Understanding the “Flight” Response: Anxiety, Avoidance, and Feeling Safe

Being Well with Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson

Being Well

Health & Fitness, Education, Self-improvement, Mental Health

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2024

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dr. Rick and Forrest discuss the “flight” response to stress, which includes feelings of anxiety and fear, avoidant behavior, and an underlying sense of insecurity. They explore the emotions and behaviors associated with the flight response, and how we can build up a stronger, more secure sense of who we are. Rick shares some practical tools that will help you change your self-concept, safely apply principles from graduated exposure, and feel safer from the inside-out. I’ve loved this series on the stress responses, and think you’ll get a lot out of this episode. You can watch this episode on YouTube. Key Topics: 0:00: Introduction 1:00: The purpose of the flight response, and when it is and isn’t useful 5:35: Social withdrawal, conflict avoidance, and preserving safety vs. comfort 12:15: The trouble with low likelihood, high-cost risks 16:35: Exploring our capacity for stress, and identifying the risks worth taking 26:30: Feeling “sturdy,” and why we choose the flight response vs. other stress responses 33:30: Graduated exposure 39:05: Learning to trust our new capabilities as we change 44:50: Overdoing a change as a form of self-sabotage, and reserving the power to flee 54:25: Responding to anxiety 1:01:40: Being present with painful situations we can’t escape 1:08:40: Recap I am now writing on Substack, check out my work there. Support the Podcast: We're now on Patreon! If you'd like to support the podcast, follow this link. Sponsors Join over a million people using BetterHelp, the world’s largest online counseling platform. Visit betterhelp.com/beingwell for 10% off your first month! If you’re navigating something messy, call The Dr. John Delony Show. Dr. John shares practical advice on how to connect with people, face depression, overcome anxiety, and learn what it means to be well. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Transform your health with the ZOE Science & Nutrition podcast. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. OneSkin focuses on delivering more than superficial results for your skin. Get started today with 15% off using code BEINGWELL at oneskin.co. Connect with the show: Subscribe on iTunes Follow Forrest on YouTube Follow us on Instagram Follow Forrest on Instagram Follow Rick on Facebook Follow Forrest on Facebook Visit Forrest's website

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and if you're new to the show, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome back.
0:14.5	We've recently done episodes focused on the fight, freeze, and fond responses to stress. And today we're
0:20.7	finishing that series by focusing on the flight response. We'll be exploring what the flight response looks like in practice, which includes some behaviors you may not expect, give you a simple framework that'll help you understand whether your anxiety is helping you out or not and
0:35.0	walk through how somebody could go through a process of developing this sense of themselves
0:39.7	as being strong, capable, and secure.
0:43.3	I'm joined, as usual, by clinical psychologist,
0:45.7	Dr Rick Hansen.
0:46.6	So Dad, how are you doing today?
0:48.4	I'm good and really liking this whole series,
0:51.5	connecting biology to our everyday experience of things and behavior.
0:58.4	It's really great.
1:00.4	Totally same.
1:01.4	I think it's really helpful to have simple frameworks when we can and so we're going to start this episode with another simple framework. You know, this is a being well classic talking about what we're talking about. So the flight response, at least in my thinking about it, is very closely tied to the emotion of fear, which is what activates the behavior of avoiding or escaping dangerous situations.
1:22.0	Now, danger exists on a spectrum and could include everything from something that's just a little bit uncomfortable to us to potentially life-threatening situations.
1:30.0	So part of the game here is getting better at distinguishing what is
1:35.9	problematically stressful versus what is just a bit uncomfortable for us and then
1:41.8	calibrating our response to the situation appropriately based on that determination.
1:47.0	Now the behaviors that are associated with the flight response have their routes and a lot of adaptivity. They're very, very useful and we
1:56.5	particularly understand why the flight response is so useful for a prey animal out in the
2:01.1	wild and it's more just this issue of fit, which is something
2:04.3	that you've raised on the podcast in the past about other kinds of problems that.
2:08.1	We're back in the day having a very sensitive flight response made a lot of sense for animals. But these days when we're dealing more with kind of low-grade perpetual stress,
	...

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