Hi everyone, today's audio is the first of several about fight-flight, and the impact it has on the body. We've talked a little bit about how thoughts activate feelings, we don't tend to have a feeling without a thought. The feeling then influences the physiological sensations in our body, which influence our behaviours, which subsequently, once again influences the types of thoughts that we have. So essentially, we have tricky brains, we have a very, very old part of the brain, which is ancient. And it's the brain that we share with other mammals.

It's what we call the reptilian brain. And it's pretty basic. And within that, we share with other mammals survival instincts and emotions. Somewhere down the line, humans formed sort of membranes around the old brain. And the mammalian brain was formed, which gave us other gifts such as the ability to think in complex ways to plan, imagine, to ruminate. Now, those two parts of the brain coexist pretty nicely a lot of the time. An example might be that you see a potential danger, you have a thought about that, that initiates a threat response. And then we make a plan to move away from that threat in some way.

However, unfortunately, we have overactive imaginations at times, or we're hardwired sometimes in ways, which mean that we think in unhelpful ways. Which means that we can stimulate a fight-flight response, even when there isn't a threat. Typically, that's done through imagining or generating some unhelpful thoughts. Now, the threat system is ancient, as I've already mentioned, and it can't distinguish between real or imagined threats. So it just stimulates the fight-flight response by essentially sounding an alarm, which stems from the amygdala. And that alarm sends a message to our body, which sends us into fight, flight or freeze.

Before we start to talk about what actually happens in the body, it's important to distinguish between those threat responses. Now, obviously, we need a threat system. The problem is that we have a threat system, which was designed at a time when we experienced an enormous amount of threat. So essentially, over the years, the threat has somewhat diminished. Of course, this does depend on where you live. But we've still got that old system. So it's rather like we've got this incredible upgrade to a computer. But the emotional brain didn't get the reboot.

So sometimes we get some sort of miscommunication between those two brains, the old and the new, reptilian and mammalian brain. Now the function of fight-flight freeze is pretty obvious. If we hear a rustling in the bushes. Perhaps the more revered members of the clan would have reached for their spears, whereas I went along with maybe some others would have been running off towards the cave. I absolutely 100% have a flight response. And I have learned to not feel ashamed by that. It's just a lottery. It's just how I'm wired.

I've got friends who work in emergency services, for example, however, who feel very different about anxiety. They might have a fight response typically, think bouncers, firemen, policemen, they're much more likely to gravitate to those kinds of roles because of their threat response and how they feel about threat. It wouldn't do us a great deal of good would it to have soldiers running for the hills at first sound of gunfire.

The function of fight-flight-freeze, as I said, it's fairly obvious, to run away is to protect yourself, to fight is also to protect ourselves. One thing we talk less commonly about is the freeze response. Now in more extreme forms, that might come in the form of what we call tonic immobility, this sense where the body is so afraid it shuts down completely. It's essentially just evolution's way of preparing us for an impact, for the hit as it were.

But standard freeze response is very common, think of deer and how they respond in the headlights. Essentially, it's just camouflage. Not so helpful now, perhaps when we're trying to remember our lines while we're in a play or trying to think of something clever to say in a tricky social situation. But go back a few hundred years and find yourself in some local conflict and you're foraging for mushrooms in the woods and a twig snaps. It's not so strange is it, it's not so ridiculous. Possibly even helpful.