Giving in to Fight or Flight

It’s occurred to me that I’m never going to eliminate the really sticky pop-psych ideas floating out there. So I’m trying a new strategy where I beat them into a more useful form instead.

One of these particularly sticky ideas is, very obviously, the idea of ‘fight or flight’ and its more ostentatious brethren, “the three f’s”, or “the four f’s”, or “the five f’s” in some variation of “fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and sometimes fuck”.

I’ve written before about how people think about stress weirdly. A kind of chinese whispers effect which has roughly smushed three or four academic ideas into some misshapen creature that perfectly justifies comparisons of email notifications or driving in traffic with our prehistoric battles against [insert terrifying predator]. Which is silly, even superficially. But I won’t complain more about that here, because I’ll reprise the relevant bits shortly.

As you might be able to tell from the slow accumulation of f’s, fight or flight is suffering from something similar. Both the chinese whispers effect that has us drawing wildly innappropriate conclusions from academic literature and the superficial silliness—where will the f’s end!

So let’s make the f’s handy again.

¶A little history

I want to very quickly run you through the history of this little verb collection of ours, because you might notice something interesting.

People will tell you that ‘fight or flight’ has been around since at least the 1915 work of Walter Cannon: ‘Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear and rage: An account of recent researches into the function of emotional excitement’, although reading the book suggests that it might be a bit older.¹ In his chapter on ‘Bodily Changes’, Cannon refers to the fact that:

When we were working on emotional glycosuria a clue to the significance of the increase of sugar in the blood was found in McDougall’s² suggestion of a relation between “flight instinct” and “fear emotion,” and “pugnacity instinct” and “anger emotion.” And the point was made that, since the fear emotion and the anger emotion are, in wild life, likely to be followed by activities (running or fighting) which require contraction of great muscular masses in supreme and prolonged struggle, a mobilization of sugar in the blood might be of signal service to the laboring muscles.

Pugnacity is, you might guess if you’d played a Bethesda game, one’s propensity to want to fight stuff. And, more-or-less, this is exactly what fight or flight remains today.

People will then tell you that the ‘freeze’ aspect was added later, with particular reference to the literature on trauma and PTSD. A background of trauma might incline you to ‘freeze’ like possums playing dead in the face of a threat. But actually, ‘freezing’ was also there at the very beginning: in a footnote on the same page I quoted before, Cannon hedges:

It is recognized that both pain and the major emotions may have at times depressive rather than stimulating effects … Conceivably there is a relation between recognizing the possibility of escape (with the psychic consequences of that possibility) and the degree of stimulating effect.

The ‘fawn’ bit is a later addition, though. First, we have the work on appeasement behaviours in animals from people like Lorenz³ and Tinbergen⁴ in th 60’s. This seems to have then been adopted to describe similar behaviour in humans—appeasement to improve the attachment bond in Bowlby’s work, or to group some of Freud’s defence mechanisms. Finally, we see it sort-of crystallise in the complex PTSD (CPTSD) literature as the ‘fawn’ response. I didn’t look super hard, but the first references I could find were in Pete Walker’s work, culminating in his 2013 book on complex PTSD.

Now, if we ignore the ‘fuck/fornicate’ addition for the moment, an astute reader will notice a particular theme in the literature that led to our f’s conception. Commencing with literature on ‘pain… fear and rage’. Adopted, if not invented by the literature on psychological responses to trauma. Then added to in the literature on complex responses to trauma.

This is not an account of ordinary behaviour. It never was! This is an account of extreme stress responses. It always has been! And, in fact, if you look even closer, you’ll notice that it all comes more-or-less directly out of research on animal models of stress, which typically concentrate on threats to survival.

¶When did all stress become a threat to survival?

So, people will use this thing like this:

stress puts you into fight or flight mode

Familiar? They’ll add however many f’s they’ve come across. It’s not important though, because the main idea they’ll be trying to convey to you is that stress makes you stupid things—fighty, or fawny, or freezy things—instead of whatever you’re supposed to be doing. Then they will tell you some better or worse method of being less stressed and then, I guess, you are now free of the curse of stress.

But this isn’t right. Not historically, nor technically. Stress does not put you into fight or flight or whatever mode. Extraordinary stress does. In the trauma literature, they are quite clear that fighting and flighting is a hyperaroused response—you can tell they are clear about this because it survived as the ‘also known as’ in the first line of the wikipedia article.

As I write about in more detail elsewhere, stress is good:

The human stress response is an amazing piece of biology. Fundamentally, it is about keeping the body in balance—trying to maintain homeostasis. And typically, our stress responses are healthy and extremely useful. As usual, our unconscous processes are rarely the bad guy they’ve been made out to be.

By releasing certain stress hormones into the brain and body, the stress response will carefully calibrate our attention, increasing our level of physical arousal by recruiting various physiological and cognitive processes to meet some perceived challenge or threat.

Importantly, this stress response is the reason that we’re any good at anything at all.

So when did all stress get conflated with extraordinary stress?

There is something a little troubling about the co-option of trauma terminology by the mainstream. Fight or flight hyperarousal, or poly-vagal stuff, or even the word ‘trauma’, once reserved for incidents in which one feared for one’s life, and now used to describe the full gamut of psychological distress, from the trivial to the profound. What is it about the trauma literature that so entices us to steal from it?

