Fight, Flight or Freeze? Understanding the Nervous System’s Survival Response

(Part 2 of 2)

Ever feel like you’re one tiny trigger away from snapping, shutting down or running for the hills? You might notice you can't make simple decisions anymore, feeling paralysed by choices that used to be easy. That’s your nervous system talking.

When everything is fine, you’re in a regulated state, you feel safe, connected to others and yourself, able to think clearly and have fun. We thrive in that state.

But when something around or inside of us feels off… we shift into survival mode, often without realising it. That's when fight, flight or freeze kicks in (or fawn, but that’s for another blog post). It's your system signalling that you might not be safe.

Your energy spikes, anxiety shows up, you feel wired, unable to think (or even digest) properly. Maybe you feel panicky, with the urge to either escape (flight) or you get defensive, irritated, angry (fight).

And if there’s no escape, or fighting isn’t an option, your system may escalate into freeze. It's the body’s way of conserving energy and protecting you when everything just feels too much.

'Freeze' is a state of conservation, low energy, where sensations and emotions are blunted, creating a sense of numbness, disconnection and shutdown. It’s really hard to connect to others – and even ourselves – in that state. We might feel stuck or trapped and flat, spaced out.

Evolutionarily speaking, the freeze state comes from an ancient survival response, when our ancestors were ‘fish’ (just a little while ago…). Staying still helped avoid predators who hunted by detecting movement. That same protective instinct still lives in our nervous system today. When fight or flight isn’t possible or isn’t working, we literally freeze to survive.

These states aren’t good or bad, they’re just part of our system’s clever design.

But when you’re stuck in the Fight, Flight or Freeze for too long, it begins to affect every part of your life: your energy, your health, your moods, your relationships etc. It can start to influence your day-to-day more than you realise.

The good news is that your nervous system is adaptable.

And there are ways to make it feel safer.

Why nervous system regulation changes everything

When your system learns how to regulate i.e. how to move through stress and come back to balance, you don’t get stuck in the chaos.

You get to respond instead of reacting, you regain control. You get to feel choice again (a BIG favourite of mine). You're more flexible.

It’s not about being zen 24/7. You’re human living in a modern day society that’s on 24/7, you’re not a monk - and I heard even monks aren’t zen all the time so I should really pick another example… but here we are.

It's about the capacity to handle the challenges thrown your way.

It's about increasing your resilience. It’s about your capacity to handle life with more ease and fewer meltdowns in Woolies carparks.

How to support your nervous system gently and holistically

There are a lot of ways to support the nervous system: from co-regulation with loved ones and pets (not to be underestimated!), nutrition to mindfulness, yoga to cold plunges, therapy to supplements, etc.

But your nervous system is truly unique, shaped by a multitude of factors and what works for other people might not work for you. That’s why finding what works best for you matters a lot.

And just talking about stress and how stressed we are isn't the same as resolving it (looking at you, mum 😉).

More and more research shows that the nervous system doesn’t just heal through logic alone, it needs bottom-up, body-based approaches that help us feel safe from the inside out.

That’s why I'm so passionate about specific modalities, and I highly recommend them: gentle, evidence-based techniques that work with your system, not just your thoughts. In my experience (both personal and professional), they create real, lasting change. And the latest research also backs this up.

These modalities work with your whole system: your body, nervous system, emotions, thoughts and (the part I find most powerful and often overlooked) your heart - and its incredible intelligence.

3 game-changing approaches that honour your whole system: body, mind and heart

Here are my favourite ways to support and rewire gently, safely, and effectively a nervous system:

⚪️ EFT Tapping (Emotional Freedom Techniques)

EFT is a therapeutic modality that combines elements of modern psychology with acupressure.

By tapping on specific points on the body while tuning into thoughts, feelings and beliefs, EFT helps lower emotional stress and supports nervous system regulation.

Research shows that EFT can significantly lower cortisol levels and activate the parasympathetic nervous system (the part of your autonomic nervous system responsible for rest, repair, and recovery).

It helps shift the body out of fight, flight or freeze modes and into ventral vagal, where you feel safe, grounded and more connected to yourself and others.

It’s particularly effective for addressing emotional wounds, anxiety, fear of judgment, people-pleasing patterns, emotional reactivity, and long-held limiting beliefs that feel hard to shift through talking alone.

