Let’s have a chat about our fight, flight, or freeze response.

Let’s sit down and talk about our fight, flight, or freeze response. I have had a very eye opening realization recently about my own response to danger.

So what is a fight, flight, or freeze response? In short, it is what your body does to protect itself when it perceives a threat. In my recent experience, my reaction has been magnified as a fight response. Not in the sense of I’m going to get violent at the first sign of danger, but in the way that I am defensive to an extreme. I noticed that when I am surrounded by unknown people and situations, it feels like my body is willing to do anything it can to protect itself. I have an external guard that I can never seem to drop or let go of.

An example of this is when I went on a small vacation a couple of weeks ago. I woke up one morning to a knock at the door, and as a young woman my heart immediately started racing. I wasn’t going to open the door, I mean it was me and my girlfriend alone in the woods, anyone could be on the other side of that door. As it turns out, it was people to work on the roof of our cabin. So my next thought, after the idea of immediate physical danger being dismissed, was being on edge all the time. There was not a peaceful moment. My girlfriend and I needed to leave one day and our car was blocked in. I don’t like confrontation, and I didn’t want to go up to someone and say we needed to get out, but of the two of us, I was more likely to toughen up and get it done given the situation. So I did it, and a conversation that I went into feeling very guarded and defensive turned out to not be a big deal. They moved the truck and were very nice about it, even helped me back out.

What I have taken away from that entire week was that right now, my body is perceiving everything as a threat. My anxiety doesn’t know what is actually danger and what is just a normal situation. This has been very frustrating for me. Through this, I realized that I indeed have a fight response. I think that unknown people are out to get me, or that unknown situations may go badly. I put up barriers in every aspect of my life because I am constantly afraid of getting hurt and my body therefore reacts to every thing as if it is a perceived threat. It’s exhausting.

I’ve been trying to find a way to make this conversation come full circle with some advice, or understanding, or something. After some thought, I’ve come up with the fact that, for me, living in the moment has never been more important, and my response to fight these “threats” makes it hard to do that. I worry about confrontation, being looked down upon, letting down my guard and getting hurt, and the nagging idea in my head that if I loosen my defenses, something bad will inevitably happen. Everyday I still struggle with feeling the need to be guarded around any unknown person or situation, but maybe, just maybe, I can work on understanding that not everyone is out to get me. I don’t have to worry about external validation every single moment. If I can live in the moment, I can start to live my life like I am meant to.

Until we meet again,

Stan