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Stress Responses • Return to Safety from Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn

As a freedompreneur, your business is a vehicle to free yourself and others, not an ambulance straight to the Emergency Room (or the grave ⚰️😛). 

If you don't consciously down-regulate your stress, you and your business will not make it to the finish line of lifestyle freedom.

What are Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn all seeking? ⤵︎

stress-responses-chart

That's right. Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn are all seeking Safety from stress and/or danger, real or perceived.


Response Zones

Adaptive Zone • Stress ≤ Capacity. When feeling safe, at ease with stress that you have the capacity to handle, you adapt to stress. You stay mostly in Safety. Example ⤵︎
stress-responses-adaptive-zone

Dysregulated Zone • Stress > Capacity. As stress mounts, you might react with freakouts or meltdowns. But you can still return to Safety. Example ⤵︎
stress-responses-dysregulated-zone

Maladaptive Zone • Stress > > > > Capacity. When stress faaaaaar exceeds your capacity to cope, you end up in chronic fight, flight, freeze or fawn mode. You can't find your way back to Safety. Example ⤵︎
stress-responses-maladaptive-zone

RESPONSE GRADIENT

Your stress responses are not on/off switches. They exist along a spectrum. 

Too much of any response for too long can turn life giving / creative energy into life taking / destructive energy. ⤵︎

stress-responses-spectrum

Fight • What started as passion, a spark in a lantern that inspires and guides, can rage into a forest fire that burns self and/or others.

Flight • What started as stamina, breath in mighty lungs that fuels and drives, can spin into a tornado that rips self and/or others.

Freeze • What started as presence, fertile soil that nourishes and grows life, can collapse into a mudslide that buries self and/or others.

Fawn • What started as flow, a cleansing river that carves new paths, can surge into a tsunami that drowns self and/or others.

What is your primary and secondary stress response quadrant? 🤔


In order to return to Safety, therefore access passion, stamina, presence and flow, you need to consciously navigate your response along the gradient back into the Adaptive Zone. ⤵︎

stress-responses-gradient

For you, what is the difference between 🤔:

  • Fight • Impulsivity and persistence?
  • Flight • Hyperactivity and desensitization?
  • Freeze • Numbing and patience?
  • Fawn • Over-giving and compromise?


RESPONSE ARCHETYPES

Including your past and present, how many of the 20 Stress Response Archetypes below do you recognize in yourself? 🤔 ⤵︎

stress-responses-archetypes

Live fierce, live free.

xo, Ella

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Having lived, died and traveled 131 countries, 87 emotions, 16 career reinventions, and 46.5 traumas, Ellany Lea inspires and guides women overachievers, phoenixes, wisdom keepers, and entrepreneurs to free her genius, so it frees the world.