I’m not entirely sure I want to tackle this today. It’s a similar problem to the casual use of ‘OCD’ to describe somewhat rigid preferences, or the increasingly casual use of ‘autism’ and ‘ADHD’ to describe trivial weirdness and normal responses to the attention economy. On the one hand, this kind of stuff increases awareness and decrease stigma. But on the other hand, it serves to marginalise people who suffer these things in more profound ways. As I point out in my stress article, we have a narrative that looks like this:

In other words, stress makes you fight, flee, or freeze—not think, “What would a prudent reaction be at this moment? Let’s consider the options”. This makes good evolutionary sense: Half a million years ago, taking time to manage your emotions would have made you a tiger’s lunch.

Odds are, you no longer need your amygdala to help you outrun the tiger without asking your conscious brain’s permission. Instead, you use it to handle the nonlethal problems that pester you all day long. Even if you don’t have tigers to outrun, you can’t relax in your cave, because the emails are piling up.

That’s a real quote, from the Atlantic, but you’ve almost certainly heard it yourself many times. And let me tell you something. If email notifications are inducing a fight or flight reaction in you then you really should be offered help, not pithy blog articles. This isn’t normal. Email notifications should be email notification stressful, not tiger stressful. Anything else makes me consider burnout, or PTSD, or various other things that should be addressed with more than a subscription to Take 10.

¶Making fight or flight unproblematic, or anti-trauma-theft

Listen, though. I agree with you guys. We shouldn’t let the trauma people have all the fun. They already have access to perks that most of us won’t get until the tech in that Black Mirror episode rolls out. So I will help you steal fight or flight from them.

There is obviously something sticky about the f’s. When you get in an argument and you start feeling defensive, raising your voice, and so on, it does feel like some kind of ‘fighty’ thing is happening.

Or, when you have a phone call to make that’s going to be uncomfortable, and you do every other task on your todo-list, or clean out your youtube watchlist before getting to the call, that does feel like some kind of ‘flighty’ thing, right?

Polyvagal theory is not only widely regarded to be complete nonsense, but is impossibly baroque to boot. Yet, people love it. Vagus nerve stuff floods my instagram, and little segments on polyvagal theory appear in many of the consulting contexts I’ve been a part of. What do people like about it? It describes stress that makes us shutdown and withdraw. This does feel like some kind of ‘freezy’ thing.

And, when people are aggressive with us, we very often have the urge to appease them. Speak softly. Compliment them. Soothe them. This does feel like some kind of ‘fawny’ thing.

And all this is true with very straightforward, day-to-day stressors.

But what’s also true of straightforward, day-to-day stressors, is that often this is exactly the correct behaviour to be engaging in. Arguments are passionate. Uncomfortable phone calls should wait until you feel prepared. Some stressors should be withdrawn from. And irritated people do have to be soothed.

Stress isn’t just responsible for our bad behaviour, it’s responsible for all behaviour when we’re trying to achieve something. So when we talk about the whatever f’s, let’s just extend it to talk about the good side of these things too.

• Fighting can be the wrong approach to a situation, but it’s also about assertiveness, boundary setting, courage, and leadership.
• Flying away from an obstacle can be unhelpful, but there’s a reason ‘withdrawal’ is a military tactic. Flight can be more industrious than fighting. It’s about perseverance, which sometimes requires healthy disengagement.
• Freezing can stop us doing anything useful. But it’s also a way of achieving peace, mindfulness, presence in the moment. Poise is a word we use to describe courtiers at the Queen’s court, but to be poised is to hold the balance, ready to act, and freezing is a way of doing that.
• And I’d probably have more trouble convincing people that fawning is a bad thing than a good one—another little reminder of the population we’ve been stealing from. All we do as humans is fawn. Sometimes you can over-fawn. This is quite common in the traumatised. You might people-please too much. Be too submissive. Fail to set healthy boundaries and say ‘no’. But in the main, smoothing the way for others is a virtue we admire.

For all of these, stress is responsible for the good and the bad side of them.

¶What to do with ‘fucking’

The ‘fuck’, or ‘fornicate’ bit is a bit harder to pin down. Academics don’t really deploy it at all. This is more blog-article fare. But there is a known relationship between physical arousal and sexual arousal, as I point out:

In fact, we know that sexual arousal is so similar to the kind of physical arousal that comes from a fear-based stress response that we can easily confuse fear for attraction to someone. The famous study is that of the love bridge. Young men who are asked to rate a woman’s attractiveness after speaking with her while crossing a rickety old bridge will rate much higher than those rating her attractiveness on a more stable bridge. The physical arousal from the threat of the bridge was confused for sexual arousal from the woman standing in the middle of it.⁵

But, less helpfully, and also as I point out in that article, sexual arousal is mostly goverened by our parasympathetic nervous system, not the more typical stress-promoting sympathetic nervous system. If sympathetic activation is what promotes both good and bad stress, then the parasympathetic activation is what brings it back to baseline so you’re ready for the next challenge you need to overcome.

Perhaps, then, a desire to fuck comes after the stressor, when we’re starting to be brought down. But also, sex can be a form of appeasement—making the person we were in conflict less at conflict with us in a very convincing manner. So perhaps it simply forms a natural part of the other other f’s.

I’m not sure. But “the five f’s” sounds ridiculous anyway, so I reckon we should just drop it.

¶Outro

Stress is good. It’s not some messy evolutionary callback. It makes us do things. It’s just that sometimes it tries too hard. Or, more commonly, it tries for too long—chronic stress is, honestly, super bad for you.

But in day-to-day life, it’s something we should seek out. And we can use the f’s for this just as easily as we can to try to avoid bad stress. Fight for those things worth fighting for, and fly from those things worth avoiding. Freeze when you’re not sure what to do until the answer becomes clear. And fawn. Always fawn. Not so much you’re sacrificing too much of yourself, but being nice to other people isn’t something the average people needs to be told to do less of, let’s be honest.