Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn: How We Respond to Threats

The stress response occurs when the demands of the environment are greater than our perceived ability to cope with them.

The stress level depends on the individual’s perception of the event and their ability to cope with the event.

E.g., taking an exam might not be perceived as a stressor by someone who has had good results on their test (they feel they can cope) but might be seen as a stressor by another individual who has failed all their tests (they feel they can’t cope this leads to a stress response).

Fight Response

When you feel in danger and believe you can overpower the threat, you are in fight mode.

Your brain sends signals throughout your body to rapidly prepare for the physical demands of fighting.

When someone feels threatened and believes they can overpower the danger, they might react with anger, aggression, or defiance.

The Physiological (Bodily) Stress Response

• Eyes: the pupils dilate. Allowing your eyes to absorb more light improves your eyesight so that more attention can be dedicated to danger. You might notice a “tunnel vision” or realize that your vision becomes “sharper.”
• Ears: the same concept for the eyes applies to the ears. You will notice that your ears essentially “perk up,” and your hearing can become “sharper.”
• Heart: heart rate increases, and there is a dilation of coronary blood vessels. A faster heart can feed more blood, oxygen, and energy into the body, enhancing your power to run away or fight.
• Lungs: breathing quickens and becomes shallower. Again, this quicker breathing takes in more oxygen for your muscles.
• Skin: you become pale, and your face gets flushed. Blood vessels in the skin contract, directing more blood where it is needed – the muscles, brain, legs, and arms. Your hands and feet get cold because of this too.
• Muscles: your muscles tense up all over the body, becoming primed for action. Because of this, your muscles might shake or tremble, particularly if you are not moving.
• Stomach: you may get nausea or “butterflies” – blood is diverted away from the digestive system, which can cause these feelings.
• Mind: thoughts begin to race. This quicker thinking can help you evaluate your environment and make rapid decisions if necessary. Hence, it can be challenging to concentrate on anything other than the danger you perceive. You may also feel dizzy or lightheaded if one does not actually run or fight under the trigger.
• Pain: your perception of pain temporarily reduces while under the fight or flight or freeze or fawn trigger.

Emotional and Cognitive Signs

• Feeling angry is common here — it’s like your body gearing up to push back or defend yourself. Anger gives you energy to face obstacles or protect your boundaries.

• You might also feel fear or anxiety, which often feels very similar to excitement — like your heart pounding or sweaty palms — because your body is getting ready for action.

• Irritability is another usual sign — little things might get under your skin more easily.

• Your attention can get really focused on the threat, sometimes so much that it’s hard to think about anything else.

• Sometimes, you might feel like you’re not really in control of yourself, especially if trauma has triggered this response.

• Because your body is on high alert, you might find it hard to sleep at night.

• In moments of strong fear or anger, the part of your brain that normally helps you think things through (the prefrontal cortex) can get overridden by automatic emotional responses, making it tough to stay calm and logical.

Behaviors That Show You’re in Fight Mode

• You might feel more aggressive or ready to fight—this can show up as arguments, yelling, or even physical actions.

• Yelling or screaming can feel like a release when anger is intense.

• You might notice yourself or others taking on defensive body language — like raising hands, lowering the chin, or curling the shoulders forward — even when there’s no actual threat.

• Sometimes you act on impulse without thinking, like shouting or reacting quickly, because your brain’s control center isn’t fully engaged.

• You might feel restless or have a strong urge to move around — almost like your body needs to do something to release the tension.

Flight Response

Flight means escaping or avoiding the threat.

When the situation feels too dangerous to confront, the instinct is to get away as quickly as possible.

For example, if you’re at a loud party and start feeling overwhelmed, you might leave early to find a quiet place.

The physical signs of fight and flight responses – like a racing heart, rapid breathing, and muscle tension- are very similar because both prepare your body to respond quickly to danger.

Emotional and Mental Signs of the Flight Response

When you’re in flight mode, your brain narrows its focus, and feelings tied to danger – like fear and anxiety. take center stage.

