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Fight, Flight and Freeze: Understanding the Autonomic Trio

• Rebecca Kase • Season 2 • Episode 5

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Unlock the Secrets of Your Autonomic Nervous System—Fight, Flight, and Freeze Explained

Curious about how your nervous system shapes your mood, stress responses, and healing journey? In this essential episode of The Thrive Podcast with Rebecca Kase, trauma therapist, author, and yoga teacher Rebecca guides you through the science and spirit of the three key pathways—fight, flight, and freeze—that define the autonomic nervous system. Whether you’re a trauma therapist, healer, yogi, or anyone seeking nervous system regulation and lasting resilience, this episode reveals actionable insights to help you thrive—not just survive.

Discover:

  • Polyvagal theory explained: How your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems work and what the vagus nerve means for your emotional health.
  • Physiological state decoded: Learn how your body’s state influences anxiety, depression, shutdown, or thriving, and why “fight, flight, and freeze” aren’t just buzzwords—they’re your biology in action.
  • Why neuroception matters: Unlock how subconscious threat detection shapes emotion, behavior, and healing, plus how you can intervene for greater safety and presence.
  • Real tools for nervous system regulation: Simple tips (breath work, movement, finding moments of safety and joy) to activate your ventral vagal pathway and shift from survival mode to grounded thriving.
  • Science meets spirituality: Blending neuroscience with lived experience, Rebecca offers hope, neuroplasticity insights, and micro-practices for lasting transformation.

If you’re recovering from trauma, supporting others through healing, or simply searching for more balance and connection in life, tune in for empowering strategies you can use today.

Don’t miss Rebecca’s new book "The Polyvagal Solution"—explore even more powerful tools for nervous system healing, coming soon from New Harbinger.

🧠 Listen and thrive:
The Thrive Podcast with Rebecca Kase

Keywords: polyvagal theory, autonomic nervous system, fight flight freeze, vagus nerve, trauma recovery, nervous system regulation, neuroscience, emotional health, ventral vagal, neuroplasticity, Rebecca Kase, mental health podcast, healing, resilience

SPEAKER_00:

