ditch effort to convince a predator they’re already dead; Stephen Porges has hypothesized that freeze is a stress response that facilitates a painless 1death.
If an animal survives such an intense threat to its life, then it does an extraordinary thing: It shakes. It trembles, paws vibrating in the air. It heaves a great big sigh. And then it gets up, shakes itself off, and trots away.
What’s happening here is that freeze has interrupted the GO! stress response of fight or flight, leaving all that adrenaline-mediated stress to go stale inside the animal’s body. When the animal shakes and shudders and sighs, its body is releasing the brake, completing the activation process triggered by fight/flight, and purging the residue. Completing the cycle. It’s 2called “self-paced termination.”
A friend offered this example of her son waking from anesthesia, after waiting in the emergency room for five hours for minor surgery on his finger: “He came out from under the anesthesia ‘very distressed,’ said the nurses. I translate that to ‘bat shit crazy pants,’ meaning he screamed hysterically, and flailed his arms and legs wildly, and yelled that he hated me and everyone else, and cycled his legs like mad and screamed, ‘I just want to run, I just want to run!’ ”
Cycling his legs and “I just want to run!” are flight. Hating everyone is fight. Anesthesia is medically induced freeze—wild animals who are anesthetized by researchers experience the same thing as my friend’s son. I call it “the Feels,” since it’s just this thing that happens in your body without any obvious environmental cause. The kid wasn’t actually in any danger, but he had a lot of Feels that needed to work themselves out. And his mom did exactly the right thing: “I held him, remained calm, kept telling him I loved him and that I was keeping him safe, and eventually he calmed down enough to put his clothes on (he’d literally torn them off) and leave with me. By the time we were walking into the parking garage, he was calmly telling me that he loved me very much, and when we got home, he collapsed into sleep.”
He moved through the cycle and got to the relaxation at the end— affection and sleep.
Only rarely in our everyday lives does unlocking from freeze take such a dramatic form. But even in its smaller scale, that’s how the stress response cycle works, beginning, middle, and end, all innately built into the nervous system and fully functional—in the right context. stress and sex
By now it won’t strike you as revelatory when I say, “To have more and better sex, reduce your stress levels.” I might as well say, “Exercise is good for you” and “Sleep is important.” Of course. You know this.
In fact, more than half of women report that stress, depression, and anxiety decrease their interest in sex; they also reduce sexual arousal and 3 can interfere with orgasm.Chronic stress also disrupts or suppresses the menstrual cycle, decreases fertility and lactation, and increases miscarriage, as well as reducing genital response and increasing both distractibility and 4pain with sex.
How do the hormones and neurochemicals of stress interact with the hormones and neurochemicals of sexual response, to suppress or stimulate sexual behavior? Nobody knows precisely—but we know some things.
We know that stressed-out humans more readily interpret all stimuli as threats, just like the rats being blasted with bright lights and Iggy Pop.
We also know that the brain can handle only a limited amount of information at a time; at its simplest, we can think of stress as information overload, so when there’s too much happening, the brain starts to triage, prioritizing, simplifying, and even plain old ignoring some things.
And we know that the brain prioritizes based on survival needs: breathing, escaping from predators, maintaining the right temperature, staying hydrated and nourished, and remaining with your social group are all first-order-of-business priorities—and of course these priorities sort themselves based on context. If you’re starving, you’ll be more willing to steal bread from your neighbor, even if it risks your membership in a social group. If you can’t breathe, then it doesn’t matter how long it’s been since you’ve eaten, you will not feel hungry. And if you’re generally overwhelmed by twenty-first-century life, practically everything else takes priority over sex; as far as your brain is concerned everything is a charging lion. And if you’re being chased by a lion, is that a good time to have sex?
To sum up: Worry, anxiety, fear, and terror are stress—“There’s a lion! Run!”
Irritation, annoyance, frustration, anger, and rage are stress—“There’s a lion! Kill it!”
Emotional numbness, shutdown, depression, and despair are stress —“There’s a lion! Play dead!”
And none of these indicates that now is a good time to get laid.
Stress is about survival. And while sex serves a lot of purposes, personal survival is not one of them (except when it is—see the attachment section). So for most people, stress slams on the brakes, bottoming out sexual interest—except for the 10 to 20 percent or so of people like Olivia for whom stress activates the accelerator. (All the same parts, organized in different ways.) But even for those folks, stress blocks sexual pleasure (enjoying) even as it increases sexual interest (eagerness). Stressed sex feels different from joyful sex—you know, because: context.
To reduce the impact of stress on your sexual pleasure and interest, to have more joyful, pleasurable sex, manage your stress.
Yeah, easier said than done.
When Olivia was stressed, her interest in sex increased—and it was a source of conflict in her relationship with Patrick, since when he was stressed, his interest in sex went down. And worse, sometimes the stress-driven sexual interest made Olivia feel out of control.
How can she manage that feeling?
By practicing completing the cycle.
My technical description of Olivia’s out-of-control experience is “maladaptive behavior to manage negative affect”—which just means trying to cope with uncomfortable emotions (stress, depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage) by doing things that carry a high risk of unwanted consequences. Compulsive sexual behavior is one example.
Other examples include • using alcohol or other drugs in a risky way • dysfunctional relationships—for instance, trying to deal with your own feelings by dealing with someone else’s • escaping into distractions, like movie binge-watching when you have other things you need to be doing • disordered eating—restricting, binging, or purging Of course, all these things can be done in a healthy way. It’s when we do them instead of dealing with our Feels—that is, instead of completing the cycle—that they bring the potential for unwanted consequences. Some of those consequences are fairly benign . . . and some are could-kill-you-tonight dangerous. And they’re all intended to do one thing: manage the underlying feelings. We might do these things when we don’t know how to complete the cycle or when the feelings just hurt too much.