Most people have heard about the fight or flight response. Some have heard of “freeze,” there’s talk about triggers and dysregulation and you might have heard about “tend and befriend”

Unless you’re in the therapeutic space, you probably haven’t heard about the other survival responses, even though they’re running the lives of many high-achieving, emotionally intelligent folks every day.

Before I ever studied nervous system science, before I trained in Somatic Experiencing or built a breathwork practice, I lived mostly between freeze and flop, the two least glamorous, least Instagrammable stress responses. (Which is probably why I dove down various rabbit holes) The “play dead” responses aren’t the ones folks talk about at networking events and have only very recently been included in the wellness content you see online.

People would say, “Why don’t you just do this? Why don’t you take action? Why don’t you respond?”

I…couldn’t.

It wasn’t a lack of intelligence, desire, or self-respect. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to advocate for myself, set boundaries, or take action when it mattered.

It was that my nervous system simply couldn’t coordinate and muster activity.

I would get news, something that required a response, a decision…some action, and go blank. No thoughts. No next steps. No energy to mobilise. I would feel… nothing.

Even anxiety felt like a luxury. Who has energy for all that franticness?

Freeze and flop were my home base. I was stuck there for years.

The Problem With “Just Fight or Flight”

The conventional stress response narrative is simple:

When you’re stressed, you either fight (get aggressive, defensive, confrontational) or you flee (run away, avoid, escape).

It’s a good story that fits neatly into infographics and Instagram carousels.

For many of us (especially high-performing, emotionally sensitive women navigating burnout, perimenopause, chronic workplace stress, or complex relational dynamics), that binary doesn’t capture our lived experience.

What do you call it when you’re sitting in a meeting, appearing completely functional, responding when spoken to, even taking notes… and inside, you’re utterly detached? Operating on autopilot with no emotional access, no creative thinking, just mechanical functioning?

What do you call it when you receive feedback or conflict and instead of fighting back or running away, you simply… collapse? When the overwhelm is so complete that your system says, “Nope. We are done. Initiating shutdown sequence now.”

What do you call it when your default response to tension isn’t aggression or escape, but immediate accommodation? When you habitually shrink, smooth over conflict, and agree to things you don’t want, making yourself smaller to keep everyone else comfortable?

These responses don’t fit the “fight or flight” framework and they’re not aberrations, signs of weakness or indications of dysfunction.

They’re survival strategies.

If you have to manage trauma (big T or little t trauma), the body in its wisdom will default to a strategy. Outside of your window of tolerance (your ability to cognitively respond), the system reacts. Based on what’s available and your physiology, the response might become a habit, a response conditioned over time, and you might find that some situation even mildly resembling a previous threat, triggers a response that is now maladaptive. The need to protect isn’t there but the response kicks in, and we react. What was once protective might be a liability.

Building the Map I Needed

It wasn’t until years later, working with my own patterns and then with high-performers across stuckness, perimenopause, and leadership stress, that I realised just how common these patterns are.

And how few tools actually address them.

You can’t box-breathe your way out of a deep freeze. You can’t journal your way into boundaries when your nervous system’s entire job is to keep you appeasing and accommodating.

These are conditioned, mostly subconscious reactions. You’re not consciously picking a strategy.

The practices that work for fight and flight (the ones that help you discharge activation, calm anxiety, release tension) don’t always work for immobilisation. They don’t work for shutdown. They don’t work for the survival strategies that keep us stuck in patterns we can’t think our way out of.

So I built a map to help me navigate my own inner territory. I call it the F-State Map™.

It’s a functional system for awareness and understanding what’s actually happening in your body when you’re dysregulated so you can choose practices that match your state instead of fighting against it.

The Five F-States

The F-State Map builds on established nervous system science, drawing from polyvagal theory, trauma research, and the lived patterns I’ve observed in my own body and in the bodies of the women I work with.

What the actual F:

1. FIGHT

Mobilisation with direction: irritation, defensiveness, control, quick anger.

