Coping Through Crisis: Understanding Fight or Flight

Whether you’re processing and healing from past trauma, you’re going through a breakup, there’s illness in your family, you’re adapting to living through a global pandemic, or you’re dedicated to the fight for racial justice, your trust, safety and certainty in the world have been challenged. You’re dealing with strong feelings of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty. In order to endure, we must reestablish our sense of trust, safety, and security.

As I’ve been figuring out how to cope through crises myself, I decided to create this series sharing what I’ve learned to help you find the tools to cope and process everything that is going on in the world, or in your own life.

Before you can begin to heal, you need to understand what your automatic stress response is. You need to understand the instinct your body will have when under stress so you can know how best to work through it.

Fight or Flight: Our Automatic Stress Response

During times of high stress, our minds and bodies are automatically triggered into a survival response called fight or flight (this book is a great resource for learning more about this). The problem is that our brain can’t tell the difference between a real physical threat in the present moment (like someone attacking you) or an abstract threat (like a virus, frenzied media outlets, loss of employment, etc). The brain reacts the same in both situations - it pumps cortisol, adrenaline, and other chemicals through your body to prepare to either fight the threat or run from the threat. Unfortunately, neither of those responses are very helpful when it comes to abstract threats. 

When we can’t out run or fight our current circumstances, what we’re left with is a bunch of chemicals wreaking havoc on our minds and bodies. You may be feeling this in the form of racing anxious thoughts, heart pounding, shortness of breath, muscle tension, headaches, moodiness, etc. I’ve personally been feeling particularly on edge lately, so much so that it’s been difficult to enjoy music. As I work, I’ve noticed music that would normally have me dancing and jamming along instead sounds like grating noise. The sounds are no longer joyful but irritating because my brain is having trouble interpreting signals for danger. Since my brain can’t locate the threat, everything has become an alert to danger.

How to Respond to Fight or Flight

I’ve been experiencing a lot of side effects from being stuck in fight or flight over the past few months. For a while now, it’s felt like I’m treading water. Prolonged periods of stress, like the global pandemic or systematic oppression, are particularly damaging if our mind and body remain in fight or flight. The good news is that we have so much more power over our emotional state than we realize. 

Having lived through many challenging times in my life, I have accumulated tools and practices that help me not only stay afloat, but come out the other side more in tune with myself. The key to endurance is to reorient our stress response in productive ways through surrender, awareness, release, rest, and relationships.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be going more in depth with each of these steps for responding productively to stress. There are things you can do to reorient your mind and body to find peace from that fight or flight instinct. This is something I’ve personally been working on and learning to apply in my own life, so I hope my experiences can be helpful to you as you work through whatever personal, professional, or even national and global things are adding stress and trauma to your life right now.

If you’re looking for other ways to educate yourself on fight or flight and how to work through it, I highly recommend the book I linked earlier: The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. It’s a must-read for anyone working through traumatic stress and seeking to understand on a deeper level!

Ready to Start Healing?

Now that I have started coaching, I’m so excited to help you heal and cope through the crises in your life. With all the tools, resources, support, and guidance I have gained during the decade of my own healing, I’m here to support you and catalyze your journey!

I’m offering a special highly discounted offer to anyone who is ready to make this change. If that sounds like you, email me with the subject line “I’m Ready!” for a discount on your first three months of coaching with me. Let’s co-create a life that you love and feel inspired by!