Fight, Flight, Freeze: Learning to Recognise My Own Warning Signs

Most days, I can hold it together until about 3 PM. After that, I feel myself starting to slip. By the time dinner rolls around, I'm in the thick of it. Addy isn't listening. I have decisions to make quickly: What's for dinner? Has she done this? Has she done that? And the noise—so much noise. The TV, especially, is something I cannot manage during that window of the day. It's not just annoying; it actually goes straight through me, almost physically, in a way it never used to before the accident.

Understanding the Overwhelm

Part of what's happening isn't really about the noise itself. It's about how many things my brain is being asked to hold at once. I need to decide on dinner, track what Addy is doing, filter the TV noise, and remember what still needs to be done before bed. Before the accident, I could juggle ten things without even noticing. Now, juggling is the whole job, and there's nothing left over for actually being present in the room.

That's usually when I notice my body's already decided something before I have. Whatever I was about to say to Addy just stops. Or there's that flight urge, the want to leave the room, the house, the moment entirely. I don’t really do fight, for what it's worth. For me, it’s flight and freeze, sometimes both wrestling for control at the same time. These days, it's a lot harder to act on those urges. In a house, there was always somewhere to go—a different room, the laundry, a hallway, or even just a door you could close for thirty seconds. In a caravan, there isn't really anywhere. The room I want to flee is usually the only room there is.

What's Actually Happening in My Brain

I wanted to understand why this happens the way it does, instead of just living inside it and calling it a bad day.

Turns out there's an actual alarm system in your brain, called the amygdala. Its whole job is to scan for threats and sound the alarm the second it senses one. It doesn't wait for permission. It doesn’t check in with the rest of your brain first.

Think about where this system actually came from. Somewhere back in caveman days, if something started chasing you, you didn't have time for a meeting about it. You had maybe a few seconds to decide: fight it, outrun it, or freeze and hope it didn't notice you. Getting that decision wrong meant you didn't get another turn. The body that evolved out of that isn't built for nuance. It's built for speed. Racing heart, tense muscles, senses on high alert—all of it happens before the thinking part of your brain has even caught up. That's not a character flaw; that's the system working exactly as designed, for a world with predators, not a world with dinner and a toddler's iPad time.

Normally, there's another part of your brain responsible for planning, weighing things up, and staying in control. This part can step in and settle the alarm down once it realizes there's no actual danger. That's the part that lets most people feel a flicker of stress and come back to baseline fairly quickly.

Here's what changed for me. A concussion doesn't just bruise the part of your brain that hurts. It puts the whole nervous system under a kind of inflammatory stress and interrupts the networks meant to regulate emotion and bring you back down once the alarm's gone off. So the alarm goes off faster and louder than it used to. And the part of my brain that used to talk it back down isn't functioning the way it once did.

That's the zero to a hundred in seconds. It was never really about willpower. It's an alarm system that's more sensitive than it used to be, wired to a regulation system that's had some of its wiring knocked loose.

Building a New Routine

We've had to build actual structure around this, not just hope I muscle through it. Addy has the iPad instead of the TV during that window now because iPad noise I can filter, while TV noise I genuinely can't. And that's not a preference; it's just how it is these days. I wear my Loop earplugs some afternoons, on my occupational therapist's advice, and they've been one of the few things that actually help.

There's a whiteboard in the caravan now, so my to-do list lives there instead of circling around in my head all day—one less thing my brain has to hold onto by 3 PM. We've built a new routine where Addy comes in and has a shower at 5 PM. This sounds small, but it's actually doing a lot of quiet work. Back when we had the house and the Thermomix, dinner got easier the day I let Cookidoo do the deciding for me instead of standing there every night trying to think of something. We don't have that here in the caravan, so these days it's just meal planning, working out the week ahead of time so 5 PM me doesn't have to make a decision that 9 AM me could have made instead.

And then there are the days when none of that matters anyway. The crash days, when my body's already made its decision before I've even noticed the warning signs. I sit down for a minute and I'm just gone, asleep before I've even registered how tired I was. Not a nap I chose—a full stop my body decided for me because I didn't manage to stop it in time.

Those days remind me that the toolkit was never about fixing this or beating it. It's about giving myself the best possible chance on an average day and being gentle with myself on the days the system shuts down anyway.

Learning to Recognise My Own Warning Signs

For a long time, I thought the goal was to stop this from happening altogether. Get calm enough, organized enough, healed enough, so that 3 PM would just stop being a cliff edge.

I don't think that's actually the goal anymore.

Life is hard. Life is chaotic. If I'm honest, I don't always get an early warning sign. Some days it's zero to a hundred before I've had any real chance to notice it coming at all. What I don't like is the fallout—being short with Addy, feeling foggy and low afterward, the days that end in guilt instead of just tiredness. So instead of trying to get better at catching every single warning sign in the moment, which isn't always possible, I've focused on putting things in place ahead of time that limit the damage, regardless of whether I catch it coming or not.

Earplugs in before 3 PM, not after I've already noticed I need them. iPad on as part of the routine, not as a rescue plan mid-meltdown. Whiteboard already up. Dinner already decided at 9 AM instead of invented at 5 PM. None of that depends on me noticing anything in the moment. It's already there, waiting, whether I catch the warning sign or not.

Every single person has a fight, flight, or freeze response. It's not a PCS thing, a trauma thing, or a broken thing. It's a human thing. You've felt it too, I'd bet, even without a brain injury behind it.

The Importance of Self-Care

Think about the moments in your own day. A child bites another child, and you've got two sets of parents to manage, a certificate to fill out, and a room full of other children still needing you—all in the same sixty seconds. Someone's crying, someone's climbing the bookshelf, the phone's ringing with a family running late for pickup, and your body has already decided what it's doing before you've consciously chosen anything at all. Maybe it's your voice going sharp before you meant it to. Maybe it's that urge to stand very still and hope the chaos resolves itself. Maybe it's the pack-up scramble at the end of a huge day when every cell in you is saying shut down, not switch on, while you're still expected to smile at the gate.

That's the same juggling I described earlier with dinner, just wearing a different uniform. Decide, track, filter, remember—all at once, with no room left over for actually being present. Educators do that juggle for hours at a time, most days, often completely alone if you're in Family Day Care. Mine just has the volume turned up, and the part of my brain that used to turn it back down again isn't as reliable as it once was. That's not something I need to fix so much as something I need to actually know about myself.

There's one more thing I'm still learning, and I think it might be the hardest one. It's not just about recognizing the warning signs. It's about actually stopping when I see them, instead of pushing through because there's washing to fold, dinner to finish, or some version of myself that's supposed to keep going regardless.

It's okay to rest. It's okay to give yourself a moment of reprieve. Or ten of them, back to back, if that's what the day actually needs. Not because you've earned it by getting everything else done first, but because stopping before you crash is so much kinder than being forced to stop by a body that's run out of options.

That's the actual work: not becoming a person who never gets caught off guard, but building enough scaffolding around the hard parts of the day so that even when I don't see it coming, I've still got something in place to catch me. And giving yourself permission to actually use it, to actually stop, instead of earning your rest after you've already run out.

Reflection Question

Is there a hard part of your day you can predict, even if you can't always catch yourself in the moment it hits? What's one thing you could put in place ahead of time, not to stop it from happening, but to limit the fallout when it does?

I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

💙 Rachel Smith

The Educators Well

Wellbeing First • Empower Through Learning • Lead With Purpose • Lift Each Other Up