This is the classic “fight” response. You have energy, and it’s pointed outward. At work, this might look like interrupting or over-asserting. It’s gripping the steering wheel too tightly in traffic and snapping at someone who doesn’t deserve it.

Fight has a bad reputation, but it’s not inherently problematic. It’s your system’s way of saying, “Boundary crossed and I have enough resources to push back.” The issue is when it becomes your only option, or when it shows up in contexts where it doesn’t serve you.

2. FLIGHT

Mobilisation without direction: restlessness, racing mind, busyness as escape.

Flight is anxious energy. It’s the need to move, to do, to stay in motion because stillness feels dangerous. At work, this looks like over-preparing for meetings, jumping between tasks without finishing any of them, staying “productive” as a way to avoid discomfort.

Flight keeps you busy but not necessarily effective. It’s the response that makes you feel like you’re doing something while keeping you from doing the thing that actually matters.

3. FREEZE

Immobilisation with awareness: brain fog, stillness, numbness.

This is where I lived for a long time, and it’s where many high-performing women find themselves without realising it.

You’re awake. You’re aware. But you can’t move. You can’t access emotion. You can’t generate ideas or energy or momentum. You’re stuck.

Functional freeze is especially common in high performers: you appear competent, you attend meetings, you meet deadlines, you might get home and zone out in front of screens for hours. You’re detached, depleted, operating mechanically. You’re running on muscle memory, not aliveness. People around you might not even notice. But you feel it. The flatness. The distance. Internal detachment. The sense that you’re watching your life happen instead of living it. For years, I felt as if I was sitting ringside instead of in the centre of my own experience.

4. FLOP

Immobilisation collapse: overwhelm, emotional shutdown, “I can’t,” sudden exhaustion.

When freeze isn’t enough to protect you.

Flop is the response that looks like giving up. It’s the sudden, complete exhaustion that hits when the overwhelm is too much. It’s the moment when your system says, “We’re done. No more. Shutting everything down.”

What looks like “under-reacting” or “being too passive” can actually be a deeply wired survival adaptation. Your system is trying to protect you the only way it knows how, by collapsing so completely that no one would demand anything more from you.

Flop isn’t laziness, weakness or your system failing you. It’s your nervous system’s last-ditch effort to get you to stop.

5. FAWNFOLD

The appeasement response: people-pleasing, smoothing conflict, shrinking needs, over-compliance.

I call this FawnFold to fit the map’s structure (F-States was just too good to add “appease”) while being clear about what it is: a social survival strategy.

This is the response where you make yourself smaller, more agreeable, more accommodating in order to stay safe. You prioritise other people’s comfort over your own needs. You smooth over conflict even when it costs you. You say yes when you mean no because “no” doesn’t feel like an option your nervous system will allow.

We are pack mammals and can kowtow if that’s what’s needed to keep us safe.

It’s not a personality flaw. FawnFold keeps you employed. It keeps you liked. It keeps you safe in environments where asserting yourself feels dangerous.

It also keeps you from your own life.

What Makes This Map Different

The F-State Map isn’t a clinical diagnostic tool, pop-psych or a spiritual framework.

It’s a functional system for high-performing, emotionally sensitive folks who:

• Don’t resonate with “fight or flight”

• Struggle with freeze or flop

• Hit burnout cycles repeatedly

• Live inside intense relational or workplace demands

• Have spent years appeasing to stay safe, respected, or employed

The F-State Map helps you accurately identify your state so you can choose the right breath or regulation tool, quickly, and build your capacity over time to live in more regulated states like flow, fun and flexibility.

It’s hard to shift what you can’t name.

I remember what a buzz the love languages made. And the axiom that you can either act from love or fear. An F-state is a survival strategy that you default to when your system is dysregulated. Something happens that puts your system outside of your window of tolerance. It’s not a cognitive response; it’s an automatic, habitual survival strategy.

