The Big Six
What do you do once the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is activated is what we call the big six. These are basic reactions to threats or frustration in pursuit of goals or desires. The big six happen in the body and involve subtle patterns of organization. For example, if you’re in fight mode, blood will flow into your chest, muscles, and arms. If you’re fleeing, it’s the thigh muscles that get an increase in blood flow. These are objective phenomena that can be measured.
The big six are:
- Fight
- Flight
- Freeze
- Appease
- Tend
- Befriend
These basic responses to threatening situations, which we share with other species, have gotten a bad rap. We tend to think of them as something to avoid or overcome, especially the first three. What we want to do is counterintuitive. We’re going to mine these basic patterns of reaction for good coping skills. After all, they got us to the top of the food chain. They’re what we have learned over billions of years of evolution. How can we apply these to become more skillful in dealing with things that make us fearful, anxious, worried or alarmed?
Fighting and Fleeing
Bring to mind one or more things that make you anxious. It may be one or more of the Buddha’s “three great messengers”: sickness, old age, and death. It may be a conflict with someone you love, a difficult challenge at work or something you’d like to do that frightens you.
There can be wholesome aspects of the big six, such as setting boundaries unilaterally or speaking up and naming what is true. Take some time to think about ways to bring the coping skills of healthy fighting to a situation that makes you anxious. Write these strategies down or hold them in your mind so that they are available when needed.
Freezing and Appeasing
The second pairing of the six is freezing and appeasing. Bring to mind the same or a different emotional state that promotes anxiety; look at the ways you could cope with the situation using healthy freezing.
What does it mean to freeze in response to a threat? What is served by freezing? You might think, for example, of the rabbit in the underbrush. If the rabbit freezes, the hawk can’t see it. Frogs and amphibians don’t see shapes, only motion, so if flies could freeze, frogs would starve.
Now bring to mind some ways you can cope with an anxiety-producing situation with some healthy appeasement.
Is there a way to appease individuals, the situation or your own internal dynamic that could help you skillfully move forward? You also might find it useful to note how this healthy freezing and appeasing makes you feel.
One advantage of freezing is that it buys time for more of your resources to come forward. The frontal lobes are a rheostat for your emotions. People who have lost functioning of the frontal lobes are left with an on/off switch. Our frontal lobes allow us to deploy the six different responses when dealing with threats and risks of loss.
The skill of empathy is embedded in everything that comes under the heading of appeasement in the wholesome sense. Empathy gives us a lot of valuable information, so we benefit ourselves when we feel empathy for another. The most fundamental and valuable sense we give to another in any communication is the sense that they have been understood. Signal received. I got the message. Without this, no communication loop can be closed. Empathy is the basis for all human exchange.
Tending and Befriending
Think again about a situation that makes you anxious, fearful or alarmed. How could you increase your coping through tending? Through nurturing, healing, caring?
Now consider befriending. How can befriending help you to cope better? Notice that there’s a lot of overlap between tending and befriending. These are not rigid categories, so don’t feel like you need to strictly adhere to them. Something to think about is befriending yourself, particularly those parts of yourself that feel frightened. Often we’re ashamed of these and scorn them. What happens when you befriend them?
When you reflect, when you step back and get a feeling for what it’s like to be you, ask the question: Who are you when you cope with these difficulties? What are some of the internal senses of yourself? What’s activated or enlivened when you cope with things in the different ways we’ve outlined?
Resilience and capability are feelings, experiences in the body, and states of being.
A few hundred years from now, neuroscientists will probably have a picture of the brain in a state of capability. Your task is to remember that feeling of capability so you can trigger it, or go back home to it again.
At the deepest level, below the level of all these tools, is the hand that wields the tool. It’s that sense of capability, of leaning into a situation, addressing it, and mobilizing inner resources to deal with it. What’s does this feel like?
The important point is that no matter which coping skill you choose, there’s always something you can do. Even in freezing, there is the powerful state of creating space. In freezing, we’re actually creating space to make room for different possibilities The feeling of learned helplessness is only a few layers deep, and we can change it. If we can hold on to the feeling of capability, we can learn to transfer this from one area of our lives to another.
Conclusion
There are many ways to deal with anxiety. There’s a limit to what we can cover in two articles. Probably none of us is going to completely reverse our lives over what is written here, but there are many lessons for each of us, individually. As a way of centering on these lessons, let’s get back into quiet reflective space. How do we take these lessons with us?
The best way is an intention.
Take a deep breath, feel the energy come into your body and then let it out in a long, slow exhale. Settle into the ground of your body and your being. Of all the skillful means you wrote down or thought about, notice which one seems to have the greatest resonance for you right now. Take that as an intention: “For the next week or month I will make this skillful means manifest at some level in some new way in my life.” Feel the capability, confidence, and faith involved in doing that. That’s all it takes. And so bow to yourself for having the insight and the courage to carry this on.
This is Part Two of a two part series. Part One: Train Your Brain – From Anxiety to Security
