In a postmodern world, fight-or-flight response is causing you more harm than good!#

The post-modern flight response#

I prepared a thorough and brilliant presentation for our next big endeavour. During the meeting, teammates expose several competing ideas. Suddenly, I did not feel so well. I started blushing and was not able to articulate my thoughts.

I quickly counted the proponents of my project only to find out that only a single teammate supported me! Suddenly, I was not part of the conversation anymore. I felt ashamed of my initial concept and convinced myself that it as a bad idea. I retreated on my phone and looked at useless news feeds or slack messages.

For my teammates, engaged in the discussion and passionately debating what to do next, I indeed disappeared! From their point of view, I was not in the room anymore. My survival response system decided that fleeing was the best solution. I accomplished this by blocking eye contact, cutting all communications with the threats, being as small as I could, looking nervously at the nearest exit and protecting my vital and reproductive organs.

At this stage, any physical discomfort is amplified and I could leave the room immediately: headache, sore throat, a notification on your phone, a spammer call, etc.

Whether you leave the room in real life or not is incidental: for everyone else in the room, you have already left the room.

The post-modern fight-response#

We usually have more experience with fighting. The human race is now earth super-predator, and there is no doubt that we are, overall, an aggressive species.

In a meeting, fighting will lead you to take aggressive measures to protect what is at stake. This is the typical passive-aggressive behaviour.

Just before a meeting, I had a great 10 minutes coffee chat about what happened during the week-end with Patrice. Then we went into the meeting. The minute Patrice became slightly dismissive of my project, I went all-in on this poor soul. Everybody could see that my cheeks were red and that my speech was fast, hard to understand. I went personal: “You never support my ideas,” “you do not understand my position,” “you have no idea what you are saying,” “this is my area of responsibility.”. At this point in time, I was not able to listen to any other ideas; I don’t even remember what happened after my fight response at this particular meeting.

Years after, however, I still remember vividly how stupid I felt afterwards!

Post-fight-or-flight: the physical malaise#

From a physiological dimensions, after the fight-or-flight response, the parasympathetic nervous system kicks-in. Its goals are to bring us back to normal (homeostasis) using another neurotransmitter: Acetylcholine. During this cool down, you do not feel particularly well as your body transitions from full active/survival mode to your regular mode of operation. Your heartbeat, breathing, pressure and various hormones level are going back to their normal operating parameters.

This is why you will most certainly experience some level of physical discomfort. For most of us, after flight-or-flight events, our hands are shaking, our throat feels dry and we tend to feel empty.

If you can, physical activity is a great therapy: your body was primed to do an intense life or death exercise. Because this was a non life-threatening social interaction, this lack of coherence can cause long term direct health issues: ulcers, cardiac problems, hypertension.

We compensate our short-term physical malaise with an addiction behaviour. We immediately look for comfort outside of our body and mind system: drink soda, eat greasy and sugary food, go shopping, use drugs.

Without realizing it, we can end-up in a very negative circle of cause and effects where stress and unmanaged fight-or-flight responses for non life-threatening situation is causing us and our social, professional and family circles long term irreversible harm.

Post-fight-or-flight: the emotional harm#

Once the physical malaise emotional response is completed, most of us will continue the fight-or-flight response in our mind. Telling ourselves stories that justify our course of action and going all-in into our own framing of the situation.

This mental reframing is really toxic on the long run. Instead of considering the situation and why it happens, we invent stories where others have fixed roles and even dialogue. Either supporting you or being the archetypal bad-guy/girl.

This is all caused by an evolutionary mechanism: as a species, we needed to remember all our fight-or-flight answer and map these to our environment. A classical example would be that you do not try to use a young saber-tooth tiger as a puppy for your family: sabre tooth mom will most certainly be angry by your actions and threatened the whole tribe. Certainly an event and encounter worth memorizing and sharing with your kids and grand kids.

The bad meeting you just had about the flyer for the next developer event does not have the same intrinsic life-threatening value. It is not worth memorizing each and every detail (what were your co-worker wearing, the meeting room, the taste and temperature or your morning latte, who was there, who triggered you, etc.).

Once you have these mental model of other human being in mind, it will taint all your relations with them. Your alert system will now be monitoring even more closely these circumstances and looking for leading indicators that this situation is happening … again. Improving your sensitivity to improve, by evolutionary design, your chances to live another day.

As you can see, your mental chatter and story-telling has long term negative consequences about all your future human interactions.

You can detect these fixed mindset (closed behaviour) easily: simply listen to yourself (or to your thoughts about yourself). For instance:#

  • I am terrible at public speaking and will never do it again. This was most certainly caused by a flight response when younger. And now you have decided that you will never experience this again.

  • I am an alpha-male and industry captain. This could be caused by a systematic fight comportment during social interactions: I am a bully, I love the fight response and I am gaining power and money because of it.

