The Intelligence of Flight
Most of us have a fundamental misunderstanding about the flight stress response that prevents us from using it as often as we could. Because of this, we waste energy, risk conflict, and end up far more stuck than we ever needed to be.
Let's change that.
"Fight or flight" are the most common stress responses – and the most adaptive because they remove us from potential danger. They allow our bodies to take action to confront or escape from perceived threat.
With the flight response, we escape. And with the fight response, we confront the threat directly. In both cases, if we're successful, we create enough distance to keep ourselves safe — emotionally, physically, socially, and otherwise.
If fight or flight don't work or aren't possible, then the freeze or fawn responses activate. We aren’t aware when this happens, as it’s below the level of our conscious awareness. When we’re frozen or fawning, we often feel overwhelmed, trapped, and may even ingratiate ourselves to the source of danger to stay safe.
We often think of fighting first. The fight stress response is usually people’s preferred option because we see it as standing up for ourselves or being confident. But this fundamental mistake overtaxes our nervous systems and puts us more at risk than we need to be.
The flight response is often the better option. After all, it’s better to navigate confrontation not from an activated nervous system but from a grounded place of calm.
By learning to use the flight response strategically, we can make conflict easier and our relationships more enjoyable.
We need to first understand what a stress cycle is, to see why the flight response is the preferred option for moments of perceived threat.
Completing a Stress Cycle
Our nervous systems are always scanning inside and outside the body for signs of safety or danger. When we perceive a risk, we automatically activate a stress response — fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. This unconscious survival mechanism sends a cascade of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol through our systems to mobilize us for action.
The stress response is unconscious. It happens so fast that it bypasses the prefrontal cortex where we do our logical reasoning and thinking. It's about securing short-term survival, not developing or deploying long-term strategies.
Fight and flight allow us to mobilize these energies into movement and action. Freeze and fawn immobilize our physical response, while the levels of stress hormones remain the same.
With freeze and fawn, we don't use the nervous system energy to act, so the electrochemical energy remains in the body. When this happens again and again, layers of this "stuck" energy remain to be carried in our bodies' tissues.
Over time, this undischarged activation can show up as chronic stress or even trauma symptoms like physical pain, digestive issues, breathing trouble, heart and chest pains, insomnia, and more.
When we move into the fight or flight stress responses, we metabolize the energy created by our stress hormones through our physical activity or even using our voice. A stress response takes a tremendous amount of energy.
When we go into a flight response, that energy gets us out of the situation. We act, we escape, and we're out of danger. Our bodies can rest and return to balance.
When the threat is resolved, our bodies can feel safe enough to return to baseline. Our heart rates decrease, the blood flows back to our feet and hands, and our digestion resumes. We complete the stress cycle, and we give ourselves the space to rest and relax.
A fight response, on the other hand, requires additional energy for confrontation. Fighting takes tremendous energy. Confrontation often leaves us feeling depleted and exhausted.
The flight response is preferable because it saves our energy. It's easier on our bodies' systems. It gives us space to think of how we want to respond to the perceived threat, rather than how our body is primed to react in the heat of the moment.
When the Flight Response Becomes Avoidance
It’s possible to take the flight response too far, into the territory of avoidance. Rather than distancing ourselves from perceived threats to decide the best way forward, avoidance puts the challenge out of our minds completely.
When we’re avoidant, we don’t make time to confront the situation from a place of safety and calm. We give ourselves space, but we never circle back to address the issue. Over time, this impacts our self-esteem, relationships, and even our worldview.
Avoidance is an ongoing flight response that never completes. It creates a perpetual stress cycle. It damages our nervous system because, as with freeze and fawn, we never effectively get ourselves to safety. We keep running away from the threat, again and again, but never resolve it.
Most avoidance comes from early attachment wounding and is largely a defense mechanism against anticipated pain. But because of neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, the nervous system’s ability to rewire and even regrow, we can always learn how to shift these patterns.
However, avoidance is easy to stay oblivious about. Because it is a survival response, it bypasses the prefrontal cortex, where we do our rational thinking. It’s easiest to notice its impact through our relationships, which suffer when we continuously avoid conflict, challenging conversations, and intimacy because we’re primed to flee at the first sign of risk.
Those of us with avoidant patterns don’t have the nervous system flexibility to tolerate the discomfort required for a conflict, even within ourselves. Over time, this leads to lowered confidence and relationship challenges.
It's hard to have a deep and intimate partnership when one person is always trying to get away.
The other thing about avoidance is that our minds are primed to make meaning of the unconscious stress response and rationalize our actions. Our partner's desire to talk about something becomes neediness, so we dismiss it.
Our unwillingness to confront someone at work might re-focus attention on their shortcomings. The avoidance at the root of these behaviors can be easy to overlook.. Our stress at doing basic adulting tasks like household accounting becomes procrastination that leads to overwhelm.
Once we see avoidance as an over-active flight response, we can support ourselves and our bodies to heal. It's not complicated, once we know what's happening and where we need to focus. This happens not at the level of the mind, but in the nervous system and the body.
How to Support a Healthy Fight Response
Here are some ways to create a supportive and healthy flight response.
1. Notice and support your body by orienting during stressful situations. Look around at your environment. Notice where the exits in the room are. In a group, it can be helpful to have your back near the wall so no one can approach from behind you. Your rational mind might not need this, but your body’s neuroception might.
2. Feel the body's sensations of discomfort and early activation. When we learn to notice the felt sense of a stress response early on, before the survival-oriented cascade of hormones takes over, we have more conscious awareness to decide how to respond. Map your physical sensations and notice when you’re starting to get activated.
3. Give yourself permission to leave. Those of us with complex trauma (CPTSD) were not able to leave dangerous or threatening situations in the past. This may have coded fight, freeze, and fawn into our nervous systems as the only viable options. Trauma healing involves reintroducing choice. I invite you to verbalize, to yourself, that you're allowed to leave. Give yourself verbal permission to step away, even for a few moments.
4. Leaving creates a boundary. You don't need to apologize or over-explain. This one takes practice. Sometimes a simple, "I need to take care of something," or "Excuse me," is enough. Sometimes, it's best not to say anything at all.
5. Help your nervous system complete the stress cycle. The flight stress response removes us from risk. The body needs time to recognize that we're now in safer territory. Give yourself space to settle and rest, acknowledging that you don't need to address the situation you left until you're ready. Some situations, like dangerous people or places, are better to put behind us and don't need addressing at all.
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Listening to our flight responses means knowing when to leave.
We don’t need to second guess ourselves or get stuck in situations that are not in our best interest to remain in.
When our flight response isn't strong, we easily freeze or fawn. Our minds can create a litany of reasons why leaving isn't possible or is a bad idea. The mind steps in to make sense of what's happening in the nervous system, but what's at play is a weakened flight response.
When we are connected to our flight responses, we take swift action to protect ourselves from perceived threat and create enough distance to safely strategize the best way forward.
We conserve our physical energy and don't waste it on conflicts that have no useful outcome or benefit. We set boundaries with powerful and often frightening people or situations. We get the self-esteem boost of knowing that we can take good care of ourselves.
The wisdom of the flight response is that often the most prudent action is to step away.
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