Human Fear Reactions: Do you fight, flee, freeze or fawn?

And the ‘Get Excited’ technique to befriend your fear

Most people have heard of the “fight-or-flight” response — an instinctive function of the sympathetic nervous system that readies us to either fight or flee when faced with danger.

Many of you will also have come across two other related responses to fear:

• “Freeze’”— shutting down or becoming immobile

• “Fawn” (sometimes known as “friend”), which involves people-pleasing to avoid conflict.

If you dig a little deeper into your Google search, you’ll find yet other F’s, such as “flop” (seen often in hostage situations and cases of serious abuse, this is when the mind and body completely shut down, leaving the victim compliant in an attempt to survive) and “fatigue” (feeling tired and/or sleeping in response to threat).

Learned patterns

None of these reactions is bad. In fact, they can all be used in healthy ways. In an ideal world, we’d select the most viable or productive reaction depending on the type of threat we’re faced with.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work out that way for most of us.

We learn our fear reactions as a result of the stresses and traumas that we experience in life (both severe and minor) and this means that we can often find ourselves leaning towards one reaction over the others — the one that worked best around our primary caregivers, for example, or with an aggressive partner, etc.

The good news here is that anything that’s been learned is, of course, plastic. Old habits can fade away as new patterns and preferences are programmed in. I’m not saying it’s easy to change the way you react to threat, but — with a little awareness and application — it is possible.

Here, I’d like to look closer at all four reactions so you can get a better sense of how they apply to your life and, more importantly, what you can do to leverage your natural instincts and take control. Then, I’ll share one surprisingly powerful yet simple tool for swapping anxiety for excitement.

Fight

Used healthily, the fight response allows you to stand your ground, to assert yourself and to both set and maintain healthy boundaries. In other words, a little fight is vital. Without it, you’d be a doormat.

When used unhealthily — i.e. when the fight reaction is out of control or used habitually, often as a trauma response — it can cause people to move reactively and automatically towards conflict with anger and aggression. Those with a preference for the fight response can feel that the whole world is out to get them, seeing and reacting to threats that don't necessarily exist, or creating conflict in relationships that could otherwise be peaceful.

At the root of this response is an unconscious belief that goes like this:

“If I can maintain power over the threat (or threatening person), then I will gain control and finally feel safe.”

The fight response can take many forms — anything from actually throwing punches to shouting, hurling things, crying, arguing, being irritable, tightening your jaw, balling up your fists or feeling a knot in the stomach.

If you’re a fighter, be kind to yourself when addressing your habits — you can’t fight yourself into a better pattern. Instead, try soothing things like deep breathing, gentle exercise, warm baths or whatever might best activate the parasympathetic nervous system (the “rest and digest” response) for you. Fighters first need to feel safe enough to let go of their fear so they can then reconnect with themselves, the world around them and, often, the person they’re arguing with.

Flee/Flight

The flee response is a necessary reaction — you won’t get far trying to fight a double-decker bus that’s veering into your path. Backing down is also needed in less obvious situations: the argument that’s just not worth having; the relationship that you can’t save; the friendly dare that’s actually quite dangerous. Healthy use of this fear reaction means being discerning under pressure and making a conscious decision to disengage.

Those who tend towards flight, however, can find themselves fleeing so often that they seriously limit their opportunities in life and ultimately isolate themselves.

Here, the root belief goes like this:
“If I can escape threat and conflict, then I can avoid pain.”

But, again, this strategy is flawed because running from anything that could pose a threat means running from virtually everything you love, desire or need. Ultimately, living your best life — however you define that — will always involve some level of risk.

If you want to interrupt an avoidance cycle, you may need to actively choose to drop back into your body when you notice the urge to run. Doing this repeatedly can help you to train your nervous system to feel okay with being where you are, even when the pressure is on. So try things that create a pleasant sensation for you to focus on — a warm drink, a soft massage, crunchy foods or gently stroking the back of your neck or arms. Alternatively, take a few deep breaths and practise releasing tension from your muscles one by one.

Freeze

When used healthily, the freeze response can look like pausing to appraise the situation and decide on further action — to choose the right words, for example, or to weigh up your options. A pause at just the right moment can be a powerful thing.

When someone freezes automatically in response to threat, however, they feel anything but powerful. Freezing can happen in a number of different ways: literally, physically freezing; falling silent; or experiencing numbness or a general loss of connection with your body. Any one of these reactions can be understood as a form of dissociation. It’s as if your mind decides to check out of the situation you’re in, or of the emotions you’re experiencing, in an attempt to find safety.

If you tend to freeze, you might find it helpful to learn a simple grounding exercise to use when you sense that you’re beginning to shut down or check out. For example, you could identify and name five blue objects in your immediate environment (e.g. “plant pot” … “hardback book” … “draft excluder” … etc).

Fawn

The healthy version of fawning, really, is just being a considerate human being — aware of the needs of others as well as your own, and resolving conflict in a way that benefits everyone involved as much as possible.

• Whose emotion is this?

• Whose need is this?

• Whose desire is this?

These might sound obvious, but they can be remarkably hard to answer when the boundary between yourself and others has blurred. Once you’ve started answering the above, the next step is to give your attention to the feelings, needs and desires that definitely belong to you.

The “Get Excited” technique

We can’t delete fear from our emotional repertoire, and it wouldn’t be a good idea if we could. However, experiencing this emotion too intensely or chronically isn’t desirable either, and the key to finding a healthy balance lies in cultivating a sense of agency and ways to cope with the perceived threat.

While appropriate coping mechanisms will, of course, vary from person to person and situation to situation, there’s one key takeaway:

When you’re in fear, it’s better to do something than nothing.

In addition to the tools already discussed, Harvard researcher and psychologist Dr. Alison Wood Brooks offers a staggeringly simple trick you can add to your toolbox. Here’s how to do it:

Once feeling anxious about something (e.g. public speaking, flying, a certain social event…), simply say to yourself, out loud, “I’m excited” or “Get excited” a few times.

That’s literally all there is to it. The research behind this tool found that those who used it were less anxious, more optimistic and more successful in solving problems or undertaking stressful tasks.

The reason it works is that at the physiological level, anxiety and excitement are virtually identical — adrenaline floods your system, blood rushes to the extremities, heart rate increases, you might feel butterflies in your stomach, dryness of your mouth, etc. What this means is that when you’re feeling anxious about something, it’s much more realistic to turn your nerves into excitement than it is to try and calm down, which would take time, as well as considerable effort — the effects of adrenaline on the body can last for up to an hour after an “adrenaline rush”. In order to experience excitement, however, your body doesn’t have to change state at all. You simply need to change how your mind interprets what your body is already feeling.

Your turn

Let me know in the comments:

• What is your typical fear reaction? How does it impact your life?

• Is there one small thing you can take from this post to improve it?

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Thank you for reading!

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.

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