Fawn or Freeze?

Fight or flight which do you prefer?

The classic answer is “it depends…”

Humans, despite those who dogmatically deny it, are not comprised of binary code… our choices are not made from zeros or ones which is why many people who say yes really mean no and some who say no actually will do yes.

Despite the polarization in the world with right and left, wrong and right beliefs humans can see the world in more than shades of grey. The human eye has three types of cones which distinguish red, green and blue which is fascinating since in painting the primary colours are red, yellow and blue… sorry green you are a bit special in art but in physics you rule.

In the real-world light can be split into a spectrum and we observe it from ultraviolet through to red. Depending on which source you choose to believe we can see somewhere between 1 million and 10 million different colours. Unless you are a woman…

12% of women have an extra cone in their eyes and can distinguish up to 100 million colours. That’s a super power right there, hiding in plain sight. It’s called tetrachromacy.

Men on the other hand have a greater chance of something going wrong with one of their cones resulting in colour blindness.

It’s all down to that X and Y chromosome thing… men just have a greater fail rate and women get a greater chance of adding a bonus to their abilities.

I wonder how many great women artists had tetrachromacy enabling them to out colour their male peers… possibly Berthe Morisot – possibly the greatest impressionist painter of her time

Anyway… I’ve drifted from the point… we see the world in millions of colours and likewise our brains process situations not on a single dot but on a multitude of different considerations that all together analyse the context of what is happening and a lot of this processing is done automatically.

Internally we have a communication system where our brains receive an SNS message – the SNS is our Sympathetic Nervous System and its job is to keep you alive. Our bodies are so complex that have some automated systems to take care of things for us so that we can get on with life instead of sweating the small and big stuff. Actually, sweating is something the SNS controls as well as our heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, the urge to go to the toilet, and a bunch more activities that the article I’m reading from Cleveland Clinic didn’t elaborate on.

Effectively, the SNS will stir your body up into a frenzy when you are threatened. In an instant you can react by fighting or flighting. Which makes me wonder about those whose homes are threatened by forest fires, some flee and others stay to fight the flames… in that situation I’m more with Team Flight though I know when it comes to insurance pay outs, I’ll join Team Fight. These people also use time in their decision. Instead of letting the body automatically decide, they take the time to weigh their own pros and cons before choosing fight or flight.

The thing is with the SNS it is great for snapping us to attention in emergencies but in everyday decision making it gives up and lets us find substitutes like coffee to kick-start our movement.

So, when it comes to everyday decisions are you a fight or flight person?

Do you like to decide and follow through as quick as possible?

Or do you prefer to take your time and avoid committing to the choice and the possible consequences?

According to Cleveland Clinic there are another 2 options we can take when put under stress.

Freeze – um do nothing

Fawn – try to appease the threat.

Hmmm… if you watch the world, you will see Fawning, Freezing and Fighting going on in politics… however… there’s plenty of other SubStack writers who talk about such things and I only mention politics as it is easy to see the stress responses in action and amplified.

In our personal decision making we get to choose our own response to stress and let’s be clear here, stress is a normal part of life, it just means pressure. When the alarm clock goes off that is a stress event, when we are yawning at midnight that is a stress event, when we are hungry that is a stress event, when there is no coffee in the jar… well you get the picture.

So stress is just part of our lives and is unavoidable however, we are pretty resilient and can cope with lots of pressure which gives life that sense of adventure, thrill and excitement, after all we all need to be a little bit brave to fall in love with someone else and then to potentially share our lives with them.

Decision making is one of things that we must do by nature and yet our nurture can really mess it up. Parenting involves helping children learn to make decisions and take responsibility for their choices.

Our actions are almost always preceded by our thoughts and it is in our thoughts that we decide what action to take.

Some people weigh up a lot of factors before deciding and others are like the proverbial fool and rush in and pay the price for not thinking first. Those in a trade often know the saying “Measure twice and cut once.” Unfortunately, life is not like a video game where there is a restart button if we make a bad choice.

The tricky thing about being human is that we are the sum of our experiences. So, if our decision making has led to tough outcomes, we can be reluctant to make new decisions, this is sometimes politely referred to as being risk adverse. Conversely if our decisions have led to good outcomes, we can become over-confident thinking that future outcomes will have the same results based on our ability to choose well.

When I taught leaders how to develop high energy teams, I would ask them what does success breed? Can you guess what their answer was… 100% of the time they would say success. To which I’d say no, success breeds complacency and then follow up with plenty of business and individual examples of how that was proven.