Are you ready to thrive as a trauma therapist, author, yoga instructor, and healed human? I personally and professionally know what it means to live stuck in survival mode. I've learned a few things in my healing journey and my career that can help you transform into your best self. Join me, Rebecca Case, as I use neuroscience, psychology, spirituality, and personal experience to help you find the tools and techniques to thrive. Welcome back to Thrive the Podcast. I'm Rebecca Case, your host. And today we're going to be continuing on with our Polyvagal Series episodes. And we're going to be talking about your three autonomic pathways. Why does this matter? Your autonomic nervous system is your automatic nervous system, constantly governing your physiological state, your mood, and how much access you have to just being able to thrive and live a good life. So this is a super important episode when it comes to health, wellness, regulating your nervous system, and being able to spot times of dysregulation before they get too out of control. So here we go. Are you ready to unlock your body's hidden potential for healing and connection? Discover the power of your nervous system and the incredible role of the vagus nerve in my new book, The Polyvagal Solution, coming May 1st, 2025 from New Harbinger. In The Polyvagal Solution, you'll explore how the vagus nerve, the key player in polyvagal theory, guides your emotional regulation and transforms stress into strength. This isn't just another self-help guide. It's a practical roadmap grounded in cutting-edge science and real-world strategies. Whether you're recovering from trauma or simply seeking balance, this book offers actionable exercises and insights that help you harness the power of your vagus nerve to reclaim your inner calm. Get your copy now wherever you like to buy your books. The Polyvagal Solution, because your body and especially your vagus nerve hold the key to transformation. Physiological state. Oh, what is that? She's starting off with a heady term. Physiological state is quite simply the state of your body. Your physiological state is... directly correlated to your mood and how you're feeling in any moment. So if you're saying, I feel really good today, Rebecca. I feel grounded. I feel regulated. I feel happy. You are describing your mood, your affect, how you're doing. That's all based on what your physiology, what your body, what your nervous system is doing. If you're saying, I feel super anxious today, I feel really depressed. You're describing different physiological states. You're saying my nervous system is in a certain space and it's producing all of these symptoms that go along with it. And I'm going to slap a label on that and say that means I'm depressed. physiological state is governed by lots of things. But for this conversation today, we're going to specifically talk about your autonomic nervous system and the three pathways of your autonomic nervous system that have a huge effect on your physiological state and therefore how you're feeling in any given moment. Now, let me go back. Rewinding for anybody who remembers what it was like to have a VCR. Let's go back. to just talking about neurobiology 101. Your nervous system is a huge expansive system made up of trillions of cells. It is one system, but in neurobiology and science, we break it into a couple of different branches because it helps us to organize concepts and it helps us to study certain parts and aspects, certain functions of the nervous system, but it's all one system. Your nervous system, has the central nervous system, which consists of your brain and your spinal cord, kind of like the operating center of all of your body. Your brain runs the show. It's in charge of everything. It's the conductor that's kind of directing all of the instruments, which are your bodily systems. Then you have your peripheral nervous system. So your peripheral nervous system are like the nerves at the periphery. is one way to think about it. The nerves outside of the brain that run throughout the body and they communicate information from the body to brain and brain to body. They tell your stomach what to do and they tell your brain what your stomach is doing and they tell your heart what to do and they tell your brain what your heart is doing. So it's this huge bi-directional communication web that all works on electricity. That's right. Your neurons communicate via electrical impulses. Now, Within the peripheral nervous system, so the branch of nerves that run throughout the body, there are a couple of other branches. We won't get into all of them. But the one we're going to specifically talk about here today is the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is what houses the functions of fight, flight, freeze, collapse, and just feeling good and grounded and safe. The autonomic nervous system, I think of as your automatic nervous system because it operates outside of your conscious control, mostly. There are ways that we can intentionally influence our autonomic nervous system, but this part of your nervous system is a really big component of your survival biology. And so it needs to function automatically. Now, going back to the episode before this one on neuroception, which if you didn't listen to that one, I encourage you to maybe go back and listen to that one first because that one is important for this conversation as well. Neuroception is passive, unconscious awareness. So it's detection without conscious awareness, the process through which your brain and your nervous system is constantly scanning the stimuli that you come into contact with and assessing without your conscious, logical, rational mind, whether or not that stimuli is dangerous or whether or not it's safe. If neuroception perceives stimuli to be safe, so for example, I'm sitting in my home right now and I see the sunlight and the trees outside and I hear my husband mowing the grass and it smells nice in my room. Nothing is on fire and I feel pretty comfortable in my body. I feel well rested. I don't feel sick. There's no rabid animals in this room. This room is pretty well organized. All these cues of stimuli in my environment are telling my nervous system, because neuroception is appraising that, like, hey, I'm safe here. So I can be focused. I'm regulated. My heart rate is beating a certain way. My breathing is operating in a certain way. My immune system is functioning. So when my nervous system perceives there's enough safety here to be present, to engage, to be curious, to learn, my physiology is going to match that. But if I was not feeling that way, if I'm in an environment where there's lots of cues of danger, whether those be clear and present imminent cues of danger, like animals that are about to attack you or people who are about to attack you or a dangerous environment or the smell of smoke or the sound of gunfire, those are clear imminent cues of danger. And Neuroception perceives that, says danger, danger, and it changes how your autonomic nervous system is functioning. It moves your autonomic nervous system to protect you. Your autonomic