Have you ever wondered what’s actually happening in your body when you feel the urge to run, fight or back, people-please your way out of discomfort, or simply shut down completely? These responses—fight, flight, fawn, and freeze—aren’t just mental experiences.

They create distinct energetic patterns throughout your nervous system that you can actually see and feel.

These are the sympathetic states of your autonomic nervous system (the part whose responses you can’t control), more commonly known as fight, flight, fawn, freeze, and functional freeze (which has its own category). 

This is the incredibly sensitive landscape of the Nervous System Realm—where every detail matters and your body’s responses create distinct energetic patterns that tell the story of how you’ve learned to survive.

The Fight and Flight Response in Energy

In both a fight and flight response, your Nervous System Realm redistributes energy to your motor neurons, stimulating you to hurry away from what feels like a threat, or to turn around and face it.

Energetically, the frequency that moves along the nerves begins to amplify or build up in the motor neurons that need to fire. If the Muscle Realm doesn’t pick up on this message (or it isn’t actually a situation that requires you to fight or flee, your unconscious mind just thinks it is) the energy can’t discharge and may sit there, or may recirculate along your sensory neurons towards your central nervous system. 

Additionally, your cerebrospinal fluid will energetically “warm up”; it will appear to move faster, and may even feel “thinner” to me. From the Nervous System Realm’s perspective, the goal is to get energy to the skeletal muscles fast, so your cerebrospinal fluid will create less resistance to energetic messages flowing along your central nervous system to your peripheral nervous system.

The Long-Term Impact of Living in Fight or Flight

If you’ve lived in an extended fight-or-flight response, your cerebrospinal fluid may also feel like it’s ready to boil over, showing me that it hasn’t had an appropriate amount of time or a safe space to discharge that energy and cool down (literally!)

Often this redistribution of energy in your Nervous System Realm will come with decreased electrical activity from your sensory or afferent nerves. So your brain will recognize less of your internal cues for biological needs like hunger, thirst, or even needing to use the bathroom.

Physiologically, your heart rate is going to increase, you’ll breathe faster, and the Nervous System Realm will also send out a little SOS signal to your kidneys, co-create the emotion of fear, and your adrenals will dump adrenaline into your system.

Energetically, there’s negligible difference between fight or flight. This is an energetically taxing or expensive state to stay in for prolonged periods of time. Your body isn’t meant to be here in perpetuity, so the longer this lasts, the more energetic damage occurs to your electrical conduit system.

Sometimes it will look like a tape that’s looping—constantly signaling to move, and when your body doesn’t respond (because maybe there’s no physical threat), it will erode the trust between your motor neurons and your Muscle Realm.

It may also take the form of constantly running from or fighting anything that feels remotely unsafe, including your own soul guidance.

But over time, your Nervous System Realm will exhaust itself, have to prioritize energy towards life-sustaining activities, and you find yourself in burnout. Dun dun dunnnnnn.

The Freeze Response in Energy

The freeze response is an energetic and biological imperative to stay very very still when danger is near in order to be overlooked or seen as harmless. You can see this in nature with opossums playing dead or the deer-in-the-headlights response. The biological imperative is to freeze, faint, fold, feign, or fragment.

This is a short-term autonomic response until danger has passed and then you can resume your normal activities again.

Energetically, it looks like someone hit pause on a video game and wherever the energy was in the nervous system conduit, it freezes there until you press “play” again. This means the only message in your Nervous System Realm is to stop.

If your body prolongs this state without restoration and regulation in the nervous system, it puts pressure on the individual neurons where the energy paused and sat. Energy in this Realm doesn’t like sitting still; it’s a messenger, so even with the “pause” mandate, it exerts force or tries to find movement if stuck for too long.

The Long-Term Impact of Freeze on Your Neural Pathways

The long-term impact of the freeze response occurs in each individual neuron.

The Myelin sheath is a coating along many of the neurons in your body. Picture myelin as your nerves’ essential protector and accelerator. This specialized fatty wrapping encases your nerve fibers, but not continuously; instead, it creates segments with small gaps called Nodes of Ranvier. These gaps are just one micrometer long, but they play a crucial role in how signals move through your nervous system.

The myelin sheath makes your nerve signals jump from gap to gap instead of crawling along the entire fiber. This leaping motion, called saltatory conduction, speeds up your neural messages by about 100 times compared to non-myelinated nerves.

Meanwhile, non-myelinated fibers in your peripheral nervous system are still protected, but without the fancy myelin layers. Instead, Schwann cells (the architects of the myelin sheath) wrap around multiple nerve fibers at once—up to nine in a single fold.

When your body presses “pause” too many times or holds the pause for too long, the energetic information expands the gaps in the myelin sheath, and it becomes too wide for saltatory conduction. And in non-myelinated nerves, the heat of the paused frequency becomes too big for the Schwann cells to contain, especially in bundled nerves.

This breaks down the conductivity, increases the “heat” or frequency at one point in the nerve or neuron for too long, and essentially pushes your Nervous System Realm into a forced state of prolonged freeze because the signal can’t move.

The Fawn Response

Compared to fight or flight, the fawn response is an energy-saving nervous system response.

Instead of asking how do I run away from or stand up to this moment, it asks: How do I blend into this moment?

A fawn response is a type of camouflage that requires your Nervous System Realm to look around your environment in detail. So while you’re not making big macro moves like running or throwing a punch, you’re making constant micro adjustments.

The right facial expression here. The correctly timed giggle when you feel uncomfortable.

Your energy distribution moves farther to your edges towards your eyes, your integumentary system (skin, hair, fat), and to your gut (your enteric nervous system).

With this response, your cerebrospinal fluid gets still. It primes your nervous system to hear a pin drop, and any large movement or internal shifts are going to make that difficult.

However, after a prolonged period in this state, the cerebrospinal fluid will feel stagnant. It may feel like a borderline freeze response (and is often incorrectly identified as one) because the stillness and stagnancy are difficult to move.

Like all sympathetic states, your body isn’t designed to stay here. Prolonged hypervigilance and gut-sensing from the enteric nervous system can lead to a breakdown in the energetic integrity of the gut, hair, nails, adipose tissue, and eyes because of the persistent redirection of power in your communication conduit to these areas; this causes energetic heat (from frequency) to sit and stagnate at the edges. It can physically manifest in the inability to put on or lose fat, eye strain, brittle nails and hair, and more.

There can also be a feeling of despondency like something isn’t moving, information isn’t being delivered in your body, vitamins and minerals aren’t available. It’s truly a perpetual feeling of “something isn’t right” without ever getting to a “root cause.”

Recognizing Your Patterns and Moving Forward

You may have identified which nervous system states your body has a predisposition to, and if you’re like me, this may have blown your world up a little.

After I wrote about the fawn response, I broke something so wide open that little me needed; something that was set in motion so long ago. So I reached through the cracks, took her hand, and helped her through. It was an integrative process that my body had been longing for.

Know that you can bring those versions of yourself experiencing these states forward to sit and be safe with you today.

Your Nervous System Realm is always doing its best to protect you. Even when it doesn’t feel like it. Ready to explore what your nervous system is ready to share with you? Schedule an Energy Archaeology Session to discover the unique patterns in your body’s electric light show.