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Understanding Threat Responses, and Strategies for Calming your Brain and Body

December, 2024

The ability to self-regulate when challenged on the spot, or in a tense or conflict situations, is a critical success factor for achieving good outcomes for all, presenting the best version of yourself, and maintaining important working relationships. Knowing your own typical threat responses and having effective strategies to manage them is critical.

 

The following worksheet is designed to support you understand your typical responses to threats at work and identify strategies for managing them that work for you personally. 

Threat Responses

Threat responses refer to the often-unconscious ways we react to stressful or confronting situations. The most common threat responses are:

  • Fight: This response involves confronting the challenge or conflict in the moment. It is a response aimed at overcoming the perceived threat.

  • Flight: This response involves avoiding the situation. We may withdraw from the discussion, or physically leave the room. It is a way to escape the perceived threat and protect oneself.

  • Freeze: This response involves shutting down in the face of challenge or conflict. Our response here is often a reaction to feeling overwhelmed.

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As these responses are often influenced by our past experiences and individual personality traits, we tend to have an automatic go-to response of one of the three types above. That said, it is not uncommon for us to have one go-to response with our family and an entirely different go-to response at work.

It is useful to have awareness of our conflict imprints at work (and in other parts of our lives) as this can help us to pause, when we feel the desire to fight, flee or freeze, and not immediately act on the impulse.

 

To support self-reflection, you may find it helpful to respond to the multi-choice questions below:

My typical imprint(s) at work is:

1. Fight                   2.   Flight             3.     Freeze

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When it comes to conflict situations, I tend to fall into:

  1. Avoiding the conflict

  2. Accommodating other people’s needs before my own (to make the conflict go away)

  3. Trying to find a comprise (partial-win: partial-win)

  4. Getting defensive or competitive

  5. Trying to collaborate (find a novel win: win solution)

 

Strategies for Calming your Brain and Body

Our sympathetic nervous system controls our fight, flight, or freeze response. In stressful situations, this system activates to increase our heart rate, deliver more blood to areas of the body that need more oxygen, and trigger other responses to help us escape danger.

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It is never advisable to attempt resolving a conflict if either party is in this triggered state because:

  • Due to the chemical reactions occurring in our bodies, it is very difficult to think clearly (we often struggle to articulate our thoughts in the moment,

  • We are approximately six times more likely to perceive the other person’s motives and intent negatively while in this state, meaning that we are not our usual balanced selves and can therefore say and do things we latter on regret.

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Developing strategies to calm your brain and body can help you manage your threat response and emotions, enabling more constructive communication or conflict resolution. Some strategies are:

 

Deep Breathing

This is the essential first step. Slow, deep breaths start to activate the parasympathetic nervous system (the opposite of the sympathetic system) and promote relaxation.

 

Grounding Techniques

  • Progressive Muscle Relaxation: Tense and then relax different muscle groups to reduce physical tension and promote calm.

  • Sensory Awareness: Use your senses to stay present. Focus on physical sensations, like feeling your feet on the ground or the temperature in the room.

 

Movement

Whether it involves walking to the kitchen to get a glass of water, taking a short walk around the block, or engaging in more vigorous exercise, movement sends helpful chemicals throughout our bodies.

 

Emotional Regulation Techniques

  • Name your emotion: Identify and label your emotions to yourself, as specifically as you can to gain clarity and reduce their intensity.

  • Be kind to yourself: Treat yourself with kindness and understanding during this challenging times. Remember, everyone gets triggered from time to time – there are no exceptions.

  • Take time out: Take a break from the conflict situation to calm yourself and gain perspective. Communicate the need for a break and suggest a time to come back together to continue the discussion.

 

To support self-reflection, you may wish to complete the activity below:

 

Strategies that work for me, or that I would like to test out, include:

1.

2.

3.

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