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Anxiety and Fear in Daily Life

The Three F’s When our primitive men, Grr and Eek, heard a lion outside their cave, they had a decision to make. Do they attack the lion or avoid it? This is the same decision every person makes when faced with a threat. This dilemma even has its own name: the fight-or-flight response. Humans today don’t have to struggle for survival nearly as much as we did thousands of years ago. But our fight-or-flight response still exists. Even if you’re afraid of a loud sound in the dark or of sitting down for a hard test at school, you will still experience that same fight- or-flight response that Grr and Eek did. Although the choice is usually expressed as “fight” or “flight,” there is also a third option, called “freeze.” Animals often choose freeze as a response to predators—they simply stay very still and hope the predator won’t notice them. The way deer stop in front of oncoming cars is a famous case of freezing in the face of a threat—that’s where we get the expression “caught like a deer in headlights.” Humans also sometimes freeze in response to danger. This is why

it’s usually unfair to criticize a crime victim for not fighting back. We might want to fight, but sometimes fear makes us unable to do so.

Deer really do tend to freeze when confronted with an oncoming car.