How To Not Freeze Under Pressure

How to not freeze under pressure. Have you ever been described as a “deer in the headlights”? When faced with a difficult or stressful situation, do you mentally lock up or “freeze” unable to respond? Sometimes, when faced with a situation that calls for fight or flight, the human brain instead decided to choose neither, causing you to mentally shut down rather than come to terms with the problem at hand. Have you ever wondered what causes this, and by extension, how you can stop it? Well today, here at Bestie we’re about to find the answers.

#FreezeUp #FightOrFlight #StressResponse

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Summary:
No two brains are alike, and it goes without saying that everyone learns how to process and deal with stress differently. So why is it that, when faced with a stressful obstacle or challenge, some people opt to completely freeze up and go into shutdown mode? As it turns out, there might be an interesting piece of psychology behind this particular stress response.

As Dr. Leon F. Seltzer explains in Psychology Today, people typically respond to what they perceive as threats using what is known as the “fight or flight response”. The fight or flight response is an evolutionary tactic that we as humans developed in order to continue our survival against the world’s many dangers. When a threat emerges, our brain immediately kicks into high gear, and within mere milliseconds assesses what kind of threat we’re facing. If the threat is something our brain thinks we can confront, it chooses Fight and prepares us for the battle by pumping our bodies full of adrenaline. If the threat looks like something that can’t be fought and can only be avoided, our brain chooses Flight instead and tells us to get away from whatever is threatening us as fast as possible. However, Seltzer points out that there is sometimes a third variety of stress response, which he refers to as the Freeze response. The Freeze response occurs when our brain sizes up a threat and decides that it’s something we can neither fight off or run away from. Instead, your brain chooses the only other option, which is to lock up and hope for the best.

While this might seem like a poor solution to a problem, the Freeze response does seem to hold an evolutionary purpose. If you found yourself cornered by a hungry predator, freezing up would at the very least help numb you out so all those pointy teeth don’t hurt quite as much. If you don’t run or put up a fight, they might even lose interest and leave you alone. If we can’t prevent a problem or painful confrontation from happening, we can at least block out as much of it as we possibly can, which leads to our brains choosing the freeze response.

Of course, there are still quite a few situations in which locking up and numbing yourself won’t actually do any good. If you have a tendency to freeze up when your boss gives you an important decision or ultimatum, for example, that will probably only serve to make an already stressful situation worse. In these instances where our minds lock up at bad times in response to stress, that’s when we need to devise ways to work past the stress response of freezing and learn how to cope with those situations differently.

While Seltzer points out that the freeze response is typically more common in children, it can still continue into adulthood in the form of anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, and examples of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. In these cases, these responses represent a freeze response that never had the chance to “thaw out” as we got older, and started gaining the necessary tools and experience to deal with our problems in different ways. A tendency to become paralyzed during certain kinds of stressful situations could also be a possible symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

So what can we do to stop ourselves from freezing when it comes to stressful or challenging scenarios? Well, if your brain has a habit of locking up at the most inappropriate times, it might just be a matter of making sure you have the right tools to unlock it-- we are, of course, talking about seeking out mental health professionals who can help you figure out where your freezing tendency is coming from and suggest ways to work around it.

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