nervous system is made up of your sympathetic nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous system. So two branches within this part of the nervous system. And your parasympathetic nervous system and sympathetic nervous system have some different qualities to them. Now, before I go any further, I want to be clear that both of these branches, all of this nervous system is useful and good. Sometimes when we start talking about the different functions of the autonomic nervous system, people might get the sense of like, oh, my sympathetic nervous system is bad. No, it's all good. It's all necessary, needed, and important. You're still here, so evidence that it works and it's necessary. But when we can better understand how this part of our neurobiology works, we can better work with it so it doesn't feel like it's so automatic and ruining our lives at times. So let's start with your sympathetic nervous system. Your sympathetic nervous system is the mobilizing part of your neurobiology. So your sympathetic nervous system brings in energy. You need this part of your nervous system to get out of bed in the morning. It increases your heart rate. It helps you get to the gym. It helps you find motivation. It helps you perform big feats. It helps you get up on stage and do a presentation. It's mobilizing. It's energizing. Ooh, energy. Mobilization is good. But if neuroception perceives something is dangerous and I need fight or flight energy, your sympathetic nervous system can take over out of survival and protection. And when it does so, it kind of changes its tune. It's not like, oh, I feel mobilized and motivated, like I'm ready to go to the gym. It's responding out of fear and danger. And so in those spaces, when the sympathetic nervous system gets activated out of fear and alarm, it can move us into feeling panic and rumination, overwhelming anxiety. We have a lot of tension. It's hard to sit still. Our heart rate is kind of picked up along with our breathing, our respiration. Our blood flow actually changes. So we get more blood flowing to vital organs, our arms and our legs to fight or to flee. And we have a decrease in blood flow to parts of our body that we don't necessarily need to fight or flee. Your digestion gets depressed here. So you might lose your appetite. You're not really digesting your food because again, your body is trying to allocate all those resources that would be going to digestion to surviving whatever it is that you're trying to survive. We can also get dry mouth here. Now, in this space, we can feel a lot of fear. We might feel the need to flee. We might feel like we're irritable and easy to start a fight. And that's all that fight or flight energy. Now, this is really useful if you are running away from a bear that's chasing you in the woods. But this part of your nervous system doesn't recognize the difference between imminent danger necessarily and, oh, that was a real snotty email that my boss sent me in all caps and I just want to go in and tell him where to go. Yes, we can certainly dampen our nervous system so we don't have the same fight or flight energy in response to that email from our boss. But for some of us with trauma histories, or if we didn't have somebody teach us how to manage our emotions, we can have the kind of same level of reaction to that email as we might have if we come across a scary animal in the woods. It can sometimes overshoot its response. The parasympathetic nervous system on the other side is more of your kind of grounding and immobilizing aspect of the autonomic nervous system. So sometimes parasympathetic is referred to as your rest and digest part of your neurobiology. And this is true. But there's another aspect to the parasympathetic nervous system that we don't always talk about. So in polyvagal theory, we talk about the parasympathetic nervous system in two kind of branches, pathways, I should say, two pathways. So one is the ventral vagal pathway. And the ventral vagal pathway is represented by a bundle of nerves that allow you to rest and digest. So when we are connected to that ventral vagal pathway, we feel calm and regulated. We feel alert, but not hyper alert. We feel attentive. We're curious. We might feel playful. We are able to sit still. We're able to listen, be good listeners. That ventral vagal pathway is often the pathway that we are all trying to achieve more connection to. The ventral vagal pathway is where rest and restoration happen. It's the Goldilocks zone. It's the just right zone. All of your bodily functions and organs are able to function optimally. You're balanced. You're getting good sleep. You're digesting your food. Your immune system is working. So optimal functioning in that ventral vagal pathway. But the parasympathetic nervous system has another side to it. And that's called the dorsal vagal pathway. And in polyvagal theory, we use this term to describe a branch of nerves within the parasympathetic nervous system that can immobilize us in response to danger. So when we move into a state of feeling collapsed, shut down, like we just want to hole up and disappear, when we feel depressed, when we feel lethargic, a lack of excitement or motivation for life, when we want to disconnect from our relationships, when everything just feels like you just want to hide and slow way, way down, that's an expression of the dorsal vagal pathway. So when the dorsal vagal pathway takes over in response to fear, If neuroception has perceived, I cannot run away from this animal. I cannot run away or escape or fight off this threat. How do I try to disappear inside? Our physiological state shifts. We lose the ability to make eye contact with others. Our energy kind of bottoms out. This is a pathway where I think of sometimes bears going into hibernation. So we want to store a lot of calories. So sometimes in that dorsal pathway, our body is going into, I need to protect and shut down and disappear. So it causes us to crave maybe high carb, high sugar, high calorie foods to try and hoard resources, even though in your brain, you're not thinking of that, but that can be kind of what happens. We might also be looking for that sugar high to move us out of that state of collapse and despair. Our digestion can get really sluggish. So sometimes this is where people have issues with constipation or they have really slow digestion. They feel really bloated or unable to really process their food. We can sleep and not feel well rested here. Our immune system can get depressed, which means that its functioning is less than optimal. Our heart rate can slow way down. Our breathing gets really depressed. And overall, we just really lack energy in our body. So that dorsal vagal pathway, again, is there to try to protect you. And we need some access to immobilizing energy. We need some immobilizing energy when we go to bed at night. When we try and just sit and watch a movie and be present there. But when that pathway takes over because neuroception is perceived something to be dangerous, it changes its tune. And I can go into this really protective space. So these are our three pathways. So