Interestingly, those anxious sensations, like a racing heart or sweaty palms, can feel a lot like excitement.

Your nervous system goes into hypervigilance, which means you’re on high alert, easily startled, and constantly scanning for threats.

If you’ve experienced attachment anxiety, you might notice you pick up on danger signals more quickly and intensely than others.

Feeling irritable is pretty common too. Your attention gets really focused on whatever feels threatening, sometimes making it hard to see the bigger picture or think clearly.

This intense focus can lead to worries spiraling out of control, especially when you find uncertainty hard to handle.

When fear ramps up, the part of your brain that usually helps you think things through – the prefrontal cortex – can temporarily shut down.

That means your automatic, emotional responses take over, and it can feel like you’re losing control or can’t think straight.

Behavioral Signs of the Flight Response

The most obvious behavior is the urge to run away or escape the danger.

You might find yourself avoiding certain places, situations, or even thoughts that trigger those anxious feelings.

Sometimes this avoidance is obvious, like steering clear of crowds, and other times it’s more subtle, like emotionally “checking out” or distracting yourself.

You might hesitate or pull back when faced with a threat, feeling the strong need to retreat.

Physiologically, your body gets ready for quick movement—blood rushes to your legs so you can run if you need to.

Freeze Response

Freeze happens when neither fighting nor fleeing feels possible.

The body shuts down or becomes immobile, often to avoid detection or minimize harm.

This is often described as dissociation. It can manifest as as feeling zoned out, unable to focus, hollow, empty, or lost.

For example, if you’re startled by a sudden loud noise and feel stuck in place, unable to move or respond immediately.

What Happens to Your Body When You Freeze

When your body goes into freeze mode, it’s like hitting pause to conserve energy — almost like going into a temporary shutdown to survive.

You might become very still or rigid, like a “deer in the headlights,” and your movements can feel jerky or slow.

Your heart rate can actually slow down, and your metabolism takes a break to save energy.

Your gut might react too, becoming more sensitive or inflamed, and your body can go into an inflammatory state, signaling it’s under stress.

At the same time, the part of your brain that usually helps you think clearly (the prefrontal cortex) takes a backseat, letting more basic survival instincts take over.

How You Might Feel Emotionally and Mentally

Freeze can leave you feeling overwhelmed or crushed, like the situation is just too much to handle.

You might feel numb or flat, like you’re on autopilot, disconnected from what’s happening around you. Sometimes, people mentally check out or dissociate -like their mind goes somewhere else.

You might lose your usual sense of purpose or struggle to make decisions.

Negative thoughts can creep in, and procrastination or feeling stuck is common.

Many people feel ashamed of freezing, not realizing it’s actually a natural way the body tries to protect you.

What Freeze Looks Like in Behavior

You might find yourself cowering or trying to hide, curling up protectively, slouching, or just moving very little.

Simple tasks can suddenly feel really hard – like grabbing something from the fridge.

You might just “go through the motions” without really engaging.

Sometimes, you might avoid places or situations that trigger these feelings, or you might emotionally numb yourself to cope.

Because of feeling overwhelmed and low on energy, some people even lash out or push others away as a way to protect themselves.

the freeze may deepen into what’s sometimes called “fright, flop or collapse

The freeze response can sometimes deepen into what’s known as “fright, flop, or collapse.”

This is an even more intense form of freeze where the body goes completely limp or shuts down, almost like a protective shutdown.

Instead of just being still or tense, the person might feel physically unable to move or respond, almost like fainting or going into a state of numbness.

This reaction is thought to be an extreme survival mechanism- by becoming motionless and unresponsive, the body may reduce pain or avoid attracting further harm during a situation where fighting or fleeing isn’t possible.

While it can help in the moment, afterward people may feel disconnected, confused, or experience difficulty recalling the event clearly. 

It’s important to understand this isn’t a choice or weakness but a natural, automatic defense reaction to overwhelming threat or trauma.

Fawn Response

Fawn involves trying to please or appease the threat to avoid conflict or harm.

