The freeze, flop, friend, fight or flight reactions are immediate, automatic and instinctive responses to fear. Understanding them a little might help you make sense of your experiences and feelings.
The Four Fear Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn.
Fight, flight, freeze, fawn
These are ways the body automatically reacts to stress and danger, controlled by your brain's autonomic nervous system, part of the limbic system.
As soon as you recognize fear, your amygdala (small organ in the middle of your brain) goes to work. It alerts your nervous system, which sets your body's fear response into motion. Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline are released. Your blood pressure and heart rate increase. You start breathing faster.
The 'fight or flight' response is how people sometimes refer to our body's automatic reactions to fear.
Breathe through panic
Stay where you are and simply feel the panic without trying to distract yourself. Place the palm of your hand on your stomach and breathe slowly and deeply. The goal is to help the mind get used to coping with panic, which takes the fear of fear away.
In this episode I explore the 7 Fs of survival response – fight, flight, freeze, faint, fawn, fix, and flop – within the context of some recent and past news items as well as my own experience.
In the most extreme situations, you might have lapses of memory or “lost time.” Schauer & Elbert (2010) refer to the stages of trauma responses as the 6 “F”s: Freeze, Flight, Fight, Fright, Flag, and Faint.
Fight, flight or freeze are the three most basic stress responses. They reflect how your body will react to danger. Fawn is the fourth stress response that was identified later.
The responses are usually referred to as the 4Fs – Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn and have evolved as a survival mechanism to help us react quickly to life-threatening situations.
We often will feel sad and cry after a highly traumatic event. The crying can be a way for the nervous system to come down from the fight-or-flight response, since crying is associated with the parasympathetic nervous system which calms the mind and body.
The two-level modality divides fear into no fear (0) and fear (1), while the four-level modality divides into no fear (0), low fear (1), medium fear (2) and high fear (3).
Even so, our brains are hardwired for fear — it helps us identify and avoid threats to our safety. The key node in our fear wiring is the amygdala, a paired, almond-shaped structure deep within the brain involved in emotion and memory.
According to Soukup's study, the fear archetypes include: The Procrastinator, the Rule Follower, the People Pleaser, the Outcast, the Self-Doubter, the Excuse Maker, and the Pessimist.
Tetraphobia (from Ancient Greek τετράς (tetrás) 'four', and Ancient Greek φόβος (phóbos) 'fear') is the practice of avoiding instances of the digit 4. It is a superstition most common in East Asian nations. It represents or can be translated as death or to die.
The elements of fear are genetic, cultural, environmental, physiological, and psychological. Fear is part of human pathology.
Fear starts in the part of the brain called the amygdala. According to Smithsonian Magazine, “A threat stimulus, such as the sight of a predator, triggers a fear response in the amygdala, which activates areas involved in preparation for motor functions involved in fight or flight.