How the brain works – fight, flight and freeze

Have you ever wondered what is happening in our brains when we are anxious and we experience the fight, flight or freeze response? 

The answer lies in what we call the limbic system, which engages two parts of our brains – the amygdala and our frontal lobes.  I promise this isn’t an in depth neuroscience post (I am in no way qualified for that!), but a bit of background into what is going on can help us to understand our bodies responses, particularly in stressful situations. 

When we have an emotional response to stress, what occurs is often described as an “amygdala hijack”.

The amygdala is found at the base of the brain.  It is made up of clusters of almond shaped cells – one cluster found in each hemisphere of the brain. 

The amygdala’s day job is to help us to regulate our emotions in the here and now.  It also preserves memories and allows us to attach emotions to those memories.  For example if we remember running along the beach with a friend as a child, this will likely have a happy memory attached.  If we remember falling over and hurting ourselves as a kid, we will attach negative emotions to this (perhaps sadness, pain or maybe even embarrassment depending on the circumstances). 

So the amygdala does a lot of heavy lifting in our day to day lives and is constantly working away in the background, managing our emotional and behavioural responses.  In times when our brains perceive that we are in some sort of danger, the amygdala responds and it’s purpose is to keep us safe, which is when the fight, flight or freeze responses kick in.  When it senses a danger, it’ll send signals to the brain to produce and distribute stress hormones, getting your body ready to react to the threat.   

To go back in time for a moment.  Picture the scene… you are a hunter gatherer out and about hunting for food to bring back to feed your family.  You enter a clearing and you are faced with a lion.  You don’t know if the lion has yet seen you, but you have certainly seen it.  Your amygdala will be well and truly hijacked at this point (understandably so) and it’ll be hurriedly sending signals to your brain to get stress hormones pumping, your heart rate will quicken, you’ll likely notice your breathing affected too, you are probably breathing faster and shallower.  This is all to get your body ready to react in the best way to keep you safe in that situation.  In all likelihood, in this hypothetical situation, your body will probably be telling you to get as far away from this danger as quickly as possible, so your flight instinct is activated (it would be bold to try and fight the lion I would propose, and freeze probably won’t be helpful unless you are really well hidden and the lion hasn’t seen you). 

So you see, the amygdala is doing what it is designed to do, and being ‘hijacked’ in the situation above isn’t a bad thing.  It’s actually exactly what you would want it to do.  It’s doing all within its power to keep you safe. 

In modern day life, it is fairly unlikely that we are going to find ourselves face to face with a lion (unless it’s in a zoo or we are on safari).  But our amygdala is still there, still poised to do the job it is designed to do.  To protect us and keep us safe.

Remembering that the amygdala hijack is an emotional response, when we think about the emotions that are prevalent in modern day life, such as extreme stress, anxiety, fear, aggression or anger it can still be triggered. 

Thinking of another hypothetical situation.  Picture the scene… you are at work.  You are in a really busy role and one of your colleagues has just left, so you are covering their workload as well as your own.  You are running to keep up.  You feel that there isn’t enough hours in the day.  You are doing your best, but the workload never goes down, and you worry that in the chaos of it all, you are missing something, that you have forgotten to do something important.  It’s 10am and you hear a ping which indicates that you have received a new email.  You open your emails and you see an email form your boss.  They are asking you for an update on a project you are working on, because they have a meeting with all the big wigs at midday who will be expecting to hear about the progress that has been made.  It is at exactly that point that you remember the actions you had agreed to take forward, but you haven’t.  It’s got lost in the hum of everything else going on.  Thinking about your physiological responses (what is our body doing)?  You might notice that you start to breathe faster, your heart rate quickens and you start to feel nauseous.  And what about your mind?  What is your inner dialogue saying?  I won’t use any spicy language here, but it’s probably fair to suggest you are thinking thoughts like ‘oh no!  How could I have forgotten?’ ‘I’m going to get into trouble’ ‘this project is going to fail and it is all my fault’.  For some people, it might go even further and they might think ‘I’m going to be fired’ ‘I’ll never get another job’ or even ‘without a job how am I go to pay my bills?’.

These examples demonstrate that the amygdala is doing what it always has done, what it is designed to do.  What has changed is what triggers it in modern life.  An email from the boss is the modern day lion.  We are not in physical danger as we were in the past, but the amygdala still gets hijacked.   

There is still more though.  We now understand what the amygdala is, and how it works, but we now need to consider the frontal lobes, which sit in the frontal cortex (and the front of your brain, as you’ll see in the image above). 

The frontal lobes form part of the cerebral cortex (big word, don’t worry).  This Is the part of the brain that regulates our voluntary actions.  It is the rational part of our brains.  It’s the part of our brain that is responsible for moving, planning, thinking, reasoning and decision making.  You get the picture, the dependable part of our brain that we would prefer to be in the driving seat most of the time. 

In times of really extreme stress or anxiety, the frontal lobes don’t get a look in, because, as we have seen above, the amygdala has taken over, leaving no space for the more reasonable frontal lobes.  They are likely giving it a good go, but we can’t hear it over the ‘shouts’ of the amygdala.  That is why it’s described as a hijack. 

At other times, when a trigger is less intense, or we are able to regulate our response (more of that in a moment), the amygdala will be doing it’s thing, but not taking up all the space or bandwidth, there is still a bit of room for us to take a moment to evaluate what is happening, to exercise judgement and respond in a more considered way.  If we head back to our example of the overworked employee above, if the amygdala response was less intense and the frontal lobes are able to override it, the employee will have more scope to decide how to respond.  They may not jump head first into the catastrophic thinking outlined above.  They might have more reasoned thoughts like ‘oh no, I’ve been so snowed under I haven’t managed to complete the actions I agreed to.  Let me call my boss and explain, and see what compromise can be reached’ followed by ‘it’s a blip but it really isn’t a big deal.  Some people might be a bit annoyed initially but it’ll blow over.  I’m not going to lose my job’.  When our more rational side kicks in, we are able to keep the situation and it’s effect on us and our response in proportion.  We may even start trying to find solutions. 

So is it possible to stop the amygdala hijack form happening in the first place?  As I’ve mentioned above, the amygdala hijack is an automatic response, that is we don’t consciously think about it happening.  But that doesn’t mean that we can’t stop it really taking hold. 

When we start feeling significantly stressed, like in the examples above we can try to acknowledge how our body feels – what physical sensations are we noticing?  How about emotionally?  What are we feeling?  What thoughts are running through our head.  Remind ourselves that this is an automatic response, not necessarily a logical one.  This act of noticing can be really difficult to start with, so it might be something you reflect on after the fact, but if we keep trying, it is possible to lessen the amygdala hijack. 

If we are able to, when we are in a state of amygdala hijack, focusing our breathing can be really powerful.  Notice how we are breathing and try to slow it down, taking big deep breaths and slow exhales. 

At the point that you have calmed down and your stress levels have reduced, you think about what it was that triggered the response, and you felt.  When you have completely calmed down, and you are able to utilise your frontal lobes (ie thinking a bit more rationally), we can think about other ways that you could have responded to the situation.  Appraise if you were in danger, and the fight, flight or freeze responses were warranted.   

It can also be really helpful to identify our triggers.  If a particular situation seems to trigger this response in us, is there anything you can do differently to avoid this?  Is this something you could talk with a therapist about?  When we recognise what is triggering us, we are better able to manage our reactions. 

As is often the case with our mental wellbeing, awareness and understanding are the key first step to addressing them. 

As Christopher Robin said in the Disney movie ‘Pooh’s Grand Adventure:  The Search for Christopher Robin’:  “You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think”.