It’s common in situations where the person feels powerless and tries to keep the peace by complying.

For example, if a boss is angry, you might agree with everything they say – even if you disagree – to avoid further conflict.

Essentially, the fawn response is about creating safety through submission and appeasement, often at the expense of one’s authentic self, to prevent confrontation or abandonment.

Why Do We Fawn?

The fawn response is an adaptive survival strategy, identified in the polyvagal theory alongside fight, flight, and freeze.

It’s an automatic self-protection mechanism where someone tries to appease or submit to a perceived threat in order to stay safe or maintain connection.

This response is often learned early in life, especially when fighting or fleeing weren’t safe options. It’s particularly common in people who grew up in abusive or harmful environments.

For example, an abused child with narcissistic parents might realize that agreeing and being helpful is their only way to survive.

Over time, this pattern can look like constantly putting others’ needs before your own—even when those people treat you poorly. You might find yourself more focused on making others happy than taking care of yourself.

Basically, fawning helps avoid conflict and keeps important relationships intact – even if those relationships aren’t healthy.

Behavioral Signs

• People-pleasing: Individuals may exhibit a strong tendency to please others, constantly doing things for them, or agreeing with others even if it goes against their own desires.
• Submissiveness: There is a stepping back and submitting oneself, often to avoid conflict or harm, such as not wanting to be hit or screamed at. This can lead to a lack of expression of one’s unique personality or true self.
• Lack of Boundaries: Difficulty in setting boundaries, saying “no,” or expressing one’s own wants and needs, even if it leads to being in undesirable situations (e.g., being in a restaurant one dislikes but saying “it’s cool guys, no problem”).
• Sacrificing Self for Connection: Children (and by extension, adults) may unconsciously undermine their own needs for personal freedom and sovereignty to stay connected. This can even manifest as unconsciously getting sick to gain attention and maintain a connection.
• Changing Personality: Individuals may change their personality depending on who they are with because they want to be liked, leading to a feeling of being a “sycophant” or being taken advantage of.

Why These Responses Exist

The fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses are natural adaptive behaviors that help keep us safe by preparing our bodies to react quickly to threats.

These threats can be real, like physical danger, or imagined, such as worrying about something that might happen.

These automatic reactions come from evolutionary biology and work to maintain homeostasis, or balance, in the body during stressful situations.

Back in prehistoric times, our ancestors faced real physical dangers—like saber-toothed tigers—and their survival depended on reacting instantly.

Today, our “tigers” are more likely to be psychological stressors, like job interviews or deadlines, but the body reacts in the same way.

The response is part of your sympathetic nervous system, and it happens without conscious thought; it’s been hardwired into us through evolution to help us survive.

When triggered, the body releases stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which boost energy and focus, helping us confront danger, escape, or protect ourselves effectively.

The term fight-or-flight was first coined by American physiologist Walter Cannon in the early 1900s.

He observed that animals, when threatened, released hormones like adrenaline that prepared them to act fast, calling it the acute stress response, a built-in survival system designed to protect us in life-threatening situations.

The fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response has been with us since the beginning of time and still plays a crucial role in coping with stress and threats in our environment.

When These Responses Become Problematic

Phobias are great examples of this concept and how the fight or flight response might be falsely activated.

A person who is afraid of the ocean might experience acute stress if they go on a family cruise or visit the aquarium.

Even though typically these things are enjoyable to most of us, the person in question will experience their body going into alarm mode, with their heartbeat and respiration rate rising.

If the response is severe, it can lead to a dangerous panic attack.

This kind of response is not nearly as adaptive in the modern world; in fact, we suffer negative health consequences when faced constantly with psychological threats that we can neither fight nor flee.

How are these trauma responses connected to childhood experiences?

Early childhood experiences, especially those involving trauma or chronic stress, play a powerful role in shaping how we respond to threats as adults.

When a child grows up in an environment where safety feels uncertain – such as in cases of neglect, abuse, or household dysfunction – the brain’s survival systems become highly sensitized.

