Do you or your client go to fight/flight or freeze?

The fight, flight, or freeze response is how the body responds to real or perceived threats.

It is involuntary and involves a number of physiological changes that help someone prepare to:

• fight---> push away --> take action to eliminate the danger
• flee/ flight --> running away, escaping the danger
• freeze --> becoming frozen/ immobile

What happens during fight or flight?

An acute stress response causes the body’s Autonomic Nervous System to become active. This is the part of the nervous system that controls rapid, unconscious responses, such as reflexes.

The ANS can send messages that tell the body to prepare for danger in different ways. If someone experiences either the fight or flight responses, they will have:

• Rapid breathing and heart rate: This allows the body to send more oxygenated blood to the muscles and brain, in case someone needs to take physical action to escape danger. This also causes an increase in blood pressure. .
• Flushed or pale skin: As the body redirects blood to key areas, a person may develop a paler face than usual, or it may alternate between pale and flushed.
• Tense muscles: As the muscles prepare to move, they can become tense, which may cause shaking or trembling. Muscle tension can also create a constricted feeling in the throat, and result in a person’s voice becoming higher pitched.
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• Dilated pupils: The pupils dilate to allow more light into the eyes, which allows someone to see better and observe their surroundings.
• Dry mouth: Constriction of the blood vessels around the mouth mean that the salivary glands temporarily stop producing saliva, causing a dry mouth.

A person in fight or flight may feel extremely alert, agitated, confrontational, or like they need to leave a room or location. A severe fight or flight response can become a panic attack too!

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What happens during ‘freeze’?

Freeze is an “attentive immobility.” While the person who is “frozen” is extremely alert, they are also unable to move or take action against the danger. Freezing causes: physical immobility, a drop in heart rate, rather than an increase, muscle tension

Why do some people freeze?

While freezing might seem like a counterintuitive way to respond to danger, it serves a purpose, just as fight or flight does. Freezing may:

• Prepare for action: A 2017 review shows that freezing may function as a time for the brain to decide how to respond to the threat. In experiments where participants had more time to prepare to take action, a period of freezing was more common.
• Scientists have observed that freezing enables animals to continue scanning the environment in order to decide what to do next.
• Increase visual perception: A 2015 study argues that freezing is associated with a better perception of one’s surroundings. The researchers tested people’s reactions to shock and how this affected their ability to understand visual information. Those who froze had a better understanding of what they saw in low-quality or poorly defined images, and processed threat-relevant information faster.
• Help someone hide: In some situations, being very still may keep a person safe from danger, or cause an attacker to lose interest. In animals, tonic immobility can be a last resort when fighting or fleeing have not worked, as many animals will not eat something that is dead.
• Reduce the impact of the event: 

 Research suggests that the freeze response may be related to dissociation.

Dissociation is something that can occur when a person has a traumatic experience. It makes severely distressing events feel less real, causing a person to feel numb or detached. This may explain why the freeze response is more common in people with previous experiences of trauma.