Not sure which F-State you’re in? Take the “What’s Your F-State?” Quiz.

Why This Matters Even More During Perimenopause

If you’re a woman over 40, your body is likely navigating a massive hormonal transition that directly affects your nervous system’s resilience.

Perimenopause doesn’t just affect your periods or your temperature regulation. It also affects your nervous system’s capacity.

Fluctuating estrogen levels directly impact how your nervous system responds to stress. What used to roll off your back… doesn’t. What was manageable is now overwhelming. Your capacity (that internal reservoir you’ve always been able to draw from) suddenly feels finite and not that large.

It’s not your imagination. Your body is operating with different resources than it had before.

If you’ve been a high performer for years (if you’ve built a life and career on your ability to push through, to manage, to keep all the plates spinning), this shift can feel like betrayal.

Why can’t I do what I’ve always done? Am I being dramatic? Why does everything feel so much harder? Why am I suddenly in freezing or in flop when I used to be able to fight or flee?

Understanding your F-State becomes even more critical during this transition because your nervous system is already working harder just to maintain baseline function. You don’t have the luxury of operating from states that drain you. You need tools that match what’s actually happening in your body, not what you wish was happening.

The Science: Where This Framework Fits

The Defense Cascade and Threat-Imminence Framework

The F-State Map builds on well-established neuroscience research, particularly what neuroscientists studying threat responses have mapped as the defence cascade and threat-imminence framework.

Both models describe how our nervous systems shift between different defensive responses based on how close, how inescapable, and how dangerous a threat feels.

Rather than a simple binary of “fight or flight,” researchers have mapped a continuum of defensive states that vary with threat proximity and our ability to escape. This cascade is orchestrated by midbrain circuitry working in concert with the amygdala and prefrontal cortex.

What the research shows:

Active defence (fight/flight) engages when we perceive a threat but believe we can do something about it, either confront it or escape from it. This involves sympathetic nervous system activation and mobilisation.

Freeze is not “doing nothing.” It’s a preparatory state with heightened sensory awareness and motor inhibition. Your body is gathering information, deciding whether to fight or flee. Research shows that freeze actually enhances certain perceptual capacities and readies the system for rapid action.

Collapsed/tonic immobility (Flop) occurs when escape and struggle are futile. This is a last-resort shutdown state associated with specific vagal pathways, often appearing during inescapable threat. Studies link this state to increased risk of post-traumatic stress, which makes sense: the body has concluded there’s nothing it can do.

Appeasement and social buffering (FawnFold) are well-documented in human ethology and social neuroscience. We deploy submission signals, conciliatory behaviours, and affiliative coping to reduce aggression risk and recruit social support. The “tend-and-befriend” literature describes how social connection can buffer stress responses through specific neurobiological pathways.

The F-State Map takes this established science and makes it practically applicable, giving you language for states you’re actually experiencing and tools that match what your nervous system needs in each state.

Where Polyvagal Theory Fits

If you’ve spent time in trauma-informed wellness spaces, you’ve probably encountered Polyvagal Theory (PVT), developed by Dr. Stephen Porges.

Polyvagal Theory has given us incredibly valuable language for understanding how our nervous systems work, particularly around concepts like neuroception (unconscious safety detection), the role of the vagus nerve in social engagement, and why things like breath and facial expression can shift our felt sense of safety.

PVT’s strengths:

• It highlights the importance of the vagus nerve in stress regulation

• It explains why breath and body-based practices work

• It gives us language for mobilisation and immobilisation responses

• It validates that our nervous systems are constantly scanning for safety

Where PVT becomes controversial:

Some of the anatomical claims (particularly around the “unmyelinated dorsal vagus” and its specific functions) lack strong empirical evidence. Evolutionary arguments within the theory are debated. Some researchers argue that the theory over-interprets limited physiological markers.

In other words: Polyvagal Theory is clinically useful, but not academically airtight.

My stance is:

Use what is helpful. Integrate multiple evidence sources. Stay honest about uncertainty.