This means the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses can become the brain’s default way of coping, even long after the original danger has passed.

For example, a child who experiences unpredictable or harmful caregivers might develop a strong fawn response, learning to please others as a way to stay safe.

Trauma-informed psychology recognizes that these responses are not signs of weakness or failure but rather adaptive survival strategies formed in early life.

Understanding this connection helps adults develop compassion for themselves and opens the door to healing through therapies that address childhood trauma and its lasting impact.

When to Seek Help

The fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses are natural, adaptive survival mechanisms.

However, there are clear indicators that these responses have become maladaptive and warrant seeking help when they significantly impact your well-being or daily functioning.

It’s important to remember that seeking help is a sign of strength, not weakness, and that your body’s responses are often protective, even when they feel overwhelming.

You should seek help if you experience:

• Feeling overwhelmed: You’re struggling to manage daily life, and your emotions are affecting your relationships or stopping you from reaching your goals.

• Long-lasting impact: Tough feelings or reactions stick around long after the stressful event and start to take over your life.

• Intense emotions: You often experience panic, dread, or terror so strong it’s hard to cope or think clearly.

• Emotional numbness: You feel disconnected or like you’re just going through the motions, unable to feel joy, love, or excitement. Your mind might even drift away from reality.

• Unhealthy coping: You rely on food, alcohol, or risky behaviors to get through tough times, which may provide short-term relief but keep you stuck.

• Thoughts of self-harm: Having thoughts about hurting yourself or not wanting to be here anymore is a serious warning sign that needs immediate attention.

Fight or Flight Response

• Sensitized System: Your fight or flight response gets overly sensitive, making you overreact with anger or agitation to small things, or just feel constantly on edge and restless.

• Overwhelm and Crashing: Staying hyper-alert for too long can wear you out, leading to extreme fatigue or even slipping into freeze mode because your body can’t keep up that high-energy state.

• Chronic Worry and Anxiety: Worry that’s more than usual and gets in the way of your daily life—like spending all day stuck in anxious thoughts or struggling with obsessive habits.

Freeze Response

• Feeling Crushed or Flat: Experiencing a feeling of being crushed, flat, or overwhelmed, where things feel “too big” and you have “no idea what to do”.
• Disconnection and Inability to Think Clearly: Feeling zoned out, unable to focus, hollow, empty, lost, untethered, or finding it difficult to think clearly and make decisions.
• Chronic Freeze: If you find yourself in a low-energy, collapsed state that lasts for prolonged periods (e.g., days).
• Trauma Response: Freezing is often an adaptive survival response to inescapable threats, such as during a rape or car accident where one is stuck. However, if you feel shame about freezing after such an event, it’s important to understand it was a normal, adaptive response and to seek help to process it.
• Stonewalling: In relationships, shutting down and being unresponsive is considered a form of freeze, triggered by fear, which hinders connection and communication.

Fawn Response

• People-Pleasing and Undermining Your Needs: The fawn response means changing who you are to keep the peace or avoid negative reactions, even if it means ignoring your own needs and freedom. This often comes from a deep need to stay connected and can lead to building a personality that’s all about fitting in, which might make you feel stuck or disconnected from your true self.

• Lack of Authenticity: If you often can’t be your real self because you’re scared of conflict or rejection, it might mean the fawn response is taking over too much of your life.

How to Cope

There is no doubt that the fight or flight response has a distinct purpose and function, but everyday situations like work, bills, kids, finances, and health, can be some of the largest, non-threatening stressors.

Stress management is key to your overall health.

It is essential to think big picture when you begin to feel yourself starting to get overwhelmed by something that you know is not a genuine threat or danger.

Learning to slow down, be aware of yourself and your surroundings, and conceptualize what is truly happening to help you regain control is vital.

Thoroughly understanding your body’s natural fight or flight or freeze or fawn response is a way to help cope with these kinds of situations.

Building emotional intelligence and self-awareness helps you recognize your stress patterns early.

