Fight/flight/freeze – Kitty Wheater

Avoidance and Other Disappearing Acts

This piece was first posted as the MindLetter from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy. You can subscribe by emailing mindfulness@ed.ac.uk.

You have a meeting first thing, and you’re thinking about the email that came in at 6am. ‘Ready for school?’ you say to your child in the kitchen. The child is quiet, and looks withdrawn, as they have done for some time. You have to get to your meeting, so you head to your study.

Your dissertation is due in a month. You are not sure what you are writing, and you are worried. You’re reading and making notes, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Hours go by. You have not achieved enough to earn a weekend off, so you try to work, but you seem just to wind up on Instagram. You are tired, and scared about the deadline.

You have been living on your own during lockdown. It’s tough, and you have been drinking more than usual to wind down after work. You feel groggy in the mornings, and so you stop going for your run before work. This means you don’t sleep well, so you have an extra glass after dinner, too, to help you drift off. You slow down at work, and are starting to forget things.

Do any of these look familiar to you? One of these scenarios may resonate more than others, depending on whether you are a parent, a student, a runner, or all of the above; whether you live alone, or not; whether you are a morning person, or not.

But what ‘too much’ really means is that your personal history, multiplied by the unique set of circumstances in which you find yourself in this moment, divided by the resources you have to meet it, equals more than 1. The parent’s meeting is perhaps the culmination of a big project; his child’s unhappiness makes him uncomfortable, because he was unhappy at that age, too. The student was a star pupil at school, but she has no job lined up for when she graduates, and she is terrified of failing. The runner was doing OK despite the lockdown until her cat died, suddenly.

The balance tips. It happens to all of us. And when stresses are multiplied, as in exceptional times, we may be surprised at the strength of our own reactions. But in the simplest terms, when you are operating at more than 1, you start running on an energetic and emotional deficit. What happens next?

1. The Stress Equation

As the camera pans over the Edinburgh skyline, the setting for our story becomes clear: it’s stress. It’s seeping up through the floorboards, washing around the main characters as they head to the meeting on Teams, sit grimly at the computer on a Saturday, and turn off the alarm, groggy and headachy.

Simply put, the parent, the student, and the runner are experiencing stress because they are experiencing too much: information, emotion, time alone, unstructured time, maybe even red wine.

‘Too much’ is, on the one hand, subjective. We all know someone who can take phone calls while also brilliantly comforting their child at 6am, or spend weeks happily in their own company, or down several pints on a Friday night and come top of their age group in the Park Run the next morning. This means that we may be tempted to tell ourselves, if we are struggling, that we are ‘being weak’. When it comes to others, we may indulge in competitive stressing, to establish that we have more to be stressed about than they do.

But what ‘too much’ really means is that your personal history, multiplied by the unique set of circumstances in which you find yourself in this moment, divided by the resources you have to meet it, equals more than 1. The parent’s meeting is perhaps the culmination of a big project; his child’s unhappiness makes him uncomfortable, because he was unhappy at that age, too. The student was a star pupil at school, but she has no job lined up for when she graduates, and she is terrified of failing. The runner was doing OK despite the lockdown until her cat died, suddenly.

2. The Escape Artist

The main character of our story is not the parent, the student, or the runner. The main character is the mind.

The mind under stress typically responds in one of two ways. It may jump in and try to solve the problem: fixating, ruminating. The parent, up too early reading emails, is doing this. But then something else happens – the child is unhappy – and rather than jumping in, the mind withdraws. The parent literally leaves the room.

Later, he may berate himself for not lingering a little longer; he may even internally accuse himself of being a ‘bad parent’. But this is the same mind that learned, on a visceral level over many millennia, to bolt at the hint of a large be-furred face in the grassland. The mind looks to escape under stress for very good reason: there are times when running, jumping, or flinching can save our life. Lions aside, avoidance of what’s difficult makes an awful lot of sense. And usually, it’s fine to wait until the meeting has passed to check in with the child; it’s sensible to question whether your thesis is going in the right direction; a glass of good wine is a pleasure in a quiet evening.

The problem arises when we get really good at it: when the deficit accumulates over time, as with chronic stress, or happens all at once, as with trauma. When this happens, the mind turns escape into an art form, and the mind will react to emotional threats as if they are lions. Fear that our child is unhappy, fear of the future, or frustration with a lonely lockdown, morph into a be-furred face. And so we may leave the room either literally, or metaphorically. The student hides from her thesis; the runner disappears into Scotch.

What happens next?

3. Escalation

Here’s the thrust of the plot: if the mind chronically escapes, things may get worse before they get better. A child’s silence stretches into months, and the parent retreats into work. The dissertation is fumbled together in a sleepless last week, and the student’s self-criticism is entrenched. Perhaps the runner, who no longer runs, slides into depression.

Things get worse because escaping, well-intentioned as the fight/flight system is, moves further away from the emotional nub of the matter. Emotions like fear, anger, and sadness are as old as the first human who ran from a lion. But for the stresses where fleeing doesn’t work – with the child, the dissertation, the loneliness – we must try something else.

What might that look like?

Photograph of a woman running on a road away from the camera. There are trees in the background and the sun setting

The escape artist thrives on two things: automaticity, and isolation. Interrupting its Cirque-du-Soleil-type flight through the air means addressing both of these.

First, step out of automatic pilot. Learn to recognise your triggers, and your reactions. Which scenario above did you relate to? Which cause of stress, and which response? You may find it helpful to write these down, in a diary, or on a post-it.

