Congrats, Your Nervous System is Cosplaying A Gazelle Running From A Lion (The Flight Response)

When I was filming the episode on the flight response... I ended up reenacting it myself. Lmao. So funny how that happens. It's like the universe loves to remind me of whatever it is I'm teaching — like hey babe, let's make you feel this thing fully so when you teach it, you're not just talking theory.

Cue: two takes, five panic attacks, and a full-blown avoidance spiral before I even hit record.

The Avoidance Before The Avoidance

I had an outline. I had a plan. And then the days leading up to recording, I found myself doing everything except sitting down and turning the camera on.

I have chickens — I hatched four baby chicks about six weeks ago, and I've been slowly integrating them with the adults in the coop. They technically weren't ready to be fully outside yet, but somehow that became the very important project I needed to handle right now, instead of recording. If you've ever suddenly decided today's the day you deep-clean your entire kitchen, or reorganize a closet nobody asked about, or scroll straight through to the end of the internet — same thing. Not laziness. Your nervous system trying to outrun a feeling by staying busy enough not to feel it.

You know it's flight and not just a bad habit when there's real nervous energy sitting underneath the busyness. You're hoping if you keep moving, the feeling underneath will just quietly leave. It doesn't. It gets louder until you actually deal with the thing.

What's Actually Happening In Your Body

Fight and flight run on the exact same fuel. The second your brain flags something as a threat, your adrenal glands dump epinephrine straight into your bloodstream — before you've even consciously clocked what set it off. Blood gets rerouted away from your skin and your gut (which is why people go pale, and why you literally cannot think about lunch mid-panic) and toward the exact muscles built to get you out of there.

That's where all the physical stuff comes from, and none of it is random:

• Racing heart — pumping extra blood to your leg muscles

• Rapid, shallow breathing — loading your system up on oxygen

• Trembling or shaking — nervous energy building in the muscles with nowhere to go yet

• Cold or sweaty skin — blood pulling away from skin and gut, toward your legs

Fight runs on the same chemicals, aimed a different direction. Fight's top-heavy — heat, jaw clenching, leaning forward like you're about to go toe-to-toe with something. Flight's bottom-heavy — restless legs, tight chest, sometimes a burning feeling low in your gut, nervous energy pooling in your feet like your body already decided to run before you caught up.

Here's the part that actually changed something for me: which one you get isn't about being brave or being a coward. It's not a personality trait. It's a split-second, completely non-conscious calculation your brain runs every time — can I actually win this? Some deep part of you says yes, you fight. Says no, your body picks flight instead, instantly, way before your conscious mind gets a vote. Same person, same nervous system, different verdict depending on what your body decided it could survive in that exact moment. That's why you can fight in one situation and run in the next. It was never about courage.

And when that mobilized energy has nowhere to go — you're not actually sprinting away from a tax bill, you can't run out of a meeting — it doesn't just dissolve. It gets stuck. For a lot of us, that's exactly where panic attacks come from: flight with no exit.

Where Mine Came From

I know that one intimately now. This podcast keeps stretching me somewhere I really, really don't want to go, and that week it caught up with me — five separate panic attacks between the two takes it took me to actually finish recording.

Underneath it was fear of judgment. Old judgment, the kind I absorbed as a kid, harsh enough that it left an actual wound. My brain was pulling from that same file, deciding putting myself out there now was just as unsafe as it was then. Imposter syndrome showed up too — some voice insisting I don't actually know enough to be teaching any of this. That fear showed up specifically to talk me out of doing the thing. I did it anyway, because it matters more to me than the fear does.

Tools For The Flight Response

Which of these actually helps depends on your activation level. If you're already maxed out — full nervous system flood, hard to think, can't sit still — movement works best, because your body's got mobilized energy that genuinely needs somewhere to go. If it's more manageable, still activated but not overwhelming, the non-movement stuff works just as well and you can do it literally anywhere.

Movement-based (best when you're maxed out)

• Run it out, then land it. High knees or fast running-in-place at full intensity for 15–20 seconds, then a deliberate, gradual slowdown over another 15–20 seconds until you're fully stopped. Why: this mirrors nature — an animal that escapes a predator doesn't stop cold, it runs, then visibly shakes and slows before going back to grazing. The taper is what tells your nervous system the danger's actually over. Stop abruptly and the activation stays stuck.

• Bilateral cross-marching. March in place, opposite arm to opposite knee, a little exaggerated and fast. Why: cross-body movement engages both hemispheres of the brain together — part of what makes EMDR and walking therapy work for settling activation instead of staying locked in one-sided.

• Leg-specific shake. Stand and shake one leg out hard for a few seconds, then the other, like shaking water off. Why: flight redirects blood specifically to your big leg muscles — quads, calves, glutes. This discharges the tension in the exact group that got loaded with "run" and never got to use it.

• Heel bounces or calf pumps. Same logic, small-scale — works seated, under a desk, mid-call, wherever you can't fully move.

• Toe curl and release, repeated. Micro-discharge in the feet, the actual contact point in a real run.

Non-movement (works well when it's manageable)

• Earthing / grounding outside. Bare feet or hands on actual grass, actual dirt. This is the one that's stayed the most reliably accessible for me even at high intensity — simple enough I can still find it when everything else is offline.

• Orienting. Slowly turn your head, look around, name two or three things you actually see. Flight narrows your visual field to scan for an exit; this deliberately widens it back out and lets your nervous system confirm there's nothing to run from.

• The physiological sigh. Double inhale through the nose, long exhale through the mouth. Extending the exhale is what tells your vagus nerve it can stand down.

• A low hum, 10–15 seconds, low in your chest. The vibration stimulates the vagus nerve directly.

What I Actually Reached For

Mine looked different from that tidy list, and I want to be honest about why. Earthing — sitting outside with my chickens, feet in the grass — handled the acute physiological piece almost instantly. That's the chemistry part, the adrenaline and cortisol, responding to something dead simple and physical.

But once that settled, what was underneath it wasn't nervous system chemistry anymore. It was grief. And grief doesn't care about grounding techniques — it needs something relational. So I cried. Loud, ugly, guttural crying. I held myself through it like I was holding my own inner child, told myself the stuff I needed to hear. Then I brought in actual co-regulation — told my husband what was going on, just so someone could sit with me. A friend suggested coloring, and turns out my inner child had been asking for that for a while.

Two different problems. Two different kinds of tools. The activation needed grounding. The grief needed to be witnessed.

The Two Wolves

Here's a metaphor that's been living in my head lately: there are two wolves inside me. One's genuinely terrified of being seen, of being judged, of getting it wrong. The other knows this work matters enough to do scared anyway. Most days, if I'm honest, the scared one wins — it's the one I've fed the longest. I'm trying to feed the other one now.

That's basically the whole thesis of The Relief Container, if I'm being real — learning to actually sit with what's happening in your body instead of running from it, over and over, until it stops being a big scary thing and starts being just... a thing you know how to do. I'm bringing that into a room together on October 2nd for The Relief Workshop — 90 minutes, live, nervous system education plus an actual practice together, not just me talking at you. Get on the newsletter if you want first access before it opens up to everyone.

And if you want the whole messy thing exactly as it happened — this week's episode of Hot Mess To Higher Self  has it.