Fight, Flight & Freeze are your friends!

I’ve been teaching my in-studio Nervous System Regulation Course over the last couple of weeks. I have the most amazing group of people in it! 

I really love teaching Nervous System Regulation because I know how life changing it is.

As I was writing a recap on this week’s content I was mulling over the explosion of information that has been circulating globally about trauma (which is a form of nervous system dysregulation).

I love that it’s being spoken about so widely.

However, the fight, flight and freeze actions of our nervous system are often spoken about in a detrimental way - ie that these energies are the ‘bad guys’ that we need to watch out for. 

This is incorrect.

So here’s the thing. Fight, flight and freeze (F/F/F) energies are functional and adaptational. We need them. There is nothing wrong with them. At all.

In fact, you utilise them as part of your healthy response to life!

For example (just to name a few but this list is certainly not exhaustive):

You will elicit the energy of the flight response to go out dancing with your friends, to help you prepare for a presentation, to enable you to get out of the way of a driver on the road who is not paying attention, to help you run a race and to do a really dynamic vinyasa practice. The little girl in this photo is using the flight response to play in the waves.

You will elicit the energy of the fight response to enable you to set a boundary with someone, to change direction in your life, to leave a relationship, to support someone in need, to ensure that rights are equal for all beings. 

And you will elicit the energy of the freeze response when you are deep in meditation, when you are sick and need to rest, when you are overworked and when you need to be still, when your blood pressure drops so your body needs to conserve energy and when you don’t have access to food for a long period of time.

They only become problematic when our nervous system does not know how to return to its healthy baseline energy - where we are relaxed yet present - once the need for the F/F/F energy has resolved itself. 

When we have dysregulation, our nervous system has become stuck in certain patterns of these energies and thus our baseline shifts.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard the story about the frog in a pot of water? That if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water it will jump out. However, if you place a frog in a pot of cold water on the cooktop and slowly increase the heat until it’s boiling the frog will not realise the heat is increasing and will not jump out. 

This is what can happen with nervous system dysregulation.

If we have a huge trauma in our lives, usually we can differentiate (quite clearly) between the before and after and we will probably seek support to bring us back to our baseline.

But if we have experienced many stressors from which we did not return to our healthy baseline then suddenly we can find ourselves operating at a level that is unhealthy. 

How do you know if you’re at that level? 

Do you have a clenched jaw? Sore neck? Frequent illnesses? Ongoing irritation? Insomnia and or sleep disturbances? Hormonal difficulties? Relationship issues? General unhappiness? Anxiety? Depression? Gut problems? 

Do you feel like you are stuck in life? That nothing inspires you? That you can’t find joy? That you don’t want to connect with friends? 

Do you find yourself exploding into anger? Shutting yourself away from the world? Needing excessive amounts of exercise to keep you on track?

These are some of the ways nervous system dysregulation will manifest in our lives.

I know it can be confronting.

But you can heal this. I promise. 

It’s about re-finding your healthy baseline and alchemising the energies that are stuck.

And you can learn how to do this yourself so you are empowered to balance your nervous system for the rest of you life. You don’t need to spend hours in therapy to learn this.

Don’t stay stuck in dysregulation. Your life is too precious.