How do I know which trauma response I default to?

Discovering your default trauma response – whether fight, flight, freeze, or fawn – starts with paying close attention to how your body and mind react when you feel stressed or threatened.

• If you tend to get angry, confrontational, or feel the urge to push back against stress, you might default to fight.

• If your instinct is to avoid, escape, or withdraw from stressful situations, that points toward flight.

• If you find yourself feeling stuck, numb, or “shutting down” when overwhelmed, your response may be freeze.

• If you often try to please others, avoid conflict by accommodating, or seek approval even at your own expense, you might be using fawn.

Reflect on past situations where you felt threatened or highly stressed and notice your automatic reactions.

Journaling these experiences or discussing them with a therapist can help increase your self-awareness.

Tools from mindfulness and emotional intelligence can also guide you in recognizing these patterns early, so you can better understand and manage your responses.

This allows you to pause, slow down, and better understand what’s really happening, rather than reacting automatically.

Emotional Regulation Skills That Can Help

• Distress Tolerance: This means learning ways to get through tough, overwhelming moments without turning to things that might hurt you, like alcohol or drugs. It can include simple self-soothing tricks using your five senses – like listening to your favorite music, smelling a comforting scent, sipping a warm drink, or holding something soft and cozy – to help you stay grounded right now.

• Opposite Action: Sometimes, your first reaction might be to shut down, avoid people, or try too hard to please others. Opposite action means noticing those urges and choosing to do the opposite instead – doing something healthier. Mindfulness can help you catch the urge before you act on it, giving you space to choose what’s best.

• Labeling Emotions: Getting better at recognizing and naming exactly what you’re feeling can make a big difference. When you know if you’re angry, sad, frustrated, or scared, it’s easier to handle those emotions in a healthy way.

• Processing and Expressing Emotions: Instead of pushing feelings away or bottling them up, it’s helpful to learn how to sit with tough emotions and let yourself experience them safely. Writing about your feelings or talking them out can be great tools to make sense of what’s going on inside.

Distancing Tools to Manage Intrusive Thoughts

Ethan Kross, author of Shift: How to Manage Your Emotions so They Don’t Manage You, suggests a simple but powerful trick to handle those nonstop, overwhelming thoughts:

Change the way you talk to yourself.

Instead of saying, “I’m stressed,” try using your own name or saying “you” — like, “Ethan, how are you going to handle this?”

This small change makes it feel like you’re giving advice to someone else, helping you step back and see the situation more clearly.

Another helpful tool Kross recommends is mental time travel.

Imagine yourself in the future, looking back at this moment with more perspective.

Both of these techniques help create distance from your thoughts so they don’t control you.

That said, there’s no one-size-fits-all fix.

Mental time travel might not work well if you’re in a toxic situation that isn’t going to improve anytime soon.

It’s important to find the strategies that fit your unique experience and environment.

How Creating a New Story Can Help You Handle Fear

Creating a new narrative or purpose is a powerful way to negotiate the meaning of fear, rather than simply reacting to its raw physical sensations.

While the physical experience of fear is a generic threat response that cannot be directly negotiated, its meaning can be.

Here’s how this process works:

1. The Brain as a Storyteller:

Your nervous system continuously sends energy and information to your brain.

The brain’s role is to take this information and create a story to make sense of what it’s receiving from the body.

These stories, or interpretive frameworks, are malleable.

For example, if you’re experiencing a rapid heartbeat, your brain might interpret it as anxiety, but with a new narrative, you can reinterpret it as excitement or determination.

2. Attaching Meaning and Purpose:

The prefrontal cortex, a part of your brain, has an incredible capacity to create and attach meaning and purpose to experiences that might otherwise just be reflexive physiological responses.

By consciously providing a new story or narrative, you can override internal reflexes, including the threat response.

This involves deliberately telling yourself, “I want to do this,” “I should do this,” or “I’m going to do this anyway,” even if the initial feeling is fear.

3. Reinterpreting Physical Sensations:

Emotions like anxiety often manifest physiologically, such as a pounding heart or sweaty palms.

