you'd leave a review and share this episode with another busy mama who needs to hear it. We've got this.