The F-State Map respects the useful aspects of PVT, especially its framing of mobilisation and immobilisation, while grounding everything in the broader science-cascade literature, observed human behaviour, nervous system physiology, and the lived patterns I see in leaders worldwide.

I’m interested in having clear, accurate language for the states we actually experience, paired with practices that match those states to help shift out of them and widen the window of tolerance over time.

Why Understanding Your F-State Changes Everything

When you can identify which F-State you’re in, three things become possible:

1. You stop making your nervous system a moral issue.

These are adaptive defence strategies, not character flaws. Freeze is not laziness. Flop is not failure. FawnFold is not weakness.

Once you understand that your responses are your nervous system doing its job (trying to keep you safe, even when the strategy is outdated), you can stop judging yourself and start working with your body instead of against it.

2. You finally understand why certain practices work or don’t.

You can’t “calm down” a fight state with gentle breathing alone. You need to discharge that mobilised energy first.

You can’t box-breathe your way out of a deep freeze. You need practices that gently reintroduce sensation and movement.

You can’t journal your way into boundaries when you’re in FawnFold. You need somatic practices that help your body remember it’s safe to take up space.

When you know your state, you can choose matched practices. And when the practices match your state, they actually work.

3. You start making decisions from sovereignty instead of survival.

When you can name your state, you can shift it. And when you can shift it, you reclaim choice. You stop operating from unconscious patterns and start choosing consciously how you want to show up.

It’s the difference between being at the mercy of your nervous system and learning to work in partnership with it.

The Work Ahead

This map has been years in the making, built from my own lived experience, validated by the patterns I see in the folks I work with, grounded in the science that makes sense of what we experience in our bodies.

It’s a work in progress.

It’s the map I wish I’d had when I was sitting in that functional freeze, wondering why I couldn’t just do the things I knew I needed to do.

It’s what I wish I’d known when I was collapsing into flop, thinking there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

It’s the map my clients need when they’re caught in FawnFold, unable to set a single boundary even though they can articulate exactly why they need to.

And, I’m sharing it with you. Because you deserve language for what’s happening in your body, tools that actually match your experience and because you deserve to stop fighting against yourself and start working with the wisdom your nervous system is trying to share.

What’s Next

Going forward, I’ll be sharing more about how to work with each F-State: the specific breathwork practices, the somatic tools, the daily applications that turn understanding into embodied change.

But for now, I invite you to simply notice.

Which F-State feels most familiar? Which one do you default to under stress? Which one have you been living in without having language for it?

Just notice. No judgment. Just observation.

Want to know your dominant F-State? Take the “What’s Your F-State?” quiz at www.mindsetbreath.com

Naming it is the first step toward shifting it.

And shifting it is how you move from survival to sovereignty.

When You’re Ready to Go Deeper

Understanding the map is one thing. Learning to shift your state consistently, in real time, in the contexts that matter most to you is where the real transformation happens.

If you’re ready to move from awareness to embodied practice, here’s how we can work together:

The Alivefullness Reset – Learn the complete Strategic Breathwork™ system: the Breath Governor™, F-State Map™, Breath Archetypes, and A.L.I.V.E. System™. You’ll know which protocol to use before the high-stakes meeting, which one when you can’t make another decision, which one when your body won’t let you rest. The framework that makes this yours for life.

Alight Bespoke – Six months of private mentorship for when you need this integrated into your leadership. We weave Strategic Breathwork™ into how you lead, how you make decisions, and how you show up when the stakes are highest.

The beauty of having a map is that you’re no longer lost. You might not always know exactly where you’re going, but you know where you are.

And that changes everything.

A Rostant is the creator of Strategic Breathwork™ and the Alivefullness™ framework. She helps high-performing, emotionally intelligent leaders move from survival to sovereignty through science-backed, embodied practices that work at work and in the wild, not just in practice.

First published on Mindset Breath on Substack.