Instead of automatically interpreting these as signs of danger, you can learn that the same physiological state can have different causes and solutions.

For instance, the physical sensations of anxiety are very similar to those of excitement, allowing for a reframe where you acknowledge the sensation but attach a more positive meaning to it, like “this is a great life opportunity”.

When you create an emotion, you are giving meaning to those affective feelings, and you have more control over this than you might think.

4. Replacing Old Associations:

To effectively address fear and trauma, it’s not enough to just diminish the old fearful experience (extinction); you also need to actively replace it with a new positive association or narrative.

This “relearning” involves tacking a sense of reward onto what was previously a traumatic or fearful event through narrative and cognition.

This transforms a “terrible, upsetting story” into a “terrible, boring story,” and eventually, a narrative that includes resilience or growth.

5. Shifting Your Relationship with Emotion:

Ultimately, this process is about changing your relationship with emotions like fear and anxiety.

Instead of fighting or suppressing these feelings, which can actually amplify them, you can choose to approach them with curiosity and openness, understanding they are part of the human experience and provide information.

By naming or labeling your emotions with more specificity, you gain greater understanding and a sense of control over them, allowing the feelings to pass more quickly or be processed more effectively.

This re-narration allows you to take responsibility for how you interpret the world moving forward, fostering a sense of agency over your emotional responses.

Would you like to delve deeper into specific techniques, such as cognitive reappraisal or exposure therapy, that help facilitate this process of creating new narratives around fear?

What’s the Physiological Sigh, and Why Should You Care?

The physiological sigh is a simple breathing trick that can quickly help you feel calmer and less stressed.

It’s not some fancy life hack — it’s actually built into your body’s wiring and something your brain naturally does, even if you don’t notice.

Here’s how it works: you take two quick breaths in through your nose, back-to-back, filling your lungs as much as possible.

Then, you slowly breathe out through your mouth, emptying your lungs completely.

That second quick inhale might even make your shoulders lift a little – it’s all part of the process.

Why do this? There are a few cool reasons:

1. Better Oxygen Balance: When we breathe too fast or shallowly (which happens when we’re stressed), we can lose too much carbon dioxide, making us feel jittery or anxious. The physiological sigh helps fix that by letting you release the right amount of carbon dioxide on the long exhale.

2. Refreshing Your Lungs: Those two quick inhales help “pop open” tiny air sacs in your lungs that sometimes collapse a bit. This means your lungs work better and you get more oxygen.

3. Calming Your Nervous System: This breathing pattern is the fastest known way to switch your body from “fight or flight” mode into a calm, relaxed state. It helps balance the parts of your nervous system that ramp you up and the parts that calm you down.

4. Powerful Muscle and Nerve Connection: By controlling your diaphragm (the big muscle under your lungs) through this breath, you’re actually sending signals to your brain that help slow things down—especially your heart rate.

5. Slowing Your Heart Rate: Breathing out slowly signals your heart to slow down, making you feel more relaxed. This up-and-down heart rate pattern is actually a sign of good health and emotional resilience.

6. Built Into Your Brain: Your brain has special circuits that control this breathing naturally. When you do it consciously, you’re tapping into a deep, automatic system that helps manage your alertness and stress.

Managing the Freeze Response

The freeze response, also called dorsal vagal shutdown, is your body’s way of protecting you when things feel way too overwhelming to fight or flee.

Instead of reacting with action, your system basically presses pause – it conserves energy by slowing everything down, sometimes to the point where you feel numb, disconnected, or even completely shut down.

This might look like feeling “crushed,” stuck, or like you’re curling up to protect yourself.

Why Does Freeze Happen?

When you face a serious threat or extreme stress, your body goes into overdrive.

Your sympathetic nervous system kicks in, speeding up your heart rate, metabolism, and blood sugar to prepare you to fight or run.

This takes a ton of energy.

If your body isn’t able to keep up – maybe because you’re exhausted, your cells aren’t healthy, or you’re just emotionally overwhelmed – it switches gears and goes into freeze mode to save energy.

