The Freeze Response to Stress & Anxiety

Feeling numb or disconnected? Here’s why

The freeze response is a little recognised expression of anxiety. The freeze response can look and feel like numbness, disconnection from yourself and others, feeling like your head is full of cotton wool, feeling unable to act.

This response can happen when our body reacts to keep us safe by cutting us off from the perceived threat; this may have been because this was a response that we were stuck in during particularly traumatic moment and we were unable to complete the full cycle of response. So now, when a similar trigger appears, our body moves us to freeze as a protection.

Have you ever fainted and you don’t know why?

The next stage after the freeze response is fainting.

Now, to start, I’m not a GP, so do get any unexplained fainting checked out medically.

If there isn’t a medical reason for it, it could be that you are fainting due to an anxiety response.

Fainting is our final response in what’s known as the defence cascade. The body moves through 4 stages, starting at fight and flight and if each stage is not successful in removing us from danger, it will move to the next stage.

You may not even be aware that you are about to faint as the faint is caused by a temporary breath hold, triggered by the amygdala and it happens so quickly that we aren’t even aware of it.

If you think that either of these responses could be happening for you, the first thing to do is to trace back what was happening a little before you fainted or froze and a little before that and so on. In this way you will start to identify triggers to the response.

Then, when you have the triggers you can work with activities like mindfulness and meditation to increase the strength of your conscious brain, which will allow it to interrupt the response. Breathwork can also help to interrupt the response if you are able to recognise it in time.

Get in touch if you’d like help with this

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