Self-Help Techniques to Calm the Fight-or-Flight Response (2024)

FAQs

How do I calm my fight-or-flight response? ›

Deep breathing, relaxation strategies, physical activity, and social support can all help if you are feeling the effects of a fight-or-flight response.

However, if you are under chronic stress or have experienced trauma, you can get stuck in sympathetic fight or flight or dorsal vagal freeze and fold. When this happens, it can lead to disruptions in everything from basic life skills like sleeping, self-care and eating, to complexities like learning and self-soothing.

As adrenaline and cortisol levels drop, your heart rate and blood pressure return to baseline levels, and other systems resume their regular activities. But when stressors are always present and you constantly feel under attack, that fight-or-flight reaction stays turned on.

Ways to keep the sympathetic nervous system from becoming overactive or excessive include lifestyle changes, such as meditation, yoga, Tai Chi, or other forms of mild to moderate exercise. Various exercises can train the sympathetic nervous system not to become overactive and may also be good stress reducers.

Beta-blockers are a class of medication that helps control your body's fight-or-flight response and reduce its effects on your heart. Many people take beta-blockers to treat heart-related conditions, such as: high blood pressure. heart failure.

Work on repairing your nervous system naturally by using deep breathing techniques. Box breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, and alternate nostril breathing are all awesome ways to invite calm during a state of panic. You can also try meditation or yoga paired with deep breathing, even if you only have 5 or 10 minutes.

Daily Deep Relaxation

Taking just 10-20 minutes each day to practice relaxation techniques can make a world of difference. Whether it's with meditation or meditative movement techniques like Qigong, yoga, or other techniques that relax you, give yourself a break during the day to simply be.

The body turns on the "fight or flight" response, but is prevented from turning it off again. This produces constant anxiety and overreaction to stimulation, followed by the paradoxical response called "learned helplessness," in which victims apparently lose all motivation.

How can I calm my amygdala naturally? ›

There are many different conceptualizations of coping strategies, but the five general types of coping strategies are problem-focused coping, emotion-focused coping, social support, religious coping, and meaning making.

The fight or flight response is an automatic physiological reaction to an event that is perceived as stressful or frightening. The perception of threat activates the sympathetic nervous system and triggers an acute stress response that prepares the body to fight or flee.

There are three stages of fight-or-flight: Alarm, Resistance and Exhaustion, the body's healthy response to a life-threatening crisis.

A deep sigh is your body-brain's natural way to release tension and reset your nervous system. Simply breathe in fully, then breathe out fully, longer on the exhale. Studieshave shown that a deep sigh returns the autonomic nervous system from an over-activated sympathetic state to a more balanced parasympathetic state.

Neurotropic B vitamins play crucial roles as coenzymes and beyond in the nervous system. Particularly vitamin B1 (thiamine), B6 (pyridoxine), and B12 (cobalamin) contribute essentially to the maintenance of a healthy nervous system.

These glands respond by pumping the hormone epinephrine (also known as adrenaline) into the bloodstream. As epinephrine circulates through the body, it brings on a number of physiological changes. The heart beats faster than normal, pushing blood to the muscles, heart, and other vital organs.

How long should it take the body to reset after fight or flight experience? ›

The high levels of reaction by the sympathetic nervous system come down and the amygdala makes the parasympathetic nervous system return the body to its normal relaxed state. The fight-or-flight response is over. The body needs about 20 minutes to physically recover from an acute stress reaction.

You can do this by slowing down, taking deep breaths, and refocusing your thoughts. These steps allow your brain's frontal lobes to take over for the irrational amygdala. When this happens, you have control over your responses, and you won't be left feeling regret or embarrassment at your behavior.

Meditation, tai chi, yoga are the best calming exercises that can help you fight chronic stresses. These calming exercises for Amygdala keeps the mind and body in a relaxed state and helps us cool down the natural rev up state.

We demonstrate that goal-directed eye-movements, like working-memory tasks, deactivate the amygdala, the core neural substrate of fear learning. Effective connectivity analyses revealed amygdala deactivation potentially engaged dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal pathways.

Passive coping strategies, such as escaping, avoiding, and denial of the stressor, can be contrasted to active coping strategies, such as seeking social support, engaging in activism, or acceptance.

Weiten has identified four types of coping strategies: appraisal-focused (adaptive cognitive), problem-focused (adaptive behavioral), emotion-focused, and occupation-focused coping.

What foods reduce panic attacks? ›

Foods naturally rich in magnesium may, therefore, help a person to feel calmer. Examples include leafy greens, such as spinach and Swiss chard. Other sources include legumes, nuts, seeds, and whole grains. Foods rich in zinc such as oysters, cashews, liver, beef, and egg yolks have been linked to lowered anxiety.

Serotonin Serotonin may be the most well-known neurotransmitter. Low levels of serotonin are linked to both anxiety and depression. Like most neurotransmitters, low or unbalanced serotonin levels can occur genetically/naturally, and can also be created by your emotions.

On average, your fight-or-flight response can last anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. You should calm down once the danger has passed. You feel your muscles unwind, and your hormones, blood pressure and heart rate return to balance—that's your parasympathetic nervous system or your relaxation response.

A person in fight or flight may feel extremely alert, agitated, confrontational, or like they need to leave a room or location. A severe fight or flight response can become a panic attack. It can also trigger asthma attacks in people with the condition.

The high levels of reaction by the sympathetic nervous system come down and the amygdala makes the parasympathetic nervous system return the body to its normal relaxed state. The fight-or-flight response is over.

Magnesium suppresses the secretion of cortisol and adrenaline from the adrenal glands. It also suppresses the release of less famous stress hormones, like adrenocorticotropin (ACTH), from the pituitary gland (Sartori et al., 2012).

As already mentioned, the two main behaviours associated with fear and anxiety are to either fight or flee. Therefore, the overwhelming urges associated with this response are those of aggression and a desire to escape, wherever you are.

Coming Out Of Shutdown Mode

So how do we climb back out of shutdown mode? The opposite of the dorsal vagal system is the social engagement system. So, in short, what fixes shutdown mode is bringing someone into healthy social engagement, or proper attachment.

Some may have a fight-or-flight type of response, which may include muscle tension, heart pounding and sweating because their body "believes it needs to activate," she explains. Others maybe experience a freeze response, which can look like someone who struggles to move or get out of bed.