Building Resilence in a Fight or Flight World

How could our lives be different if we weren’t constantly living in chronically elevated fight-or-flight mode? We often see many kids and adults who suffer from a chronically overactive fight-or-flight response. In kids, this may manifest itself as colic, ear infections, sensory issues, ADD/ADHD, developmental delays, frequent colds and in adults as depression, anxiety, digestive distress, trouble sleeping, allergies, and infertility to name a few.

The flight or flight response is activated by the release of hormones that prepare the body to react to a perceived threat (physical or emotional) for our survival. It’s our body’s innate response for adapting to stress (physical, chemical, and emotional). We either flee or stay to deal with the stress. Our bodies were never designed to stay in survival mode for more than a few hours or days. So while one might say, avoid all negative stresses, that’s not realistic.

We are constantly being bombarded with physical, chemical, and emotional triggers. Our brain doesn’t know the difference between a dog growling and ready to attack vs eating to much sugar, or phobias like public speaking vs getting injured from a fall. We can’t avoid stress that's inenvitable. However, we can adapt and move our body in a way that balances the fight-or-flight response back to normal state or fluid state.

Related: The Importance of the Vagus Nerve

So how do we do this?

We eat well, move well (exercise) and receive proper proprioception into the nervous system. Movement is essential for brain function and nervous system function. As chiropractors, we do this through identifying how your spine is moving or not moving (subluxation). Through specific and gentle adjustments we restore normal movement patterns into the spine. Special receptors called proprioceptors send signals to the brain to eliminate the alarm signals bringing our nervous system back from a “fight or flight” state into a more fluid state.

Lastly we recommend decreasing inflammatory foods and staying hydrated to keep our joints and tissues healthy. This helps the joints move with more ease and reduces the stress response on the body. Some of the foods that are helpful to avoid are grains, sugar, soy, caffeine, corn and dairy and adding healthy omega 3’s are simple ways to maintain fluid motion.

Overtime, these small steps can rebuild resilience to all kinds of stressors and allow the body to break the continuous stress loop.

Read the full article here, which was published in Pathways to Family Wellness, Issue #58