Your everyday reactions explained by neuroscience
You are in the middle of a difficult conversation and your mind goes blank. The words were there a moment ago. Now there is just silence — inside and out. You want to respond. You know you should say something. But nothing comes, and you stand there, quiet, while the moment passes without you inRead the Post
Of the four survival responses, fawn is the one most likely to go unrecognized. Fight looks like aggression. Flight looks like avoidance. Freeze looks like shutdown. Fawn, on the other hand, looks like kindness — which is exactly why most people who run it have no idea it is a survival response. The fawn responseRead the Post
Most people have heard the terms. Fight. Flight. Freeze. Fawn. But knowing the names is different from recognizing the experience. Someone who goes quiet in arguments does not think “I am freezing right now.” Someone who finds themselves agreeing to something they did not want to agree to does not think “that was fawn.” TheyRead the Post
You want to sit down and work. Instead, you check your phone, wander into the kitchen, start something else. By the time you are actually doing the thing, twenty minutes have disappeared. There is a technique that sounds almost too simple to take seriously: say out loud what you are about to do, before youRead the Post
You sit down to do the thing. You have been meaning to do it for days. Ten minutes later you are doing something else, and the avoided thing is still exactly where you left it. The brain redirected you before you even noticed it happening. That is because avoidance is a learned pattern the nervousRead the Post
There is probably something you have been putting off for a while. You think about it often. You move toward it sometimes, then find yourself somewhere else entirely — doing something easier, something less loaded, something that did not require anything from you. At some point, something shifts. You used to apply for things, raiseRead the Post