In other words, when we’re doing EFT tapping together (or with another practitioner), we’re not just talking about your stress, we’re helping your body to let it go and feel safe doing so.

This is what makes EFT different from talk therapy: it's a bottom-up approach helping you release what your mind alone can't seem to shift.

This is now backed by over 300 peer-reviewed studies (Scientific Research on EFT Tapping - Tapping Research - EFT Studies), with 2023 reviews confirming EFT's effectiveness for anxiety and research showing up to 43% reductions in cortisol (the stress hormone) levels.

🤍 Heart Coherence

Heart Coherence is a research-backed technique that uses heart focused breathing and the intentional generation of renewing emotions to regulate the nervous system.

Developed by the HeartMath Institute over 30 years ago, it brings the heart, brain and autonomic nervous system into a state of coherence: a rhythm where everything works together.

This state is measurable through biofeedback, so you can see how your system is responding in real time.

There are many HeartMath techniques. The process is personalised depending on what your system needs and how it responds in real time, with support from biofeedback technology if needed.

Heart Coherence does more than regulate the nervous system. It helps you reconnect with your heart intelligence: a beautiful, grounded, almost magical inner guidance that often knows the way, especially when the mind feels stuck or full of doubt.

It’s powerful and can be deeply transformational. It has been pivotal in my own healing journey.

👁️ Somatic EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing)

Somatic EMDR is a body-aware adaptation of the now pretty well established EMDR therapy protocol.

It’s designed to gently help the nervous system process and integrate unresolved trauma, stress and emotional overwhelm.

It uses bilateral stimulation, like eye movements or tapping, to activate both hemispheres of the brain, while also bringing attention to body sensations and emotional responses.

By activating the brain’s natural processing pathways, this work also helps rewire how emotional memories are stored and linked. It shifts the underlying memory networks that used to keep you stuck.

It can be especially helpful for trauma and for people who understand their patterns intellectually but still feel 'hijacked' by emotional triggers, somatic tension or looping thoughts.

If you'd say things like “I know it’s over, but my body still reacts like it’s happening”, Somatic EMDR can help shift that.

Each of these bottom-up techniques is already powerful on its own. I started with Heart Coherence back in 2021 and the shifts I could see in my practice were already impressive just with this one modality.

When drawn on over time alongside energy healing and other supportive practices, they support meaningful change at the emotional, physiological and energetic levels.

Recent research shows that for clients experiencing trauma, bottom-up techniques can be more effective in promoting emotional regulation than cognitive approaches (talk therapy) alone.

High sensitivity? More like high perceptiveness

Being called 'too sensitive' is something I heard quite a bit growing up (I now see it as a kind of superpower).

It's often just a nervous system doing its best to protect its human, even when it doesn’t need to. One that notices the little things others miss.

When your system has been under chronic stress, it can become overprotective, firing off false alarms and interpreting neutral situations as threats.

In other words: you're not overreacting. Your system may just be responding to old patterns or unresolved emotional wounds.

This work isn’t about making you less sensitive, it’s more about helping your system learn what safety feels like again.

So your perceptiveness becomes a gift, not a burden.

From there, you get to choose again. And you begin to respond instead of react.

Once your system feels safer, it becomes easier to tune into what’s real, what’s true and what’s yours.

Reclaiming self-trust: you don’t have to keep living on high alert

But you can.

You can keep living (or maybe it feels more like surviving) the way you always have. For some people, that go-go-go mode is familiar, even addictive. And that’s ok.

But if a part of you is ready for things to shift, to feel better, lighter, freer, and you’re still reading maybe something in you knows it's time for a shift.

With the right support, your nervous system can learn to feel steadier and more aligned with who you truly are, not just who you ‘have to be’.

Your system can feel safe enough to return to resilience, balance, clarity... and reclaim the self-trust that you haven’t lost, just forgotten. I believe it's in all of us.

If this resonates, I’d love to support you. Or I encourage you to find a trusted practitioner in your area.

I offer sessions online, or in person in Sydney near Manly (Northern Beaches) and at Better Balance Wellness clinic in Double Bay (Eastern Suburbs). You're welcome to book a session or a free connection call with me here.

With Heart,

Claudia Luck-Rodriguez

Holistic Practitioner for Emotional & Nervous System Health

Certified & Accredited EFT Practitioner in Sydney · Heart Coherence · Somatic EMDR · Trauma-informed