Freeze: The many faces of overwhelm
Transcript episode 26
In the world of stress management and trauma informed care, we spend a lot of time talking about fight or flight. That’s typically what people think of when they think “stress”. Fight or flight is also known as sympathetic nervous system activation. Some people also call it arousal. Really it’s anything that gets you up and moving or activates you to take action in some way. That could be action to move toward something or away from something. It covers any action you take from getting out of bed in the morning to pulling an all nighter to study for a test to digging into a pint of ice cream after a fight with your partner. All of that falls under the fight flight response.
There’s another stress state that you may have heard of called Freeze. The Freeze state is part of the parasympathetic side of our nervous system. It can be a little confusing because social engagement and calm also is parasympathetic and we think of freeze as bad and social engagement as good. So today we’re going to work IN to the freeze state and talk about what it is, what it’s purpose is, what it looks like and feels like in humans and how we can safely move out of that state if we find ourselves stuck there.
So let’s get started with our work IN.
Human nature is still nature. We can look to nature to help us understand our own nervous system responses. First and foremost we should understand that everything the nervous system drives us to do is always rooted in survival. We may not like the way we feel in certain situations, we might need to apologize later for our reactions but the nervous systems main job is safety, security and survival of the body, your body. So I think it’s helpful to let go of the idea that any reaction is inherently bad or good and look and try to work with those responses to find a better outcome.
So let’s start here with a little evolutionary theory of brain development. In the 60’s a guy by the name of Paul MacLean developed the Triune Brain model. He theorized that there we 3 hierarchical regions of the brain. The primal most primitive area of Basal Ganglia (the brain stem) or Reptilian Brain, The Limbic system mammalian brain responsible for emotional responses and the neo cortex - rational brain ( neo mammalian)
Maclean’s theory was that these areas of the brain we separate. We know now from brain scans that it’s simple like that, there’s always overlap and interconnectivity and complexity between these areas. But if we are trying to understand our nervous system the triune brain can give us a simple starting point when we are talking about the autonomic NS and the freeze response.
When an animal is threatened or in a life and death situation, it’s autonomic NS takes over immediately. It will run away first, if it can’t run or is trapped, it will try to fight. But if the threat is too great or it becomes overwhelmed the ANS will shut it’s body down. It will freeze. I will play dead. Possums are famous for this. Every mammal does this and I assume non mammals as well. The survival purpose in animals is 2 fold. By Playing dead, the hope is the predator or threat will lose interest and go away. And 2 the freeze state prepares the animal for actual death by numbing pain receptors and rendering it unconscious. Both of those physical reactions in the body of an animal are a mercy.
The difference between animals and humans is that in animals after they survive the threat, they will wake up, shake themselves out of that freeze and return to their normal state of animalness. Humans can also experience a state of freeze. We can be overwhelmed by threatening experiences. But the difference is that we have a rational part of our brain, the neo cortex that is always getting in the way, constantly seeking and connecting emotional meaning to everything that happens and socializing us out of some of those natural releases like shaking.
So what does freeze look like in a person? Well, first of all it can look like true physical collapse in extreme circumstances, just like a possum or a rabbit. People can and do pass out under highly stressed moments. I came close when my daughter broke her arm when she was 6. I was able to get her to the hospital, in the ER, and then they brought in the xray and the room went sideways. Same thing happened again after a bike accident that collapsed my son's lung. I made it all the way to the ER and I was fine until they put up the x rays. Apparently X rays of my children's injuries are not my thing.
Your nervous system can and will do a full system shutdown if it feels it’s necessary for your survival. Because the rational brain is such a big player it can keep us moving and acting even while being in a state of overwhelm. We call this a high functioning freeze state and there are a lot of feelings, sensations or behaviors that fall into this category. A lot of people who insist that they aren’t stressed or don’t feel stress are actually living in this state. Many of our first responders and soldiers are actually trained into this state in order to do their jobs which makes it even more important in those kinds of careers that we provide a more complete education and detraining to help these brave men and women safely self regulate their nervous system response.
Side note: stress is a normal natural part of our lives. We should feel it. Not feeling stress is something you might want to be a little bit curious about.
There’s a whole lot of space and variation between the top edge of fight or flight and the bottom edge of freeze. As we’ve said before everyone has a unique and individual reaction to both chronic and acute sources of stress. So what is that line? Where is the edge between fight flight and freeze. How would you know if you’re just really highly activated or in a high functioning freeze? There’s a simple difference between the 2. In the sympathetic the thought is still “I can” In the Freeze state of parasympathetic the thought is “I can’t”. We can use those 2 statements and apply them to anything that we feel physically, mentally and emotionally to determine whether or not we have gone over that edge.
