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? ⤵︎

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 ⤵︎

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

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 ⤵︎

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. ⤵︎

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. ⤵︎

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? 🤔 ⤵︎

Live fierce, live free.