Success does not mean that tomorrow will be better than today, because everything lives in an ever-changing context. Kodak and Xerox were incredible innovators but success did not lead to ongoing success. The context of the world they were living in changed and they did not.

In their case I suspect the stress response was Freeze. Whenever I hear businesses talk about Best Practice, I realize that they are heading for or are currently in a Freeze state.

What about businesses that are embracing AI are they in a Fight, Flight or Fawn state? Well it would depend on their context. My friend (who for commercial reasons has asked to remain anonymous) a Finance Transformation expert and sadly a Scrum Master (I despise Agile as the New Age Religion of Corporations) wrote recently “The Big4 consultants I've spoken to are excitedly talking about getting into selling delivery of AI services when they already struggle with delivering the basic technology stacks effectively.”

Based on his observations I think he’s seeing the Fawn response, a desperate attempt to pretend to be up with the play and placate the market who have no idea what they should do with AI. If the Big 4 can’t get their act together in the normal world I have no trust that the rabbit hole of AI is going to save them or their clients.

Hmm… I seem to be drifting towards business applications of stress responses when I really set out to talk about whether procrastination is a flight, fight, freeze or fawn response? Which one do you think it is?

Ah… if you only picked one then please restart reading this post as I begin by saying we are not binary thinkers, everything happens in the context of the situation. Our eyes are fully capable of seeing the big picture in between 1-100 million shades of colour.

One of the greatest procrastinators of all artists was Leonardo da Vinci. He was notorious for taking forever to complete a painting and when pressed by one of his clients to get on with it explained that only the greatest creatives procrastinate as they need the time to let the creativity occur.

This thought Leonardo had is one many believe today. You may have said it yourself that you are waiting for inspiration before you start something creative. The word inspiration is a great one, it comes the Latin word inspirare which means to blow into, breathe upon. Adam was brought to life by God breathing into his nostrils the breath of life. Interestingly that we use a similar technique when doing CPR – rescue breaths are inspiration to the person we may be trying to revive.

So, when we are saying we are waiting for inspiration it may be that we are saying we are currently out of breath and without breath we are unable to function.

The author Terry Pratchett was noted for not waiting for inspiration. Instead, he would go to his office each day at the same time and type flat out for the same allotted time. He just worked and the thoughts arrived as he worked.

I once read the difference between an amateur artist and a professional is that the amateur paints when he feels like it while the professional just gets on with it. This is of course binary thinking, and really isn’t it amazing that despite being such complex beings with automated systems our brains often default to this or that thinking?

Leonardo is noted as one of the greatest artists of all time and yet he was a great procrastinator, or was he?

You see procrastination may not be what it seems. Our bodies have multiple choices of what to do when facing pressure and indeed may even create fresh internal pressures based on the situation.

On a cold winter’s morning in my studio, I don’t like painting… so I switch into procrastination mode which for me is contextual, while I am in Freeze mode I wrap my cold hands around a hot cup of coffee and my brain goes… what can I do instead of painting?

This is what Leonardo did… when he wasn’t painting, he was watching the flight of birds and discovering that air acted as a fluid. He was observing the design of feathers and how tails were used to prevent birds from flipping over. He was dissecting cadavers and discovering what causes heart disease, he was designing cities and machines that were beyond the imaginations of anyone else living. While he was procrastinating, he was busy doing other things.

Procrastinating may be a stress response to something we’ve decided is painful at this moment. I say painful since we tend to move away from pain and move towards pleasure… though that’s all contextual as well since many will embrace pain as they see pleasure as a future reward for doing so. Personally, I’d prefer to go to a café than a gym but each to their own.

If procrastination is a stress response it could be easy to imagine it is a Freeze response or even a Flight one. I wonder if there are two, too many alliterative words at action in the Cleveland Clinic report. It’s very convenient to say Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn but decision making is contextual – we weigh up lots of factors including the time available and the reward/risk factors of doing or not doing something immediately.

Procrastination is tied to our inner clocks, we are saying yes this is something I could or should do but it is not time critical so I will do something else. And the last part there of doing something else is probably not examined enough – because in my experience the things I go do instead of art are the other things I’ve been procrastinating about that I now have the time to go do.

Life is an amazing experience is it not? Time and inspiration when they meet and shake hands can produce such amazing things and in the in between times… well this is why cafes were invented.

Wishing you a productive or non-productive week ahead – your choice. I’ll just be here… holding my coffee… oh… and thanks for taking the time to have a read 🤗