OVERVIEW OF THE FLIGHT RESPONSE
Anxiety is a necessary and protective emotion rooted in fear—your flight response. It’s part of the human condition, and can be triggered by various normative fear scenarios beginning from childhood: stranger shyness, separation, weather events, darkness, nightmares, performance and school anxiety, germs, getting ill or harmed, peer rejection, and more. Fear is healthy and helpful, until that fear interferes with normal life—where the seemingly smallest changes or circumstances can send us into a tailspin.
Here, you over-compensate for most things in an attempt to resolve the overwhelm of mobilizing hormones that help you to flee. You over-achieve, over-analyze, and over-perform. It’s where you go go go because you need to do do do in order to stay distracted. You practice escapism through: busyness with either with work, your newest hobbies or obsessions; excessive use of substances; or compulsive behaviors that provide temporary relief like gambling, shopping, or even sex. You’re subconsciously attracted to stress and hold the highest standards of perfectionism for yourself. You’re running away and avoiding people, places, and situations that create any discomfort. You’re restless and therefore find it difficult to be present, pay attention, or slow down.
Breaking free from any chronic survival response requires:Â
- Learning the language of your unique nervous system: sensation, emotion, feeling, impulse.
- Understanding how your nervous system is reenacting these protective patterns and responses in your present day.
- Somatic completion: allowing the nervous system physiology to do now, what felt too overwhelming to do back then. This turning point happens when you explore Core Wounds work. For example: advocating or setting a boundary, walking away, expressing or emoting, etc.
- Building nervous system capacity/resilience to tolerate discomfort (anger, fear, sadness, anxiety, shame, etc). This is done through routine experiential practice.
- Integrating a nervous system-centered lifestyle across your external world: relationships, health & wellbeing, career, finances, etc.
 "We may not be responsible for the world that created our nervous system, but we can take responsibility for the nervous system which creates our world."
-Dr. Gabor Maté
LET'S HEALÂ
Somatic Practice for Flight
"HEELS UP"
As you sit, lean forward in your seat while lifting your heels up and activating or engaging your calf muscles (as if you’re about to get up and “get away”). Do this for one minute. If you feel that you have the capacity, you can deepen this practice by adding in three short and consecutive inhales at the end, further mobilizing your heart rate.
Here's a BONUS, just for you! Enjoy behind-the-scenes access to this 40-minute Nervous System Guided Practice on "somatic boundary setting and mapping." This exclusive recording is from our weekly Nervous System Gym call in the Body-First Healing Program.
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