When you can start to recognise these as they occur in daily life, you are already doing something different. In the moment that you spot it, pause and settle yourself with a three-step breathing space. Later, put aside twenty minutes to explore it in more depth, with a RAIN practice.

Second, step out of isolation. We often feel tremendous shame around our stress responses. We may perceive that they make us look weak, or fear that they will burden others. But they are as human as the very blood in our veins, and you are not alone. Message a loved one, or call someone you trust.

We can make sense of the stories that we carry inside us; we can catch our own escape artist in the act. Some will surrender their running shoes swiftly, others may take more patience, inquiry, and support from outside. But the genre can be changed. The next act is unwritten.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy. You can subscribe by emailing mindfulness@ed.ac.uk.

A few weeks ago, on a morning walk, I came across a spectacular carpet of morning glories. Otherwise known as bindweed, these marshmallow pink flowers grow rapaciously on scrubby ground in the summer months. True to their name, they are open and most glorious first thing, when the sun is up; by the afternoon they have folded in a tight pink whorl, waiting for the next beams of morning light. In gardens they are often uprooted, but if left undisturbed in farmland and hedgerows, they will roam over the ground without limit, like a green and pink web of delights for visiting bees and butterflies.

There was no other way to appreciate these ground-dwellers on a glorious morning: I sat down on the sun-baked earth, and settled in to watch the flowers and their visitors. Slowly but surely, peace, like the beetles, crept over me.

When we think of going to ground, it often has a fearful quality. We think of how rabbits disappear into their burrows at approaching footsteps, or a mouse bolts below the skirting boards. Indeed, with no burrow in sight, it is a profoundly animal pattern to drop to the ground in times of terror or distress: think of how a gazelle cornered by a lion will freeze, and fall.

Humans are just the same. In a moment of shock, we crumble to our knees, or say, ‘I need to lie down.’ In Eat Pray Love, the writer Elizabeth Gilbert describes how during the years of the breakdown of her marriage, she spent nights on the bathroom floor. The ground offers us something: as I wrote a few weeks back, even being in contact with it through walking activates the pressure receptors in the soles of the feet, helping to meet the body’s neurological need for touch.

To see what the ground gives back, you might watch how that gazelle, apparently felled, can bolt for freedom at the predator’s momentary inattention; how a human’s blood pressure rights, as they fold to the floor in a faint (ouch); how Gilbert’s prayers on the floor opened her to a guiding voice within. Going to ground gives us time. It allows us to replenish. Indeed, given the time of year, and your need for a holiday, many of you as you read this may actually be horizontal – or wish you were.

But the ground is not only palliative. As the dancers among you will attest, our bodies’ relationship with the earth is also the source of some of the most beautiful forms of art. Watch a contemporary dancer roll and lift from the ground, in a seamless wave of motion; or a Cuban salsera, or a tap dancer. You will see how going to ground does not only restore us to baseline: it makes new and rather wonderful things possible.

Here, then, is some ground beneath your feet this week.

GRAIN, For Hard Times

I’ve introduced Tara Brach’s RAIN practice to you before as a way of responding wisely to fear, worry, and illness. The practice’s four stages – Recognise, Allow, Investigate, Nurture – are a very helpful way of using your attention to explore and tend to the experience of stress.

Sometimes, however, if distress is acute, or RAIN is unfamiliar as a practice, it is difficult for us to move attentively through this process without losing the thread, or getting sucked into the worry. My colleague from the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, Chris Cullen, talks about the value of Grounding first, by sensing the feet on the floor, and the seat on the chair. This allows the mind to begin to shift mode out of the fight-flight response. Indeed, once you have grounded, and are moving through RAIN, you might return the attention to the feet and the seat, in between its stages, to help steady the attention as you explore the practice.

In particularly sticky moments, simply attend for a few minutes to the soles of the feet on the floor, and the sit-bones on the chair. ‘FOFBOC’ – succinctly standing for ‘feet on floor, bum on chair’ – was developed by the Mindfulness in Schools Project, as a brief practice to help teenagers’ minds to settle at the beginning of class. It’s a great one to do regularly, so that the attention learns to settle in these places, and your ground is ready and waiting in the moments you need it.

Your Head in the Clouds

Leaving the ground can be one of the most exhilarating experiences known to humans. Think of the plane taking off to a faraway land, the phrase ‘flight of fancy’, the rollercoaster, the simple pleasure of climbing a tree. There is a reason that the penthouse is the preferred floor.

Extraordinary things can happen when we go up. But we also sense, with animal blood in our veins, that leaving the ground carries a risk to it. Those who are afraid of flying, who prefer the stairs to the lift, are in touch with this very basic fear. The idea of strange and frightening things happening when we go too high appears across literature; think of Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre’s attic, or the vicious Knids in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. Dahl, who was an RAF pilot during the Second World War, was well aware of what can happen in the sky.

One of the most interesting facets of creative thought is that it takes what is already here, and transforms it into something new. Creativity is literally grounded. The plane depends on the ground, and must return to it, to take off once more – otherwise, at some point, it will find itself running on fumes.

So use FOFBOC – not just when you are stressed and low, but at work, or play, when the adrenaline begins to peter. Take your project on a walk, and feel your feet on the ground. Dance out your energy, and feel, like the dancers do, the heels and balls of the feet, and the sense of a shuffle or spin.

We see and feel things differently from the ground. From a cognitive perspective, we shift in mode. We gain insight into problems, whether of heart or mind. When we have our feet on the ground, they support our head in the clouds. Like the contemporary dancers, we can create something new, and beautiful.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Tag: Fight/flight/freeze

The Escape Artist

Going to Ground