How to cope with the 4 fear responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn)

Hi everyone. I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist, and today's video is going to focus on ways to cope with the four fear responses. So I did a four part series, one video for each of the four fear responses which include fight flight, freeze and fawn. And and these can also be referred to as acute stress responses or trauma responses, but either way they elicit fear and anxiety and it's your body's way of responding to an actual or perceived threat.

So the more we can understand the types of fear responses that we use and we can recognize when our bodies start to feel tense and we start to feel fearful or anxious. There are some techniques we can use to kind of help ease that tension. So some of them are mental grounding techniques. So these are going to have more to do with your thinking processes.

So one of which is to really focus your attention on your environment. This is a good way of bringing your attention back to the present moment and what you're doing in that moment, as opposed to letting the thoughts associated with the fear kind of take over. You can also recite the lyrics to your favorite song or your favorite poem or just kind of mentally recite some positive affirmations to yourself.

And these can also include safety statements. So reminding yourself that you are safe in the moment or that your body is safe even though your nervous system is having this reaction. You can use visualization. So this might include sort of visualizing yourself in a peaceful place or your happy place, but it can also include visualizing yourself.

Overcoming your fears. The mind is pretty powerful when it comes to things like this. So you can use that to your advantage and then you can also perform various mental calculations. So this is just kind of a good way to busy your mind and distract it from some of the thoughts that might be occurring that are related to the feared stimulus.

There are a whole bunch of other mindfulness techniques and essentially I don't have time in this video to kind of go through all of those but just the idea of practicing mindfulness means that you are bringing your attention back to the present moment and focusing on what is going on in the present. So there are also some physical grounding techniques that you can use.

So breathing is probably one of the most effective ones. There are all sorts of breathing techniques out there and you really want to focus on the speed at which you're breathing and counting. So how many seconds are you breathing in? How many seconds are you holding it? How many seconds are you exhaling?

And there are a whole whole bunch of different techniques out there that you could just google up or look up on youtube. You can also touch or hold an object tightly. This is why stress balls are effective. You could also hold an ice cube, anything that sort of brings in one of your five senses is a really good way to ground yourself and bring yourself back to the present.

I know there has been a lot of talk on tiktok and stuff about biting into a lemon. So just that the sour nous of the lemon is a really good way to kind of um physically ground yourself and bring yourself back to the present moment. If you're standing, you can also put weight on your heels and really kind of tune into that sensation of your um your body being physically grounded in the earth or in the floor.

You can also practice tensing your muscles and then releasing them slowly from your forehead all the way down to your feet. This can also be referred to as a body scan and again, um just if you look up body scan on google or youtube, there are a lot of guided body scans where they'll have you tense and release each muscle group individually, which can be really helpful.

You can also do something to, to kind of treat yourself and do something comforting. So maybe an example might be like taking a bubble bath or something that's going to again give you physical sensations, but also give you that feeling of safety and warmth and um and just feel feel comforting and any of the other five senses that you can engage is going to be, is going to provide you with a physically grounding experience.

So, sometimes aromatherapy people will, I have clients who have a fear of flying and they will bring some um like essential oils with them and maybe smell that you can choose some pretty minty gum. Anything that that really engages one of the five senses is going to be helpful, especially now that the weather is getting colder here, just a change in temperature to you know, if you're feeling really um anxious and and kind of wound up, step outside for a few minutes and just let that that shift in temperature kind of calm your nervous system.

So, I know I threw a lot of techniques out there, this is a real short video, so I can't go through each one individually. But if you do find that you are struggling to kind of manage your anxiety or your fear responses or if you have a history of trauma, then um guidance from a therapist can really help.

So not only can we help you learn more of about the techniques that I shared, but you can also start to challenge and break out of this sort of fixed trauma response that you keep re experiencing and learn to access more effective responses when facing actual threats or actual fears or anxiety provoking situations. You can start to heal the emotional pain that is at the root of those reactions and to learn how to establish healthy boundaries, boundaries play such a huge role in our lives and it's something that I talk about in almost every session boundaries are just so important to kind of keep us keep our emotional state safe and protected.

And then finally therapy can really help you reconnect with your sense of self a lot of times, you know, if we experience trauma or anxiety, we feel disconnected from ourselves and so it can really help to re establish that. So um I know it through a lot of information at you. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to um to ask a question or leave a comment and if you feel like you do need more help with coping with your fear responses, please feel free to reach out.

I do offer free 15 minute consultations and and um you can schedule that through my website cathartic space counseling dot com. Be sure to follow me at cathartic space counseling um if you want to stay up to date on my weekly content and I try to release new helpful or informative videos each week. So I hope you all have a great rest of your week and I will see you next time.