Fight or Flight: What is the fight or flight reaction?
Have you ever felt your heart race, your breathing change or your palms get sweaty when you’ve been confronted with an anxiety provoking situation?
This is the fight or flight reaction.
Fight or flight refers a cascade of physical changes that occur when a person faces something our brain perceives as threatening. Our fear centre of the brain is called amgydala, and it’s only the size of a pinenut!
Each physical symptom that occurs whilst in this mode is designed to help you fight off a threat or run away from a threat. These include:
Feeling Shaky: the body pumps out adrenaline which makes our heart beat faster
Heart Racing: pumps blood around your body faster so you can move faster
Breathing Changes: our breathing speeds up to bring more oxygen into the body so we can run or fight
Sweaty: sweat helps us cool down whilst running or fighting
Need to go to bathroom: The fight or flight model turns off digestion as it requires excess energy that is re-directed to your heart and around your body
Feeling light headed:
· Humans breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide
· When we panic we breathe shallowly and may hyperventilate
· This means oxygen levels rise slightly and carbon dioxide falls slightly
· Because we are often not running away or fighting anything (e.g. a tiger) in the modern world, we are left with excess oxygen in our system
· The blood vessels in the brain realize they are getting too much oxygen, and so the blood vessels constrict to reduce how much oxygen they get
· However, as a by-product of this narrowing we can have feelings of dizziness/light headedness. These feelings can be quite intense but will reduce as soon as levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide rebalance
The thing about our amgydala is that it isn’t great at differentiating between imagination and reality. It’s why we freak out when we watch horror movies or when we have an anxious thought about something bad happening! All the amgydala hears when we have that anxious thought is ‘THREAT’’ and it starts the fight or flight reaction.
In cave man days, the fight or flight reaction helped us survive when faced with wild animals. However, the reaction isn’t so useful in the modern world … for instance when you are pulled over by a police car or when you have to give a presentation at work! It can feel extremely strange and can make us more anxious (‘why do I feel so anxious in this meeting?!’).
When we start to get anxious about our anxiety, the amgydala once again just hears ‘MORE THREAT’ and keeps the reaction going…..
Fortunately, there are four ways to reduce the fight or flight reaction:
1) Education – Understanding what is happening in your body and the function of each symptom in promoting your survival can help some people reduce their anxiety.
2) Breathing – I want you to try something. Turn a timer on your computer for 1 minute, then close your eyes and count your breaths per minute (one breathe is counted as breathing in and out). I want you then to google the normal amount of breaths per minute and see whether you are over-breathing. If you are subtly hyperventilating and over-breathing then slow breathing techniques are useful to reduce panic attacks and anxiety. There is a free app called ‘Breathing App’. I recommend starting with breathing in to the count of four and out for the count of four.
3) Exposure – Face situations that make you nervous in graded way. Our amgydala learns best through experience. Think of something you used to be nervous about but those nerves went down over time. It could be dating a new person or trying a new sport or working at a new job. Exposure to situations that scare you teach your amgydala there is nothing to be afraid of.
4) Thoughts lead to our feelings – Talk to yourself as if you were a friend whilst in anxiety provoking situations, rather than berating yourself for not being able to do the anxiety provoking thing.
Photo by cloudvisual.co.uk on Unsplash