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The Stress Response

You have probably heard the stress response be called many things but the most common is the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn response. This response gets triggered by a traumatic or stressful event. 

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When that stress response gets triggered, a person becomes flooded with emotions and then acts accordingly as a way to survive.

During this response, all non-essential functioning in the brain starts to shut down, including reasoning and higher thinking.

The issue with this response is like an oversensitive smoke detector. The brain and body cannot tell the difference between being told to wait versus coming across a mountain lion while on a hike. Basically, it cannot tell if there is just smoke or an actual fire happening so it will send you into survival mode just to be on the safe side.

How to turn it off

When the stress response in your child gets triggered, your first response as their parent is going to be to try and solve the problem. This may be something simple like giving them a hug or other soothing gesture and then they are fine. However, sometimes it gets more complicated than that.

If your child is in the height of their stress response they may not be able to communicate what is wrong (i.e. screaming, crying and/or throwing things) and you are going to want to ask questions to find out what’s wrong and how you can help.

The issue with this plan is that it rarely works. Why? It goes back to what I was saying before in regards to reasoning and higher thinking. When we are flooded with emotions we have switched from our thinking brain to our emotional brain so our ability to think clearly and communicate diminishes.

So, if you start asking your child “what’s wrong?” or “what do you need?” You may not get the answer you are looking for.

Depending on your child’s stress response when flooded you may get met with:

• Yelling or hitting (fight response)
• Running off (flight response)
• Mumbled words or silence (freeze response)
• Them suddenly trying to down-play (fawn response)

What To Do Instead

So what can you do instead? When you AND your child are calm, talk to them about what happened. Work together to figure out what triggered the response and then come up with a plan to deal with it if the trigger happens again if you cannot avoid it.

We cannot always avoid triggers so finding ways to cope with them is essential. There are dozens of healthy coping strategies to help when the stress response is triggered. 

Read more here on coping skills for stress relief

Some examples of healthy coping skills include: breathing, going into a bedroom or other safe space, writing/drawing, etc. 

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CONCLUSION

Emotional flooding happens to people every day. Staying in an emotionally flooded place for too long can have significant consequences so it’s important to learn ways to manage those emotions.

Like this post? Share it! Then check out: 

Stress Relief, Common Mental Health Diagnoses, How Therapy Actually Works