(the five) stress responses

Recently my response to a stressful situation showed that the fight-flight-freeze-fawn stress response is missing a fifth descriptor: network & nurture, more commonly known these days as tend & befriend. 

 

The long standing fight or flight description of stress responses was another of the situations where medical research suffered from a male bias - not only in terms of the responses, but also in the limited interpretations of things like genes, which ignored the complexities of human behaviour/social situations (how people are raised, peer influences, media, etc). 

 

Subsequently those two options were extended to include freeze or fawn, which is discussed in the links below: 

• “The Fawn Response: How Trauma Can Lead to People-Pleasing”   https://psychcentral.com/health/fawn-response   “Difficulty saying ‘no,’ fear of saying what you really feel, and denying your own needs — these are all signs of the fawn response”   

• “Fawning: The Fourth Trauma Response After Fight, Flight, Freeze”   https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/the-fight-flight-freeze-fawn-trauma-responses   

However, there other responses identified before the freeze and fawn responses: network and nurture, and tend and befriend. 

In the case of the stressful situation I mentioned, my immediate reaction was to call on the network of allies in the workplace that I have nurtured over the years, and two of those people are doing a sterling (and successful within a day, by the way) job on my behalf - which is and example of network & nurture. 

 

I have generally considered that tend and befriend was a variation of network and nurture, but definitions tend to vary a bit. For the purposes of this post, which is for my convenience, and does NOT seek to be definitive:

 

From  https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2020/05/fbu-flummoxed-by-unfamiliar.html: 

• Network - where the discomforted person seeks to build a group or network (such as old boys clubs, private schools, irrelevant admission criteria in any organisation, groups against LGBTIQ+ people [or some thereof], etc) against the idea they find discomforting; and

• Nurture - where the discomforted person seeks solace from others who also cling to the idea that is threatened (such as friends, families [especially if the family has a powerful group mind [“egregore”], priests of that religion, etc).

From https://mcleanonline.medium.com/fight-or-flight-196fc1beb89f, which is citing “Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight”   https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10941275/:

• Tending involves nurturant activities designed to protect the self and offspring that promote safety and reduce distress; 

• befriending is the creation and maintenance of social networks that may aid in this process.

These tend to suggest they are more or less equivalent. 

 

However, whether network and nurture or tend and befriend, when I have talked to people in workplaces who exhibit stereotypical male behaviour (including a couple of ciswomen), they've wrongly thought this was the fawn response - and error which assumes there are only two people in the situations: the source of the threat, and the person being threatened. In actual fact, there are also bystanders and allies - and environment/context. 

 

Hopefully a few decades of less stereotypical male and less binary gendered research will see that fifth stress response come into wide  use. 

 

Following are a few morre links: 

• “Stress Response: What Is Tend and Befriend?”   https://psychcentral.com/stress/tend-and-befriend    

• “Fight or Flight?”   https://mcleanonline.medium.com/fight-or-flight-196fc1beb89f   “We’re more complex than that”   

• “There’s A Female Version Of Fight Or Flight, But No One Talks About It”   https://www.thecandidly.com/2019/theres-a-female-version-of-fight-or-flight-but-no-one-talks-about-it   

• “The Tend And Befriend Theory – Why The “Fight-Or-Flight” Response Is Only Half The Story”   https://insighttimer.com/blog/tend-and-befriend-response-psychology/  
  

• Wikipedia: “Tend and befriend”   https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tend_and_befriend&oldid=1187235542  

You can find articles from my main blog which touch on stress at:

• https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/search/label/stress  
  

PS - see also this timely YouTube video:   “Fawning Causes Abusive, Toxic Relationships for Autistic People”   https://youtu.be/Ux8nLBUTUPI?si=T-in60LWaf_Haix3  

PPS - also, from a news post of mine: 

• “Why the mental cost of a STEM career can be too high for women and people of colour”   https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00324-0   This has cropped up in a few formats in different situations - for instance, last year there was a report that living with racism on a daily basis created trauma akin to that of soldiers in combat - and the harmful effects of discrimination on many minority groups (e.g., also different gender identities, neurodiverse people, and gender diverse people) has been long known (decades at least). This article includes:   “Allostatic load is a term coined by physiological psychologist Eliot Stellar and neuroendocrinologist Bruce McEwen, one of my mentors. It describes how chronic adverse physical, psychological or social situations — including racial and gender-based oppression — cause sustained activation of the body and brain’s stress response, resulting in cumulative wear and tear. Increased allostatic load is associated with depression and anxiety, which can impair motivation”   I can, from nearly half a century in the engineering profession in several minority groups, confirm that. I CAN ALSO CONFIRM THE BENEFITS OF BUILDING COMMUNITY - this is what I refer to as network and nurture when discussing the FIVE stress responses at   https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-five-stress-responses.html      See also   “What Is Allostatic Load?”   https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-allostatic-load-5680283      “What Does 'Allostatic Load' Mean for Your Health?”   https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/presence-mind/202010/what-does-allostatic-load-mean-your-health   “According to the allostatic load model, the effects of stress are cumulative”      “Allostatic Load”   https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/allostatic-load   “Allostatic load is defined as the perturbation of several physiological systems toward consistently high or low or non-adaptive states even when stressors remit, whose combined perturbations lead to wear and tear on the body”      “Allostatic Load and Its Impact on Health: A Systematic Review”   https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32799204/      “Allostatic Load”   https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Allostatic_load&oldid=1187244176     
  

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