Understanding the Stress Response Cycle
Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn Explained by a Florida Therapist
You know what stress is and that it’s bad for you and that life is full of stressful situations.
But what about stress responses?
Because when stress happens in your life, it hits your nervous system like a freight train and pushes your body to react like it’s keeping you safe from an assumed mountain lion on your path in the forest.
In today’s world, you’re not likely to have that particular lion-specific situation in your everyday life.
Yet, the body and brain still reacts the same.
When stress hits, you may find yourself:
Hitting your head against the wall
Needing to exercise with a walk, a run, or a bike ride
Doom-scrolling for hours even though you don’t really want to
People pleasing or overexplaining a situation until no doubt remains
Each of these shows a different stress response in action. And this article will go over what that means for you and how you can work through a full stress response cycle to make the next stressor a little less overwhelming.
Key Takeaways
The stress response cycle explains how your mind and body react to stress, process a perceived threat, and eventually return to a sense of safety.
When people don’t complete the stress response cycle, stress can build up over time and lead to emotional overwhelm or sudden reactions.
The nervous system typically reacts through four stress responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.
Fight and flight responses often involve action or movement, such as releasing frustration, exercising, or physically leaving a stressful situation.
Freeze responses can show up as fatigue, brain fog, procrastination, or doom-scrolling when your body shuts down to avoid the stressor.
Fawn responses often involve people-pleasing, overexplaining, or trying to reduce conflict to stay safe in stressful situations.
Learning to recognize your fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response and using healthy coping tools can help you complete the stress response cycle and manage everyday stress, especially with support from therapy for stress and anxiety in Florida or online therapy in Florida.
What is the Stress Response Cycle?
From Jewels of Teaching LLC, we know that a “stress response cycle is: when your mind and body respond to some sort of stressful stimuli, your mind and body see it as a threat, respond, and then cope to complete the cycle and feel safe again.”
The Stress Response Cycle puts the entire sequence into perspective. We start with the stress stimuli, respond in usually one of four stress responses based on the trigger/ Then we either move through to complete the stress response cycle using coping mechanisms, or remain stagnant collecting stress response cycles like we did Pokemon cards in middle school until we blow up at a random time for seemingly no reason….Myself included.
The main thing to remember with stress response cycles is that we have to move THROUGH them. Let the wave pass by without impeding it. Stopping in the middle doesn’t make stress go away, it just makes things worse later on when you are least expecting it.
What are Stress Responses?
Stress responses, per Harvard Health, are the survival mechanisms that we use to stay safe. They are the reaction to the stress that moves us into a new action. Most of the time, this physiological response is not of our own accord, but once we recognize what these responses look and feel like, we can navigate them a little better.
Think about a time when you were feeling stress (big or small). I’m sure you can even think of something from today: stubbed your toe, dishes sloshed water all over your clothes, you spun yourself into a panic about if you turned off the stove before you left even though you hadn’t even used the stove today…
You have to expect that you will encounter stress everyday. Which also means: you have to process some stress everyday too.
In that scenario you thought of for being stressed, what was your reaction to it?
Did you feel defensive or like you needed to take some sort of action right away?
Did you feel the need to get out of that space or move your body?
Did you feel sleepy afterward and just want to check out with a nap for awhile?
Did you feel the need to explain to yourself or others in a way that downplayed the stress?
Each of these is a different stress response.
We often hear most about fight or flight (the first two respectively in the above list); but most women actually tend toward the other two we don’t hear enough about: Freeze and Fawn.
What are the 4 Stress Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn
In a Fight Response, we feel the need to take action even if it is not a literal fight like is most often assumed. When you recognize what your fight looks like, you can better handle it by moving your body in some way, like through shadow boxing or even yelling into a pillow if that’s what you have available.
In a Flight Response, you need to move. This can be literally removing yourself from the physical space, the need to get outside and walk it out, or some other way of releasing the stress trigger. Other than actively running away from a person that makes you feel stressed, taking a walk daily can be a good way to process your flight responses no matter when they happened during the day.
In a Freeze Response, your body naturally thinks that this is the last choice and none of the other responses will work. Your body wants to shut down to make whatever stress trigger over quickly so you don’t feel the pain of it (think being attacked by a lion and playing dead). But in the modern age, this shows up as feeling fatigued suddenly, brain fog, and doom scrolling so you don’t have to really be present in your body anymore.
A Freeze Response can also have the after effects of guilt and shame for “being lazy” even though your body was trying to keep you safe. Take note of those random moments when you feel tired in the middle of the day. What happened that might be causing that…that isn’t all the tasks you’re trying to pile on in one day.?
In a Fawn Response, you want to de-escalate. You feel that fighting or fleeing are not options, so you try to mitigate the risk by people-pleasing or negotiating to downplay the situation. This can be with yourself or others as it is a very sneaky response that happens to women often when they feel stress. For this response, you’ll want to first start by recognizing it when it happens, then you can work on how to move through the full stress response cycle.
How to Complete the Stress Response Cycle?
The key here is to pause.
If you want to learn more about your stress responses and how to move from potentially unhealthy coping (or even non-coping) mechanisms to ones that will help you process the full stress response cycle, then you need to take a moment to recognize the stress itself.
Follow these steps to get started:
Identify the stress when it happens.
Accept the stress is happening (don’t deny it).
Determine the current feeling underneath the stress (do you want to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn?).
Offer yourself a little something in that moment that will help move the stress response cycle forward (even if it is just an extra few moments to breathe).
You can process the full stress response cycle when you get home from work if you need to; we know that all spaces are not safe enough to fully feel those emotions in the moment, especially with a likely build up of past stress response cycles knocking at your door.
Take this one step at a time. If you need support, you can schedule a free vibe check consultation here with one of our experienced Therapy Hour & Co therapists.
And follow along by subscribing to this Substack below as we dive further into each of these stress responses next month!