  • I can not stand this person, he/she is always criticizing me. We always end-up fighting and being angry at each other (two people decided to use systematically the fight-approach). Sometimes you quit your job, sometimes you stop all communication with this person to avoid experiencing the fight or flight response totally

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What can you do to calibrate better your fight-or-flight triggers?#

Know your existing triggers#

Understanding why these responses are happening is key to any sustainable behaviour change. In this article, we have seen that the fight-or-flight reponse is like a two-stage rockets with very different time-frame

  • Physical response: only a few seconds to start and then a few minutes-hours to cool-down.
  • Mental response: by reframing the situation and rehashing it again and again, the timeframe for this response is your entire lifetime.

Keep a fight-or-flight journal and use it to find triggers. Once you know your triggers, decide on which one do you want to work on.

Acceptance and ownership#

You have to accept that fight-or-flight response will always be part of your life. These responses are part of our evolutionary mechanism and were essential for our survival a few generations ago and all mammals and reptiles have this system.

Now you also need to accept your actions: take full responsibility for everything you have said or done during these episodes.

Do not tolerate physical, ethical or mental duress: leave the room on your own terms#

I want to emphasize that, we should accept any situation and become purely stoics in the face of these events. Even in our post-modern world, the fight-or-flight system is sometimes right!

Some behaviours are simply not acceptable and you should not tolerate them. In particular, you should call out any behaviour that undermine your physical security, ethical or mental wellbeing.

If you don’t feel safe anymore, wether because of repetitive abuse or during a single-time event, it is still possible to protect yourself from long term harm caused by the fight-or-flight system.

Use your cold-blooded analytical min and leave the room on your own terms!

You don’t have to say a word or look at anyone: just leave the room silently with a poker-face. Do that before your fight-or-flight system kicks-in.

Then you should seek help inside your organization or outside of it. Help includes law-enforcement and mental-health professionals.

If possible changing your environment could be a great solution: your current environment is really toxic and life-threatening. You could try one of these: change manager, change department, change job, change city, change country.

Take control of your past actions: make amends#

If, like most of us, you discover that your behaviour was unfair and that what you said clearly overstep the rules of engagement and even, sometime, the law you should apologize as soon as possible for your behaviour.

You can apologize in real life (physical world) but in my experience, it is way easier to do it first in the virtual world, inside your head. Then, once you have practice your virtual skills, do it for real.

You will be amazed by the outcome of sincere and precise excuses.

Join a team#

While you can certainly improve by yourself, do not hesitate to seek help and like-minded people.

I am not simply referring to mental-health professionals.

For instance, when I wanted to face my fear of public-speaking, I joined a toastmaster club. Everyone in the group was facing the same fear or had go through this fear. Some of them were now international public speakers competing every month while others were, like me, on the path. Each of them cared deeply about my challengeds and wanted to help me succeed. This is quite contagious and an efficient way to change.

If you gather items (shopping frenzy!) part of your regular responses, you can find groups and resources to simplify your life and understand the causality between your buying behaviour and your fight-or-flight response.

Key take away is that, thanks to the Internet, you can find lots of people with a similar problem working actively to challenge the status-quo. If you can join the right-team for you, it will give you access to a wide network of experts, caring about you and ready to share their own experiences to help you succeed.

Physical health#

The fight-or-flight response is intensely physical. When no effort is required it become a root-cause for various well-known chronic illnesses.

Ideally, physical activity should be done immediately after the incident. A brisk walk is enough, 10 push-ups or whatever your immediate environment allows you to do is great. This physical activity will act like a release valve and dissipate the long-term effect of these incidents.

This is why regular activity is recommended by every country health governing body. If you accept the fact that you will have random event with fight-or-flight response, regular physical activity is like the release valve of a pressure cooker: indispensable for human safety reasons!

Mental health#

This is the illness of our century (and maybe millennium). While survival was at stake, the fight-or-flight response was adapted to our species lifestyle.

For trauma or for behaviour deeply ingrained and causing hard problems, mental help professionals are required.

For lighter work, you can refer to old wisdom: develop your own mental models for the world, live an examined life or even adopt a spiritual or religious path. These frameworks provide a global sense of belonging and direction to our life. Once you have a clear set of values, you will make better decisions and it will help you avoid false trigger of your fight-or-flight response system.

Mindfulness and meditation are helpful to detect triggers and avoid solidying your past responses into an habit. Habits are very hard to change. In a way, mindfulness and meditation are to the mind what the physical activity is to the body. When done regularly it will allow you to feel the impact of each fight-or-flight event and avoid a build-up of undesired mental models, and harmful habits.

Conclusion#

Each and everyone of use will experience some fight-or-flight response during our lives. Our human superpower has created a complex and compelling virtual world where we transform these experiences into fixed bad behaviours, habits and addictions.

Recalibrating the fight-or-flight outdated response system is a multi-step process. It starts with acceptance, making amends (virtually at first!), belonging to a team of like-minded people as well as taking care of your physical and mental health.

What are you waiting for?

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