Moving Out of Freeze Is Not a Straight Line

1. High Energy Use During Trauma: When you’re really stressed or scared, your body goes into overdrive – heart races, blood sugar spikes, and your metabolism kicks into high gear to help you fight or run.

2. Switching to Freeze to Save Energy: But if your body can’t keep up that high energy for long – maybe due to poor health, exhaustion, or lack of resources – it switches into freeze mode. Everything slows down, you might feel numb, foggy, or crushed, and you might curl up or withdraw to protect yourself.

3. Coming Out of Freeze Needs Energy: To come out of this freeze, your body has to first jump back into that high-energy “fight or flight” mode again. This is often surprising because you might expect to just feel calm right away, but your system needs this burst of energy to reboot.

4. Releasing That Energy: When you’re back in that alert state, you might shake, cry, or even yell- these movements help release the trapped energy from freeze and move you toward calm.

5. Watch Out for Getting Stuck: Without the right support or energy to handle this process, some people can get stuck in freeze, feeling numb or “flat” for long periods. Sometimes medications can even make this worse.

Knowing how this works is key in healing from trauma. It shows why treatment often focuses not just on your thoughts, but on helping your body move through these stages.

How Can You Help Your Body and Mind?

As Bessel van der Kolk, MD, explains, psychotherapy can’t reach someone in a freeze state because their brain is shut down until that frozen state lifts.

That’s why treating freeze often requires somatic, body-focused approaches rather than just talking.

1. Movement and Physical Activation

• Discharging Energy: Moving your body – whether it’s shaking, dancing, or stretching – helps release the tension stored in your muscles and nervous system.

• Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE): These exercises encourage gentle, natural shaking to help your body let go of trauma.

• Somatic Experiencing (SE): Developed by Peter Levine, SE guides you to safely experience and complete the body’s natural survival responses that got stuck.

• Yoga and Breathwork: Techniques like Sudarshan Kriya or Breath of Fire help balance your nervous system by combining movement and breath, making it easier to calm down after stress.

• Cold Exposure: Taking cold showers or ice baths triggers your sympathetic nervous system and floods your body with mood-boosting chemicals, helping you build resilience and stay alert.

• Aerobic Exercise: Activities like walking, running, or dancing get your heart pumping, help release stress, and improve brain health by encouraging growth of new brain cells.

2. Emotional Processing and Regulation

• Titration: In therapy, this means gradually facing difficult emotions bit by bit so you don’t get overwhelmed, building your capacity to handle tough feelings.

• Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT): Helps you safely access and process painful emotions, while teaching self-soothing through a supportive relationship with your therapist.

• Expressive Writing or Talking: Putting feelings into words can help you understand and move through stuck emotions like anger, sadness, or fear.

• Mindfulness: Being aware of your feelings as they happen helps calm your nervous system before emotions become overwhelming.

• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): Encourages accepting uncomfortable feelings and continuing to live according to your values, rather than getting stuck trying to avoid feelings.

3. Taking Care of Your Physical Health

• Sleep and Nutrition: Getting good rest and eating well supports your body’s ability to regulate emotions and recover from stress.

• Reducing Inflammation: Chronic inflammation can worsen mental health; addressing it through diet, exercise, or medical care supports healing.

References

Cannon, W. B. (1915). Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear, and rage. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Kirby, Stephanie. “Fight Flight Freeze: How to Recognize It and What to Do …” Edited by Aaron Horn, Betterhelp, https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/trauma/fight-flight-freeze-how-to-recognize-it-and-what-to-do-when-it-happens/.

Kross, E. (2025). Shift: How to manage your emotions so they don’t manage you. Ebury Digital.

Schauer, M., & Elbert, T. (2010). Dissociation following traumatic stress. Journal of Psychology, 218, 109-127.

What Happens During Fight or Flight Response. (2019, December 09). Retrieved from https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-happens-to-your-body-during-the-fight-or-flight-response/