If you are frozen or feel yourself going into a freeze, taking a few deep breaths can help you interrupt the freeze response and regain control. As soon as you begin to feel frightened, try to force yourself to take 3 or 4 slow, deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth.
The freeze response is connected to:
anxiety and anxiety disorders. childhood trauma and neglect. adult psychological trauma. post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
It takes around 20–60 minutes for the body return to its normal state after the stress response becomes activated.
In trauma, the freeze response becomes a much bigger and more visceral experience. When a person is in freeze mode, they will shut down, dissociate or split, thereby allowing them to continue to function in the environment of the threatening situation. However, with these strategies, energy becomes trapped in the body.
ADHD paralysis happens when a person with ADHD is overwhelmed by their environment or the amount of information given. As a result, they freeze and aren't able to think or function effectively. This makes it challenging for the individual to focus and complete their tasks—including urgent ones.
In other words, a child that suffered from constant anxiety and fear due to trauma may develop a tendency to freeze as a response to triggers as an adult. Those who froze as a response often as children may develop a tendency towards disassociation, anxiety or panic disorders, and even post-traumatic stress disorder.
Deep breathing, relaxation strategies, physical activity, and social support can all help if you are feeling the effects of a fight-or-flight response.
Freezing is often associated with traumatic experiences and can leave us paralysed in fear. In such distressing situations, the physical impact of our stress hormones are magnified, causing intense negative emotions including extreme shock, anxiety, panic and terror.
When you're in freeze mode, it can feel near impossible to take action. Even if you want to or have a mounting pile of responsibilities. Other symptoms can include feeling stuck in a certain part of the body, heaviness of limbs, feeling numb, decreased heart rate, holding your breath and a sense of dread.
Symptoms of depression can be understood as the body going into freeze mode to protect itself from a threat. We feel helpless in the face of the different challenges in our life. Often, this is accompanied by a sense of frustration or shame at ourselves.
People with higher pain levels often experience heightened fight-or-flight responses, which throws the nervous system off-balance. Things like stress, pain, and lack of sleep trigger these responses. When we're stuck in fight-or-flight mode, our automatic functions stop working properly.
Causes of chronic fight-or-flight mode
The most common example of this is post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. It can also come from long periods of overwork and sleep deprivation that have essentially trained your brain to be agitated all the time, even though your health is being sacrificed.
Most importantly, impaired freezing might be related not only to PTSD but also to other psychiatric threat-related disorders as well, such as anxiety disorders and borderline personality disorder.
The freeze response, also known as the camouflage response, often triggers the individual into hiding, isolating, and eschewing human contact as much as possible. This type can be so frozen in retreat mode and it seems as if their starter button is stuck in the “off,” position.”
That's what PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) is—our body's overreaction to a small response, and either stuck in fight and flight or shut down. People who experience trauma and the shutdown response usually feel shame around their inability to act, when their body did not move.
It turns out you can't just warm up a frozen body and proceed with the autopsy. It has to be defrosted slowly in a refrigeration unit at a steady thirty-eight degrees which can take up to week. Go any faster and the outside of the body will start to decompose while the inner organs are still frozen.
Differences in emotions in people with ADHD can lead to 'shutdowns', where someone is so overwhelmed with emotions that they space out, may find it hard to speak or move and may struggle to articulate what they are feeling until they can process their emotions.
The freeze response, which makes the body immobile. You might feel paralysed or unable to move. This response is most often linked to dissociation. Dissociation in humans is like when animals freeze when they're in danger.