How Anxiety Affects the Brain 9/30 How to Recognize and Turn off the Fight/Flight/Freeze Response
This may surprise some of you to hear, but when I teach in front of a large group I get nervous, My hands start sweating and they go ice cold. I sometimes get shaky in my voice, or I often get that like crazy, stinky, armpit, sweat And even though I enjoy presenting and teaching what’s happening in my brain is that it sees all these people in the audience as a threat, and it essentially turns off the thinking part of my brain, It pumps out a bunch of stress chemicals and it goes into this protective mode.
This is our body’s, physical reaction to anxiety, and it makes it hard to solve problems and control our behaviors In this video.
You’re going to take that anxious feeling you already know, and you’re going to, explore it.
You’re going to, learn more concretely how it works, why it messes with your brain in the way it does, and then you’re going to, learn a few ways to calm it down so that you can turn on your thinking brain to make better choices instead of getting stuck in your limbic system And if you don’t know what limbic system is don’t worry, I’ll be covering that here too.
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This class is cool because it teaches you three ways to work through emotions using art, and you can see other students’ projects and other people’s journals that they are sharing right in the project gallery.
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Your brain So have you ever done something dumb when you’ve been scared or stressed out or angry You’re, not alone, You know, have you ever wondered? Why do my hands get all cold and sweaty when I’m anxious, or Why does my stomach hurt when I’m worried Many people don’t know that the way their body responds to stress or anxiety is a reaction intended to keep us safe from danger, Your brain has many different emotional responses, but in this video, we’re mostly going to focus on the fear response, because that’s the one that often leads to the worst reactivity on our part, We freeze, we get anxious, we feel hopeless.
We get angry.
All of this stems from the fear reaction in your brain, So understanding how your brain works can help.
You learn how to stop reacting to emotions and stop doing stupid stuff that you regret later, and this can help you live a happier life where your actions line up with who you want to be Okay.
So let’s talk about how your brilliant brain works.
The brain is complex.
I am not a neuroscientist, but to simplify.
There are three main systems in your brain: the brain stem the limbic system and the cortex. Now the brain stem is also known as the reptile brain It’s.
Ancient Its job is to make sure you stay alive.
It runs your body’s, basic functions like reflexes, eating, breathing heart rate, and temperature.
All the information relayed from the body to the brain, and vice versa from the brain to the body has to go through the brain stem.
This part of your brain can keep you alive even when the other parts are damaged.
This is what a vegetative state is, and this part of your brain also takes precedence over the others.
So, when you pass out this part of your brain keeps your heart beating when you aren’t thinking or feeling anything.
Okay, the Second part is the limbic system.
This is also called the mammal brain, So this is part of the brain that manages emotions and relationships.
This is also part of the brain where anxiety originates. This part of the brain is more advanced than the reptilian brain Mammals, for example, have a lot greater emotional range than a snake, and this helps us survive.
So if you imagine a wolf, it can care for its young and it can work together with its herd, and all of this is thanks to the more advanced features of this emotional part of the brain.
So anger fear, love jealousy.
These are all rooted in the limbic part of the brain.
The mammal brain.
This part of the brain is also reactionary and emotional, and we’re going to learn why this is also brilliant right?
It’s helpful and purposeful, But if we don’t learn how to manage it, it can also lead to us being reactive and impulsive.
The limbic system houses, the amygdala, and the hypothalamus When the amygdala stimulates the hypothalamus.
This is what initiates the fight or flight response.
The hypothalamus sends signals to the adrenal glands to produce hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. The amygdala is also part of the brain that learns, what to be afraid of and what is safe.
The third part of our brain is the cortex right.
This houses, the human brain.
This is the part that we often think of as our brain.
It holds conscious thinking, reasoning, memory, planning for the future, organizing prioritizing complex problems, solving making choices, self-reflection, goals, direction, and values Right.
So, even though this part of the brain seems like it,’s, the most important it’s, actually the lowest in the hierarchy.
The two lower sections focus on survival and that usually takes precedence over thinking, Not always, but usually right For us to understand our emotions.
It’s important to understand how our brains respond to threats, So the deeper levels of the brain sense, survival, and threats and then trigger emotions, instincts, and subconscious drives that we aren’t even aware of When we feel threatened our brain shuts down the higher functions And activates a more primitive state, The greater threat that we’re facing the deeper the level is activated in our brain.
