Our bodies are made to keep us alive, not thriving. And just like a good house, when the body or mind perceives a threat to survival, it has a fire alarm. Except the body’s alarm system is known as fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. (Fawn was not known until later, and it’s a response mostly women suffer from. Classic; nothing in medicine that affected women and not men was given attention until later. Women’s anatomy was not even fully mapped until about 2005. But enough side quest rage baits.) 

So biologically, we’ve developed a few fire alarms. Let’s go through them one by one, and you can see what resonates with you (yay). 

1.Fight: This response is exactly like it sounds. The body responds to the threat by fighting. Your nervous system floods you with adrenaline and cortisol in order to prepare for confrontation – emotionally, often showing up as the urge to defend, confront, and push back against whatever is hurting you. 

Blood pressure and heart rate spike, which pumps more oxygen to your muscles. You take in more oxygen as breathing quickens, and blood flow is directed toward your limbs and away from digestion – allowing you to use them more than in rest state. The pupils dilate, to sharpen focus on the threat (tunnel vision), and muscles tense up – ever felt that tension in your shoulders, pelvis, arms, and jaw? Those are super common places.

Here’s a wonder of the body: when we’re injured in the fight state, we don’t feel it as acutely, because the pain response is suppressed so we can deal with threat. Ever been in a situation and only realized afterwards you were injured, bleeding, or something was even sprained or broken?

2. Flight: It’s pretty similar, so just refer to the above. The main thing is that it gets channeled differently.

Cortisol surges, adrenaline is released, and blood pressure spikes. Blood shifts away from digestion, and toward the muscles, and breathing quickens. Pain dulls and the pupils dilate. If this is sounding familiar, good. If it isn’t, go back and read the previous section, because you clearly weren’t listening well. Oh, and you’ll be quizzed on this.

Now here’s where it differs from fight (so it’s where you should say: oh, this doesn’t sound familiar!) The goal is to get to escape routes, as opposed to confronting the threat. The legs are the prioritized destination for blood flow, instead of the arms (for fighting). The urge is not to close the distance; it’s to create it.

The main physiological response is the same; there’s just two different outputs. 

3. If you didn’t resonate with the two above, don’t worry! There’s two more, one official and one not so official. Ladies and gentlemen, we now have reached: freeze.

Freeze is a little different, and more unique. The freeze state is associated with the heart rate dropping, not raising; muscles go limp or rigid, instead of being prepared to move; breathing gets more shallow, and is sometimes held back. Feeling like you cannot speak or act – even when you want to – is normal for this state. This response is often characterized by a feeling of detachment or numbness, like you’re watching yourself from outside yourself.

This response often comes when there is no other option; when fight or flight seems impossible – such as when the predator is too big, or there is no escape – we just freeze.

It is important to note that if you did freeze, that does not in any way mean that you consented to what took place on any level – and that had you moved, you could have caused less of it – because you didn’t flee fast enough. Your body did this, acting from an ancient survival mechanism – that happens outside of your control. The only reason the negative things happened to you is because people chose to make the negative things happen to you.

And remember, this happens whether or not the predator actually can be escaped; it all comes down to what our brain believes, not to what is necessarily true in the moment. Especially – when we learn what is safe and unsafe as children, that becomes coded into our brain forever, until we switch it. Remember how we talked about our brain being there to survive, not to thrive? Well, this is a prime example. So if something was unsafe as a child, our brain believes that it is unsafe as an adult, because it is trying to keep us safe.

Some research has found that the freeze state can be associated with messing with your memory. (Having fragmented memories of traumatic events is very normal; these events were too big for the nervous system to process, and the body is trying to keep you alive. Creating a safe space – highly suggested to do with a therapist – can help bring them up as well. Only do this in an environment where once they come up, you are with a therapist or in a space where you can regulate and bring yourself down from flooding – should it happen.) The research has shown that at times, memories are fragmented, non – narrative, and sensory heavy.

4. And now we get to reaction #4: Fawn. This is when you appease the abuser, or the threat, by engaging in behavior / speech in order to lower the threat levels. (See this book: Fawn: How a Trauma Response Became Biblical Womanhood – and How Women Can Reclaim Their Agency). It looks like laughing at a sexual harassment joke that was not actually funny because you know the person making it can turn threatening otherwise; it looks like silencing your opinion on a matter because you know you’ll be punished for speaking it; it looks like saying the right thing to avoid an explosion.

