Fight – Flight – Freeze – Faint
You may be more acquainted with our primitive survival response than you think. Many of us have heard of Fight and Flight and some may even have heard of Freeze and Faint but how many of us understand what it might be doing right now? Yes, right now – as you are reading this.
For those who are unfamiliar, our survival response (also known as fight and flight) is an automatic reaction to danger or the threat of danger. You may recognise it when you have a car accident, or when you stand in front of the tiger cage at the zoo, or even when you see a threatening person in the street. You may also recognise it when you are watching a scary movie, or when you hear a sudden noise like a loud thunderclap that makes you jump.
In order to survive, all animals (including humans) have a finely tuned alert system that makes them aware of threats and then act accordingly with either a response of fight (fists up, ready) or flight (run, Forrest, run) or a response of freeze (deer in the headlights) or faint (play-dead) response. These are essentially mobilising i.e. makes us move, or immobilising, i.e. stop moving, behaviours.
What you might not know is that we also use this system for perceived threats – those things that might happen as opposed to those things that are actually happening.
In primitive times, threats were fairly easy to define – the tiger, the warring tribe, the fall off a cliff, the need to find food, etc. – and equally easy to tell when they were over. In modern times, the threats are often far more subtle and importantly they are also often sustained, sometimes for years or even decades.
Today, the threats are things like the bad boss, difficult partner, financial woes, bullying or things that have happened in your past that you haven’t resolved such as past trauma and negative experiences. As a result, we have to defend against the possibility that “something” will happen again that threatens not necessarily our life but the life we want for ourselves, our way of life, in order to survive.
Being in a sustained survival response alters us, and not in a good way. It alters us physically and physiologically, mentally and psychologically, emotionally and behaviourally. It keeps us stuck in “same”, in symptoms that get more and more chronic and robs us of the opportunity to change. It’s not that we don’t want to change, it’s that we can’t because we haven’t resolved the reasons for being in defence/survival/fight-flight in the first place. Fight-flight isn’t about change, it’s about survival and it could be affecting you in ways you are not even aware of.