So a really big threat would be something like a massive drop in blood pressure.
In this situation, the brain turns off your thinking. It turns off the cortex you black out, which makes you get horizontal, which helps your blood pressure, go back up and tries to keep you alive right, But this isn’t the most common way that our brain turns off More commonly when we’re highly Emotional, we get stuck in the limbic system.
This is when the emotional brain takes over.
Now there’s a good reason for this right?
Over the last thousands of years, humankind’s biggest struggle was for survival in the face of physical dangers like wild animals.
Heights or attacks from warring groups When faced with a real and immediate danger like a tiger, our instincts take over and try to keep us safe.
The limbic system triggers our protective response and we have three main reactions: fight, run away, or freeze.
Now we don’t think about this or choose this.
It happens much faster than we can think Right?
So a couple of times when I’ve been out working in the desert.
I have stepped right next to or right over a rattlesnake, And when you hear that rattle go off, you’ve already jumped like a foot like, and then you start thinking Like it.’s crazy. How fast does that reaction happen your body is just flooded with adrenaline right, So it’s so much faster than you can think?
The fight-flight reaction turns down the thinking, part of our brain, and it sends power to the senses and the muscles.
This is kind of like in Star Trek when they lower the lights on the bridge to put all power on their weapons.
The cortex gets sidelined that’s, the thinking part, and the limbic system, the impulsive, reactionary instinctive part in our brain that focuses purely on survival.
This is the part that gets amped up Now.
Not thinking can be helpful if you’re facing a tiger because it’s not going to do you that much good.
If you spend five minutes trying to plan out your next move only to get eaten, However, not thinking isn’t much help.
If your danger is public speaking and your prefrontal cortex just shuts down or if you’re, asking out on a date and your brain turns off right Now, our body is doing other things to try to keep us safe right?
It sends extra blood to the big muscles, so you could punch that tiger or run away from it right.
It decreases blood flow to our hands and our feet and that’s why your hands get cold and sweaty. It turns on the adrenal glands to pump out adrenaline to give you that quick burst of energy.
This also makes you feel shaky.
It turns off the digestive system because it’s more important to use that blood flow to escape the tiger than it is to digest whatever you’ve eaten right.
So this part of the fight-flight-freeze response leads to people having a decreased appetite.
A tight feeling in their gut dry mouth and because their digestive system is getting shut off.
Sometimes people you know, get the runs or even wet themselves.
It tightens the muscles it heightens some senses.
So, for example, your vision gets more pinpointed, leading to what can feel like tunnel vision sometimes, and it also makes your breathing shorter and shallower.
Your heart rate also gets faster.
The fight-flight-freeze response also turns off the immune system for a short time and the body sweats to keep cool in case of physical exertion. So that’s where all that nasty pit sweat comes from When there’s, not a tiger.
But your brain perceives modern threats like work, evaluation, a deadline, debt, or just too many stimuli.
Then we can get triggered into this fight-flight freeze response too.
The fight response often looks like anger, shouting, big movements, and muscle clenching right.
It can feel like blame defensiveness.
Being critical, attacking others, physically or just verbally or even inside, our heads With modern stressors, the flight response can look like running away or escaping, but it can also look like avoiding perceived threats, procrastination, distracting, or just trying, not to think about a problem With the freeze Response there are typical reactions like numbing, shrinking or hiding.
This reaction can keep us safe when fighting or running would put us in danger, or when there’s no chance of escape.
The freeze response can be like feeling detached from your body or your emotions, or it can have that sensation of feeling heavy or frozen or leaden or like unable to move your muscles.
This can serve the function of making us harder to find, or it can make a predator less interested like this duck, and this dog The duck is pretending to be dead.
The dog gets bored the duck escapes right. The numbness can also make an attack hurt less Now within.
The freeze response is the fawn response.
So when we can’t fight off or escape an attacker, we sometimes have the instinct to comply to appease them to do anything to make them less angry or to soothe the situation.
Now I talk about the freeze, fawn response in more of my YouTube videos, but in one of them I tell the story of how, when, when a stranger groped me on the street, my immediate instinctual reaction was to say I’m, sorry like as if It was my fault right.
This was not logical.
This was not rational.
I didn’t plan it.
It was just my instinct kicking in to keep me safe and in that situation, it worked Right.
The whole situation was diffused and I was able to get away.
