In our last blog, Stress Responses: What Are They, How Do They Work, and Why I am so Confused!?, you survived a vicious bear attack and learned how the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in when other responses fail. We explored different stages of the freeze response, and how to recognize them. You also learned some pretty cool new words, like neuroception and ventral vagal, that can help you better identify your experience; or just impress your friends with it—it’s really up to you what you do with your new knowledge. This blog post will explore the freeze response in the everyday social-emotional situations that you are more likely to experience.

The Freeze Response in Everyday Social Situations

As we move through our day, we encounter situations that either knock us above or below our window of tolerance. That is just another way to say that we can only cope with so much stress before we “snap,” which kicks us above the window of tolerance, into the sympathetic branch of the nervous system, or we “shut down,” which is the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system.

These are regular occurrences that we often recover from quickly and we can easily slip back into our comfortable little windows. This might look like the copying machine being out of paper, the driver in front of you being too slow, missing an important call, being so busy at work that you missed lunch, your boss getting smart with you and you don’t deserve it because they don’t pay you enough to do all that extra work, you didn’t drink enough water, you stubbed your toe first thing in the morning and that set up your mood for the rest of the day; you all know exactly what I mean, and I am sure that you are thinking of your own experiences as you’re reading this!

But what if you don’t cope with these instances and instead just allow them to continue building up in your nervous system? Hint: Just moving on and trying to forget about it has a paradoxical effect that can make those emotions stronger and more dysregulated. That is why we need to constantly check in with our bodies, listen to what it needs, and honor those needs by healthily discharging that energy.

How long does it take before you tap out, hit the couch, veg out, or lock yourself away in your room? How long before you can no longer deal with people, so you stop answering your phone, and isolate yourself away from the world? This is an example of the freeze response in action. Your nervous system is sending you a message. It is saying “Hey, I am worn out and you haven’t taken care of me all day, so I am shutting us down!” 

What if as a child you experienced adverse situations (bullying, invalidation, lack of attunement from caregivers, feeling unseen, feeling unheard, being put down, being yelled at, being spanked, being told “I’ll give you something to cry about,” or left to your own devices during highly emotional times, etc.) that conditioned your nervous system to always be on high alert (there’s that neuroception again, see I told you it would come in handy).

What if as an infant your caregivers were unresponsive or inconsistent when you cried? What if you weren’t comforted and held regularly? Disclaimer: This is a very real phenomenon for children born in 1980s. We grew up in the “let them cry it out” generation. Adults truly believed that responding to crying babies would “spoil” them. Science now knows that our infant brains registered this as a threat to our survival, and that our nervous systems encoded these pre-verbal memories on a subconscious level. So when there is an event in your adult life that the nervous system remembers, it does not come back as an autobiographical memory, it comes back as a reaction. 

Okay, so back to adulthood. Let’s say that you and your partner get into an argument over where to eat for dinner. During the conflict, something in your partner’s tone “feels” triggering for you so freeze up. You might not know how to respond, you might not be able to get the words floating in your head to come out of your mouth, you may dissociate, you may feel sad, you might feel a sense of guilt or shame, and you may walk away from your partner and lock yourself in your bedroom. This is the freeze response in action. 

But why would my body go into this response if my life isn’t actually being threatened? Well, there are several systems at play here. Remember in the last blog post we said that the nervous system cannot tell the difference between an argument and a bear in the bush. If your system is “primed” (this is a neurological phenomenon in which our brain learns to expect a certain response after a stimulus, or any stimuli associated with it) or if you have experienced any of the situations listed above, your brain is primed to detect this as a threat and shut down. The icing on the cake is that because we are evolutionarily relational beings, meaning that we rely on social connection to survive, our brains register this as social rejection and social rejection was a threat to survival during the paleolithic era and that got handed down to us because it did save lives! Social rejection is registered in the same region of the brain as physical pain (the dorsal anterior cingulate, and the anterior insula). You know exactly what I am talking about if you have ever been chosen last for a team. Yea, that hurts. It hurt as a child and it hurts as an adult, and it’s okay to admit it. 

Alright, alright. We get the freeze stuff, and why it’s important. But what about the other responses? Why do I sometimes want to yell and throw things or run away? Great question! Stay tuned for future blog posts that are part of the Stress Responses series. We will explore them all. 

Written by Autumn Walsh, MSW.