hey there everyone and welcome to this very short video
on the f's of the stress response i'm your host dr donnelly snipes
i had a question from one of the subscribers recently about the f's of the stress response
and which video i covered that in and quite honestly i couldn't remember so i figured
i'd do this short little video just to hit the highlights so let's talk really briefly about what
are the f's of the stress response when we experience a threat it triggers our
stress response our fight or flea response our hpa axis whatever you want to call it
and we have to respond our body perceives a threat out there so we either fight flee fawn freeze or
forget about it so let's look at the functional nature of each of these really quick
fight well that is the one a lot of us think about when we think
the stress response we think get angry well not everybody's comfortable with anger but fighting
can be helpful and it doesn't necessarily mean physical fighting it can also mean getting that
motivation and that determination to oh uh-huh you think that's going to happen no i am going to make
sure that i succeed that i prove you wrong that i do whatever that's that fight response that is the
nobody is going to get the better of me sort of response flee is the opposite now again remember
the stress response is fight or fleet anger or anxiety sometimes when we experience a
threat we know that it is not something that we can overcome therefore it's in our own best
interest to flee the situation to just get out of there because we're not going to be able to
win we're not going to be able to be victorious or be safe in that particular situation so sometimes
we flee and again this may not be exactly running away sometimes it is other times it may be
for example breaking up or quitting a job or leaving a situation that you know you just can't
succeed in and by doing that you're protecting yourself
you are protecting what is important to you in your life now number three is fun and fawning is
when somebody does whatever they think the other person wants them to do in order to appease them
and this is something that may happen when people don't feel like well if i fight
i'm going to lose and i can't flee for some reason and a lot of times you may see this in
um abusive relationships you may see this in children who are in dysfunctional households
you may even see this sometimes in the workplace the person who is fawning
does not feel that they can fight or escape so they're just going to try to make the threat
less threatening make the threat happy appease them so to speak so fawning is
a learned response but it also makes sense and we can see this in nature when it happens
we can see this in humans when it happens now the fourth one is freeze and this is the one
that some people think is sort of counterintuitive but if you watch the video on the vagus nerve
response and the one that's coming out on the orienting response it'll make sense
the freeze response is actually uh the what we could term the vasovagal response
when we notice something is different when we perceive a threat our initial reaction
may be to freeze now it's harder to see it in humans although when you once you start looking
for it it becomes very obvious but i want you to think about a rabbit or heaven forbid a deer
when they are threatened when they get scared what do they do they freeze you know this
deer is in the middle of the road and it's just frozen looking at your headlights
there's a reason why there's a phrase like a deer in headlights they've frozen their uh vagus nerve
i'm assuming is the same in animals as it is in humans has triggered this response of okay freeze
that way the threat can't see you and you can figure out what to do you can take in
the information and then figure out what to do unfortunately sometimes we get stuck in freeze
when we're taking in the information and we don't have a response we're like i don't know what to do
sometimes we may stay frozen in that freeze aspect and this can be the one of the most traumatic
f's for people who've experienced victimization for example because they may remember being frozen
and not being able to do something so freezing is innate and you can see how
one might get stuck in the freeze response when the body just doesn't have any options and it's
trying to scramble through those memory banks and then the last one obviously is not forget about it
but that's the one i can use with proper language um when you have been stressed for too long
when you're at that point of burnout when you're at that point of emotional physical exhaustion
your body just says you know what forget about it unless it is something that is imminently going to
kill me i just can't care i just can't even respond oh there's somebody knocking at the door
i don't have the energy to get off the sofa oh this happened well normally i might get upset
but you know what right now i just i ain't got it in me i don't have the energy
the forget about it response is somewhat um
understandable when you look at it from the perspective of it's your body saying i am going
to conserve the energy for only those things that are an imminent threat to my health and
safety because i'm so far out of energy i'm so far burned out that if i keep going i'm gonna
disappear i'm gonna not not exist and i know that's an exaggeration but i think a lot of us
have been in that situation when we've gotten to the point of burnout and we just we can't
care things that normally bother us our body just says you know what i don't have the energy
one of the things that we talk about in managing stress
is using our executive control network using our higher order thinking before we get to that point
to start making that decision earlier and saying okay i'm feeling stressed right now
is this something that's worth my energy or can i just say forget about it so that is a very brief
summary of the f's of the stress response but i want you to recognize that every one of them
has a purpose has a function and is part of the ingrained survival mechanisms in our brain