One easy test to see if your relationship is characterized by fight or flight or by connection: are your actions coming from fear, or from expansion? Toxic relationships shrink one person. Relationships characterized by love cause both people to blossom.

Humans are a unique species where it doesn’t just take a physical threat to alarm our safety system; certain emotional or social threats are seen by the brain as a threat to survival. (We often perceive survival threat as a physical threat, just as most of society has an understanding of abuse; the word, to them, means punching, raised fits, physical assault. It’s a lack of understanding – that actually helps the abusers. Because abuse is much more complicated and insidious than that, it serves them very well that society sees the ‘drunkard raising his fists and slamming cabinets’ as the picturesque abuser). 

Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

When there is constant or intermittent threat, we are constantly in fight or flight mode. (And remember, loss of attachment and connection as a child is seen as a threat, and when we have to prioritize attachment over well being as a child we often do so as adults, as our brain sees it as survival and we don’t know there are other options. See: When I’m Flooded: Emotional Regulation). This can have devastating effects on the body. When there are multiple threats over time, or scattered / consistent threats growing up, people may develop complex post traumatic stress disorder, not just post traumatic stress disorder.

I also have this theory that when we’re not allowed to respond to real threats, imagined, simple things become threats instead. And the little things in life stress us out – like answering an email – when we grapple with the huge ones, organizing our fight or flight defense. But anyway, that’s not backed up by peer reviewed research; it’s just a hunch.

The Secret Catch

These systems don’t just get activated when there’s an actual threat. They get activated whenever the brain perceives anything as a threat. 

That means that if during childhood you learnt that speaking your mind is a threat, your FOF system might fire off any time you want to speak your mind. If you were mugged by a man in a red coat, you might develop an aversion to red coats. Once I ate spoiled cheese, and couldn’t look at any shredded cheese for a year. And if you were cut off from your parents every time you asserted yourself in ways they didn’t like, you might develop a fight or flight reaction against individuality in a relationship – or feel threatened when the figure you’re attached to steps back – and do whatever it takes to get them back, even to your own detriment. Because here’s the catch: when we learn healthy attachment when we’re younger, we can be free and independent and connect. When we don’t learn healthy attachment when we’re younger, we see disconnection as a threat but engage in behaviors that push it away. They might promote attachment, but they don’t promote connection.

So say you want to start engaging in certain behaviors, like standing up for yourself, no matter the other’s reaction. So you engage in the behavior, and the alarm system fires off. And once it does, there’s no use talking it out of the threat. The way the brain updates is through engaging in the behavior, firing off its usual system, experiencing regulation, seeing that nothing negative has happened, and updating. Slowly, slowly: it updates each time. As for how to regulate? (See: Emotional Regulation, When I’m Flooded.)

The Effects of Being in Fight or Flight Long Term

Spoiler alert: it isn’t healthy.

The constant elevated heart rate and high blood pressure increase stress on the heart, raising the risk for heart disease. Cortisol flowing regularly weakens your body’s ability to fight off illness, and sleep can be disturbed. It’s hard to fall into a relaxing slumber when your body thinks it is under threat. Muscle pain, and muscle tension, can result from this as well: jaw clenching, tightness, and being primed for action can lead to headaches, back pain – and frankly, somatic symptoms (but if you are experiencing those, go check it out by a doctor first!!! You want to rule out anything else.) It can also – joy of all joys – cause blood sugar issues as cortisol raises glucose levels for quick energy, which, over time, can strain insulin production. And because blood flows away from the digestive system into muscles, digestion can be interrupted and GI issues caused.

The effects of fawning can be pretty strong. Women who engage in fawn responses and silence themselves often end up with more autoimmune diseases; when you put away emotions, they find another place to come out. (It’s wild how when they speak up, they’re often called selfish, when they’re the ones getting the autoimmune diseases; but the people giving it to them aren’t called selfish. 

Either way, as Kate Gray, LMFT says, emotions are your body’s way of communicating something to you. It’s the language of your body. So if you feel those emotions, stop and ask yourself: what do you need? What need is not being addressed? (Note: this is for emotions in you. For problematic behavior from other adults, set boundaries and demand that it stop. It is not your job to mommy them; you can’t mommy them.)

Remember, your body is not out to get you. The fire alarm isn’t there to hurt you. It is meant to keep you safe; listen to it. And if you decide it’s time to deactivate the alarm, regulate to do so.

And remember along the way – it’s on your team.