The brain prioritizes survival over thinking – And this is brilliant, right? It makes us quick to react.
For example, there have been times when my kids have like fallen off of things more times than I can count and in a split second, I’ve been like whoosh, shot my hand out and caught them.
I’m grateful for the limbic system and its role in keeping me and my kids safe.
This ability has helped humans survive for thousands of years, But the fight-flight-freeze response has some downsides.
This response is designed to work in short, bursts in response to immediate and physical threats.
It doesn’t work well when this response happens with you know, perceived threats instead of actual threats, So we might have a fight-flight freeze, response to a work meeting or an email or a request from a friend.
We could have a fight-flight-freeze response to a complaint from a spouse or any number of other things.
Now.
The stress response is also pretty safe in the short term, but when we don’t resolve that threat, our body can get trapped in this elevated state over a long period, and this can lead to exhaustion, muscle, tension, digestive problems, and frequent illnesses.
Also, long-term stress can contribute to anxiety and depressive disorders. Another problem with the fight-flight-freeze response is it doesn’t help us solve emotional, cognitive, or relational problems, So most of these problems require more complex thinking and problem.
Solving that just isn’t happening when your brain is in survival mode.
The good news is you don’t have to feel trapped by this response, So you can learn to soothe your emotional brain, so you can make better decisions with your thinking brain.
You can train yourself to turn off the fight-flight, freeze, respond and return to a sense of calm.
So here are the basic steps on how to do that.
The first one is to just become aware of your triggers.
So when you can predict that you might get emotional that gives you a bit of time to pause and slow down before you lose control.
A way to do this is to learn to notice your body’s signs too In the course I’ve got a survey where you can.
You know check yourself for signs of this fight-flight freeze response Now when you do start to go into it.
Just notice that you are you’re flooding. I mean that’s the John Gottman term.
For this, this response is right.
You pay attention to what’s happening inside of you, You just notice your thoughts notice, your sensations from an observer position and then, whenever possible, take a pause, pay attention to what’s happening inside of yourself notice, your thoughts, your sensations, and your emotions from An observer position and then, whenever possible, pause right, Pause the conversation or situation for a few seconds.
You could just say something like Hang on for a second hang on Right, Take a break, or whatever it is, and then you just try to calm down Remind yourself that you can solve these problems, whether now or in the future right And if tensions are too High right, then, for you to get you to know, get yourself together, you can ask for a break.
This is okay, Take a break when things are too intense, and then make sure to commit to coming back to the issue at a certain time Now.
This is important because if you don’t come back to resolve the problem, all those emotions stay trapped inside and then the next time a little problem comes up.
You feel this irrational reaction to it Now, while you’re taking a break while you’re pausing, instead of reacting to your fight-flight-freeze response, take some time to self-soothe so to self-regulate right, You can do something physically calming like a Grounding exercise deep, breathing or going for a walk.
All of these things can help you process those chemicals that were released And then after you’ve calmed down after you’ve gotten your head about.
You come back to the problem from a calmer perspective.
Now sometimes we need help to do this right. We sometimes need help to see things from a fresh perspective, So you may want to work through the situation with a friend or a counselor.
So, in summary, when your deep brain perceives a threat, it turns off your ability to think, and it goes into this protective reactive mode called the fight-flight.
Freeze response, This physical reaction that our body has is a huge part of anxiety and it can make it hard to solve problems and control our behaviors.
So when you can learn to identify the fight-flight-freeze response, you can learn techniques to calm yourself down, get thinking again, and make better choices In the next sections of this course.
You’re, going to learn how to train your mind and body, to respond differently to threats, to resolve anxiety, and teach the body to return to calm quickly, so that you can think clearly and solve problems.
These skills include a grounding in how to regulate your nervous system, coping skills, breathing skills, mindfulness, and relaxation skills.
Thank you for being here and take care.
This video is one skill from my 30-skill course How To Process Your Emotions, where I teach 30 of the most essential skills for resolving depression, and anxiety and improving mental health.
Emotion, the processing is an essential skill for working through intense emotions, but most people have never been taught how to do it.
I’m putting every single main video lesson on youtube for the world to access for free You watching these videos, sharing them contributing to my Patreon and my sponsors make this possible If you would like to access the entire course in one place, ad-free with Its workbook exercises downloads extra videos, live Q, A’s, additional short readings and links to extended resources. The link to buy the course is in the description below.
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