let's talk through them again. We have the ventral vagal pathway, part of that parasympathetic nervous system that is the Goldilocks zone, the rest and digest, like optimal zone that we're all trying to get more access to. This is where you can live your best life and be your best self. You're going to be your best self in your relationships. You're going to have the best relationship with yourself. Your health is going to feel the best it can be here. You're going to feel curious and motivated and alive and passionate and inspired by life. Then we also have that dorsal vagal pathway, which is part of the parasympathetic nervous system. And that's our immobilizing pathway. And when that pathway gets activated because neuroception says danger, danger, and if we can't fight or flee the trigger, the thing that's so dangerous, it can move us into that shutdown space. And finally, we have our sympathetic nervous system, the mobilizing part of our nervous system. So great, we need this part of our neurobiology. But when this pathway takes over because neuroception perceives danger, it moves us into fight or flight energy. So how can you use this information in your day-to-day life? First, I encourage you to just think about as I was reviewing these three pathways, and this was a really quick overview. If you want to go deeper, certainly check out my book, check out some of my other material to really understand the autonomic nervous system in more depth. But think about as I was talking about each of these pathways, which one or ones do you resonate with most? Where do you live most of your life? And how could that help explain some of the things that you're really challenged by? So for example, if you're struggling with depression and a loss of motivation, and you're not really feeling a desire to engage in your life or in your relationships, you're kind of describing that you're stuck in the dorsal autonomic pathway of shutdown and collapse. If you're saying like, no, I tend to live on the other spectrum. I live in the space where I'm constantly anxious. I'm constantly distracted. It's hard for me to focus. I struggle with my appetite. I'm constantly ruminating. Worry is my middle name. You're saying that I'm really stuck in that sympathetic pathway of fight or flight. The goal to live a more... aligned in life in which we can thrive is to try and intentionally increase our access to our ventral vagal pathway. Now, luckily, there's lots of ways we can do this. And so there's no way for us to have a podcast on this is how you connect your access to the ventral vagal pathway. In fact, everything that you listen to on my podcast is going to talk to you about how you can do exactly that. In our last episode, we talked about neuroception and we talked about how to shift your awareness to taking in the cues of safety. That's one way to increase your connection to that ventral pathway. Because when your neuroception is saying, this feels dangerous, if you assess this isn't actually dangerous, I'm just in a busy airport, as the example I gave, then if you start to shift your awareness to take in the cues of safety, you can move away from that pathway of sympathetic mobilization or dorsal shutdown and get a little bit more access back to that ventral pathway. When we do cold water therapy, Breath work, we move, we get sunlight, we engage in supportive, healthy relationships, we find time for play, we dance to music. These are all things that help you connect to your ventral pathway. The other way to apply this information is to get curious in your life about those moments where you do feel really aligned with ventral. Try and catch yourself throughout the day. Maybe they're fleeting moments. Maybe you have big chunks of time. Maybe your ventral pathway is where you live most of your life. That is amazing. But even if you only have fleeting moments of ventral, I promise you they're still there because this is your nervous system. You have a ventral pathway. You wouldn't be alive without it. It's there, but maybe it just feels like a stranger, a stranger that you'd like to get to know better. And that by getting to know it better and what it needs and how to connect to it, how to build a long lasting relationship, you can thrive in your life. So the moments that you do feel connected to ventral, maybe it's sitting, drinking your cup of coffee in the morning and your cat's on your lap. And that just even a fleeting moment, a couple of seconds, a couple of minutes just feels really sweet and good and grounding to you. Maybe it's going outside and taking in a breath of fresh air and the feeling of the warmth of the sun on your skin. Maybe it's something a bit more in-depth and you sit down and you do an in-depth visualization and that leaves you feeling really groovy. And you take a moment to just notice what it feels like to feel so groovy. We can connect to those moments by being really curious about what do I feel in my body? What am I noticing in my mind? And can I just give all of this a little bit more permission to take up more space? So many of us are on the run, are on the go, and we don't give ourselves permission to soak up the good moments. But when we give ourselves permission and time, a couple of breaths, a moment of pause to connect to those ventral moments, we're helping to build a more resilient nervous system. You're essentially working out that ventral pathway. so that it can become your baseline and your home base. And I recognize if it is not your home base, that might sound like a lot of work. But here's one hopeful tip I can give you from our conversation today. Your nervous system is adaptive and resilient and you have the benefit of neuroplasticity on your side. Neuroplasticity is the process through which your neurons build new neural pathways. Yes, all of us can heal. All of us have the power to change. And by finding those micro moments to soak up moments of connection to ventral or intentionally trying to create them by going outside, feeling the sun on your skin, just an example, getting in the shower, taking a cold shower. I know it doesn't feel ventral in the moment, but it gets you to ventral afterwards. Spending time with a friend, doing the coping skills. What that's doing is it's enlisting neuroplasticity to build a stronger connection to ventral. Practice repetition over and over and over again is what will get you there. So as we wrap up today's podcast, I encourage you to go take a moment right now. If you are connected to your ventral pathway, take a couple of breaths and really soak that up and notice how you know you're connected to ventral. How do you know you're in ventral? And if you're not, Think about one thing you could do right now to try to get a little bit more connection and just notice what happens. All right, my friends, this was our podcast on one of the core polyvagal theory concepts, which is around the three pathways of the autonomic nervous system. I hope that it helps you to live a better life and to thrive. Until next time. Thank you for joining us Until next time, this is Rebecca Case signing off. Thrive on!