Healthy Flight Response

tending to frazzled nervous system stuff

Hello beloveds!

Greetings from the timeline where everything is fine! And nothing bad is happening at all!

The news is coming hard and fast these days.

I want to talk a little about our stress responses, how they work, how they get misunderstood, and how I’m experimenting and working with them.

Antoine Paikert

So the nervous system and endocrine system work very closely in tandem to alert us to danger and prime us to act. Of all the stress responses, fawn is the most complex and layered, then freeze. The simplest and most straightforward responses are fight, and flight. With these two, physiologically, the body opts to shunt resources away from ‘unnecessary’ places like the brain (HA! Tysm, body) and digestive system, in favor of cardiovascular capacity. Blood flow to the limbs and periphery reduces, both in favor of the heart & lungs and to protect against the possibility of injury, so less blood can be lost if an arm or leg gets punctured by a tusk or a fang or a sword or a wizard’s spell. Digestion would be completely unwieldy: a waste of resources and this is no time for a poo. It’s a freaking brilliant design; it’s often kind of villainized these days, but SHE IS WHO’S KEPT US ALIVE. And who keeps us alive.

Anna Kuznyetsova

In fight or flight, the body is primed, begging, and needs TO ACT. Without physical movement, this combination of the nervous and endocrine systems can’t really have proof that the perceived threat is no longer right there lurking. The stress can’t go anywhere or do it’s job and it just builds up and creates chronic problems. I recently was in a situation where someone else put a movie on (definitely not nurses on Christmas night shift) about a TSA agent who was like, on the phone with terrorists, and had to stay there at his work station, totally still and playing it cool doing his job, while the world was crashing down around him. Once the fighting broke out (excruciatingly long into the movie) I felt SO RELIEVED. Finally, this energy is moving.

So I’ve been leaning into this idea of a healthy flight response, and what that can look like. Flight is my nervous system’s typical orientation in threat, so creating avenues for that response to sort of get what it needs is very helpful.

Here’s what it looks like:

Physically running. I hate it physically but I love the freedom I feel- getting away. leaving it behind. Bonus points if I get to see moving water on the run (moving energy? Ions? Not sure) or low sun on my face (serotonin.)

Other self-propelled movements that cover ground. Biking. Kayaking would work here. Feeling your body work and seeing the landscape go by is huge.

Actual Travel. Planning little trips, so you have a break coming up to look forward to. I have a goal to go camping every other month in 2025. Idk how that will go because I tend to have a lot going on!

Anticipating/Imaginary Travel. I like to program my phone’s weather app with a few locations that aren’t where I am. Whether it’s a place I have a relationship with, like somewhere I’ve visited over and over, somewhere I want to go, or am about to visit, that little check-in is such a helpful reminder that other places exist, and the world is much larger than my worries. It’s like microdosing actual travel as a healthy flight response.

Joseph Plateau and Simon von Stampfer. Phenakistoscopes. 1833

Book and Movie Escapism. Something that takes you far from the well-trodden mental paths of your familiar world. Whether it’s another culture, high fantasy, or a post-apocalyptic world, seeing other people creatively making it through other contexts and unfamiliar conditions does a lot for the old troublemaker brain. It seems perverse, but I take a lot of comfort in too-close-for-comfort apocalypse stories, Like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower series and currently, I’m reading Starhawk’s book City of Refuge. Seeing these characters navigating exaggerated versions of the big shifts we’re facing now, surviving the unthinkable, and keep fighting and hoping and loving, it just does something for me, it’s so life-giving.

A Digital Saunter. There’s something so healing about just dicking around on Zillow or Google Maps. Some days I’m only 3-4 Alaskan homestead listings away from coping. If they’re ugly, I’m having a great time. If they’re gorgeous, I’m having a great time. I think just remembering that I can reinvent myself, it reminds me that I can do this. And then yeah like, at any given day, on street view, I can walk down streets in Thailand, Sicily, Copenhagen.

So yeah. If your body is really wanting to make a run for it, they are not wrong! Your body tells the truth. Go with that. Honor that. Honoring the stress response with opportunities for healthy flight helps us to prevent or mitigate the unhelpful ways that the unaddressed flight response can show up: avoiding what’s important, checking out, leaving the things we actually want. This shit takes courage.

When things get difficult, we need each other, we need to laugh together, we need delight and awe.

I give you…

Late night old obscure music videos from Youtube on the big TV are sometimes the only thing keeping me on the rails. Our Latest Obsession: Demis Roussos. My brain and ears were waiting for him. Greek, born in Egypt, he’s got the style, moves, grace, 1970’s pizzaz, bone necklace, everything you want and need. He loves to sing about the wind. I will never be the same.

A Handout on Completing the Stress Cycle, inspired by the work of Dr. Emily Nagoski- her books are very cool.

My Movies Pinterest Board! I have seen zero of these and cannot vouch. Except for Daisies (1966) which I love! It’s so insane. But! We watched almost all the trailers the other night. Healthy flight.

And updates from me…

I’ll be traveling the next couple weeks, but I have newsletters tee’d up for you. So if my actual flight goes actually down, be not afraid. It’s just autoscheduled.