Besides fully passing out under stress or slipping into a catatonic state, what can freeze look like in people? Here’s what’s going on physiologically:
Increase in fuel storage and insulin activity - In other words your body is going to try to store calories as fat to use for survival
There’s an increase in endorphins that help numb the pain response - ostensibly to help you survive any physical injury from the threat you’re under.
Heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature and muscle tone is decreased - again if you are physical injured these things would help you survive
Facial expressions, eye contact, voice intonations, Awareness of the human voice, and social behavior is decreased - this is a very primitive reaction to triggering the dorsal ( protective) side of the vagus nerve which we’ll talk about in just a minute.
Sexual responses and immune system responses are decreased - only systems that are absolutely necessary for survival are on line at this point and that doesn’t include fighting germs or making babies.
That’s what's going on inside the body but you probably won’t notice a lot of that. Here are some things you might notice when you slip into an “i can’t” mindset
A sense of tiredness, lack of motivation or trying to conserve energy, sleeping all the time
A sense of helplessness, hopelessness, depression
Feeling trapped, stuck, unable to make a decision, mentally paralyzed unable to take action
Physical or emotional numbness, inability to feel certain parts of the body or any emotion at all, shut down
Shame, paralyzing guilt
Dissociation, becoming stuck and distracted in past memories, reliving those moments and all the emotional & physiological responses that went with them
Technically freeze is only half of the parasympathetic NS. Steven Porges polyvagal theory divide the PNS into the ventral vagal and dorsal vagal. Placing our social engagement state in the ventral vagal think open hearted connections with others, and the freeze state in the dorsal vagal or curled up fetal position protecting all our major organs. Both are states of stillness.
The Freeze response is available to you in case of extreme emergency only. It’s designed to activate when you are in a life or death situation ( you perceive one) to help you survive. You’re not meant to live there. Unfortunately our NS hasn’t evolved as quickly as our modern society and sometimes our primitive, reptilian and emotional parts of our brain perceive life or death threats even when our rational neo cortex disagrees. Because of that we don’t always allow ourselves a way to discharge that stress energy. It builds up in our muscles and tissues as physical tension and then the body senses that tension as more danger connecting traumatic meaning and leading us down a savage path of even more emotional and mental dysfunction. In simpler terms chronic stress injury.
What can you do if you find yourself stuck in a freeze state? The purpose of the Work IN is to help people find natural ways to work with their body and safely self regulate the nervous system. When you’re stuck in freeze, your NS is perceiving danger. What you need to do, assuming there is no actual danger or you have removed yourself from the dangerous situation, is to communicate safety through your body to you NS. There are several ways to do that.
The breath - the breath is the fastest most direct communication pathway into the nervous system. There are a lot of breathing techniques out there but one of the simplest is equal ratio Ujayi (whisper) breath. Inhale and exhale through the nose if you can. Notice how long your exhale is, then slow you inhale to meet the exhale listening for a soft whisper at the back of your throat. Inhaling through the nose lets your body create nitric oxide which relaxes smooth muscle (think heart, intestines), the exhale triggers parasympathetic, inhale triggers sympathetic sides on NS and when we even those out we can help the NS come back into balance. The whisper creates a vibration which can activate the ventral vagal branch of the vagus nerve opening pathways back the social engagement half of the parasympathetic NS.
Activation of the tremor mechanism with guidance - using movement like TRE or trauma informed yoga can help organize the NS response. Please refer to the previous episode on what TRE is and how it works to safely down regulate through the body.
Nutrition - The food we consume is an underutilized force for good when it comes to stress injury and recover from trauma. Everything we consume, eat or drink is communicating something to your body and the gut brain axis is a superhighway of information to the brain about whether you’re safe or in danger. Your gut is kind of like that one friend who won’t let you get a word in edgewise and is always talking about herself. Super annoying to the point of distraction. We can either support a sense of safety through our food choices and make it easier for us to survive or we can make things harder with every bite we take. We’ll be going into how to do this in more detail in future episodes for sure because food is my love language and you can use the food on your plate as a love letter to yourself.
So that’s it for this week's work IN. I hope you have a better understanding of what we mean by freeze and overwhelm and if you are in a place where you ‘re ready to try something different and work with your own system or learn to safely down regulate but you’re not sure how to get started I can help you with that. You can reach out and schedule a 30 minute free call with me by going to elementalkinetics.com/inquiry or send me an email at info@elementalkinetics.com. I would love to work with you, it’s what I do! Also on the website under the clients tab you’ll find several free resources that fit all of the things we talked about here today.
Thanks for listening today, let’s go work in!
I’m Ericka
I offer online, on demand private sessions, courses & memberships for individuals, small groups and corporate clients looking to build resilience and recover from stress injury.
I teach a powerfully effective modality called trauma release exercise that works through the body without the need to relive the story.
Whether your fight is on the frontline or the home front, past or present, personal or professional... chronic stress & stress injury can be a debilitating enemy.
You can step off the battlefield.