Fight, Flight & Freeze: Exploring Responses to Threat

You have probably heard terms such as fight, flight and freeze before as you have gone through life. You might not have heard of them in those terms but you may have heard them in your everyday life. You might have heard people say 'I was scared stiff', 'you made me jump' or 'my heart skipped a beat'. You might have heard people say 'I got out of there as fast as my legs could carry me' or 'I saw red & lost my temper'. This post aims to discuss and explore what we currently know about these responses (from an evolutionary psychology perspective), to look at how this relates to your automatic nervous system (ANS), when these responses can become a problem and how therapy can help.

What is the Automatic Nervous System (ANS)?

Your automatic nervous system is pretty cool. It is a branch of your nervous system that functions below your level of consciousness. It is responsible for maintaining vital functions such as:

- blood pressure

- pulse

- salivation, tear production & sweating

- breathing

- digestion

- metabolism

- urination & defecation

- temperature

- sexual responses

You are able to consciously override some of these with a different part of your nervous system. So if I asked you to hold your breath, or change the rhythm of your breath you could probably do that quite easily. However, we do not need to think about breathing all day to continue doing so. For example, if you are asleep you do not need to remember to breathe because your automatic nervous system is regulating that for you.

Parasympathetic Nervous System (PSNS)

This is best described as your 'rest and digest' state when you feel calm & safe. You are the zebra grazing in the plains with no sign of threat nearby. Your heart rate and blood pressure are lower, your breathing rate is slower. You are feeling pretty relaxed in this state.

Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS)

Your sympathetic nervous system activates when you are under threat, stressed or engaging in physical activity. When faced with a threat, it engages the fight, fight or freeze response raising your blood pressure, pulse and breathing rate. Non essential systems responsible for things like sexual function & the digestive system slow. They take a back seat as the blood rushes from your internal organs to your limbs to ready you for action.

Fight

The fight response is a sympathetic nervous system response. When you are in fight mode you can feel very angry or even full of rage. You might notice your blood pumping and feeling warmer as your blood rushes from your internal organs to your extremities in preparation for fighting off a predator.

Flight

The flight response is also a sympathetic nervous system response. Flight mode switches on when we encounter a threat and decide the best course of action is to run away from the danger and get to safety. The telltale signs of flight might feel similar to fight as you notice your heart beating faster, your breathing rate might increase leading to increased oxygen in the body. Once again this is designed to get more oxygenated blood to your limbs so that you are able to run away from the threat. The main emotions driving this reaction are usually fear or anxiety.

Freeze

The freeze response is a blend between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system responses. Until quite recently we used to see these responses as either parasympathetic or sympathetic but research is now moving us away from this one vs the other model. In the freeze response we see something called dorso vagal activation which essentially causes immobilisation of varying degrees. It's this response at play when you hear people say 'I was frozen with fear', 'scared stiff' or 'I couldn't speak'.

One type of freeze response is the initial tense up that you experience when you think you spot something dangerous. After this your mind will then assess whether it needs to enter fight or flight mode (fight or run), or whether there is nothing dangerous and we can go back to social engagement mode (chatting with friends, playing with the kids, doing the shopping). This response is super quick and way faster than you are able to think. An everyday example of this might be when someone who is scared of spiders accidentally misinterprets a piece of black fluff on the floor for a spider. They will experience an initial freeze up before they are able to assess the situation.

The second type of freeze response is something that is often referred to as tonic immobility, this is that reaction where you freeze up completely and feel 'frozen by fear'. In evolutionally terms this might happen if you are running from a predator and it manages to catch you. It is being under threat and not being able to escape. What you are doing here is essentially trying to conserve your resources rather than burning them up.

The last type of freeze response we talk about is something that we call complete shutdown or the 'flop & drop' response. It is the most severe of the responses. If fight or flight is failing or has become hopeless, this is where we might experience complete shutdown. Our muscles might go limp & floppy, our blood pressure drops & as a result we can faint or lose consciousness. We might dissociate or experience depersonalisation. Essentially, the body is no longer looking for ways to survive and enters a state of emotional and physical shutdown. The body releases natural opiates (painkillers) into the system that create a sense of calm in the face of what we believe is certain death.

When does it become a problem?

Let's be clear about this. We need these responses. They are not bad responses. They are hardwired into our nervous system and have evolved over millions of years to keep us safe. You essentially have an amazing 'don't get eaten' machine or 'smoke alarm' in your body that has kept you safe since you were born and that's pretty amazing. If you didn't react to threat then a threat could significantly harm you or become life threatening pretty quickly. What would happen if you went to cross a road, saw a car coming but didn't feel scared so you kept walking?

What isn't quite so helpful is having a fully fledged fight reaction when you are trying to have a conversation with someone. Or having a flight reaction when you just want to get the weekly shop done.

Sometimes our internal smoke alarm can become hypersensitive. Many things can influence this, such as personal experiences, previous experience of trauma, unprocessed trauma, upbringing, genetics and more. When this happens our brains can become very sensitive to threat and might start sounding off in situations where there might not actually be any danger. In therapy I like to call this the 'burned toast' metaphor. The smoke alarm is going off, you've called the fire brigade and are evacuating the building but it's just burned toast in the kitchen.

Some people can experience significant problems with worry, anxiety or anger that interfere with their daily lives and prevent them from doing things that they want to do, stop them having meaningful relationships and often have other negative consequences.

Others might have experienced traumatic events that they have not been able to process. They might find that their internal smoke alarm feels active all of the time. They might feel very jumpy, hypervigilant or they might feel easily taken back to feeling as though the trauma was happening all over again.

How can psychological therapy such as CBT or ACT help?

Psychological therapies such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) are evidenced based treatments for mental health difficulties where there might be heightened threat response present. This is common in anxiety disorders such as panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, generalised anxiety disorder and specific phobia. We also see this heightened response in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) & post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Through treatment we aim to help people understand what is maintaining their heightened anxiety response and work with them to overcome these issues using cognitive and behavioural techniques.

If you would like to learn more about CBT Therapy then please click here