What Does Fight or Flight Mean at Work?

A reorganization is announced in a Tuesday meeting. Within seconds your heart is beating faster, your breathing has changed, and your palms are damp. That is the body's emergency response, running at a size that matches what the announcement seems to put at risk.

Fight or flight at work is the body's emergency response, a coordinated set of changes run by the sympathetic nervous system and stress hormones, started by a social threat. Walter Cannon described it in 1915 as preparation for fighting or flight (Cannon, 1915). Being judged by others with no control over the outcome is the strongest trigger measured.

Where Did the Term Fight or Flight Come From?

The physiologist Walter Cannon studied what happens inside animals during pain, fear, and rage, and published the findings in 1915 as Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage. He recorded the adrenal glands releasing adrenaline into the blood, digestion stopping, sugar entering the bloodstream, and blood moving toward the muscles. He interpreted every one of those changes as preparation for a physical struggle, and wrote that they readied the animal "for fighting or flight" (Cannon, 1915). The exact words fight or flight do not appear in the book.

The system that runs those changes is the sympathetic nervous system, working with hormones released by the adrenal glands (McCorry, 2007).

What Did Cannon Think the Response Was For?

Cannon spent the following years on the body's ability to hold its internal conditions steady, and in 1926 he gave that ability a name, homeostasis, which he set out in full in a 1929 review (Cannon, 1929) and made widely known in The Wisdom of the Body (Cannon, 1932). In that account the emergency changes of 1915 are part of the same defensive apparatus. The sympathetic branch and the adrenal glands act when ordinary regulation is not enough to meet a demand, and the changes they produce protect the steady state the body is built to keep.

What Happens in the Body in the First Seconds?

A review of autonomic physiology by McCorry (2007) lists the sympathetic changes. The heart beats faster and harder. The airways widen so more air moves with each breath. Blood is redirected away from the gut and kidneys and toward the skeletal muscles. The liver releases stored glucose into the blood. Sweating increases and the pupils widen. Digestion slows, because the gut receives less blood and its movement decreases (LeBouef, Yaker and Whited, 2023).

Attention changes as well. A well-supported hypothesis proposed by Easterbrook (1959) holds that as arousal rises, the range of cues a person takes in narrows, so a person in the middle of the response registers less of what is said around them.

These changes arrive together. In a tracing study in rats, Jansen and colleagues (1995) found a shared group of neurons in the hypothalamus and brainstem that drives both the sympathetic signal to the heart and the signal to the adrenal glands. The sympathetic effects arrive within seconds of the trigger (Ulrich-Lai and Herman, 2009), and the adrenaline surge in those seconds is what a speaker feels before walking to the front of the room.

What Is the Slower, Hormonal Part of the Response?

A second system runs behind the first and works over minutes. Ulrich-Lai and Herman (2009) describe the chain. The hypothalamus releases a signal to the pituitary gland, the pituitary releases a hormone into the blood, and that hormone tells the adrenal cortex to release cortisol. The chain is called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, or HPA axis. Where the sympathetic effects arrive in seconds, cortisol reaches its peak tens of minutes after the trigger.

Across 208 laboratory studies reviewed by Dickerson and Kemeny (2004), cortisol peaked 21 to 40 minutes after a stressor began, and returned to its starting level 41 to 60 minutes after the stressor ended. So a bad meeting produces two responses on two timescales. The pounding heart is the sympathetic branch and is underway in seconds. The part that arrives later and lingers after the meeting follows the cortisol clock.

How Does the Brain Decide That Something Is a Threat?

The response does not wait for a decision you are aware of making. Circuits centered on the amygdala, a structure on each side of the brain, detect threats and start the body's defensive response without conscious involvement (LeDoux, 2014), and the amygdala's output region connects to the hypothalamus and brainstem, the structures that run the autonomic changes and the hormonal chain described above (Phelps and LeDoux, 2005). The detection happens on partial information and ahead of the slower processing that reads meaning, which is why a reaction to an email begins before the email has been read. The laboratory research below shows which features of a workplace situation set it off most reliably.

Why Does a Meeting Start the Same Response as a Physical Threat?

The clearest evidence comes from a laboratory procedure called the Trier Social Stress Test. Participants give a short speech and do mental arithmetic in front of an audience of evaluators. Kirschbaum, Pirke and Hellhammer (1993) reported that this reliably produced a two- to fourfold rise in salivary cortisol along with a higher heart rate, with nobody in the room in physical danger.

Dickerson and Kemeny (2004) then reviewed 208 laboratory studies, the Trier test among them, to find which features of a task produce the largest stress-hormone response. The largest rises in cortisol, and the slowest recovery afterward, came from tasks that combined two features. Other people could judge the performance, and effort could not change the outcome.

Their explanation for the first feature is a theory they call social self-preservation. In their account the social self, meaning a person's social value, esteem, and standing, is something the body defends, and a system monitors the environment for threats to it in the same way it monitors for physical danger. A social-evaluative threat exists whenever some aspect of the self is being judged, or could be judged, by other people (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004).

A reorganization announcement has both features. Your standing may be affected, and nothing you do in the meeting changes the decision. An email written in a hostile tone has the first. The second-by-second sequence that runs when someone says "we need to talk" is this response with both features present.

How Big Does the Response Get?

The response comes in degrees, and the laboratory work measured them. Across all 208 studies, the average cortisol change was modest, an effect size of 0.31 (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004). For tasks that combined social evaluation with no control over the outcome, the effect size in the twenty minutes after the task ended was 0.85, and those tasks also showed the slowest recovery. The size of the response tracks the features of the situation, so the same person runs a small version in one meeting and a large one in another.

Recovery has a laboratory clock too. Cortisol was back at its starting level within an hour of the stressor ending (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004). Outside the laboratory the demand does not always end on time, and worry about a coming event or rumination about a past one keeps the response running after the event itself is over (Brosschot, Gerin and Thayer, 2006), which is the condition under which a body stays switched on after work.

Is Stress the Same as Fight or Flight?

The two terms describe different things. Fight or flight is Cannon's acute emergency response, the coordinated changes described above, which rise within seconds and minutes and resolve within the hour when the demand ends. Stress, in its biological sense, comes from Hans Selye. In 1936 he reported that rats exposed to cold, surgery, exercise, or sublethal drugs all showed the same syndrome regardless of the agent, and proposed calling it the general adaptation syndrome, with an alarm reaction at the start and a phase of exhaustion at the end (Selye, 1936). In 1950 he began using the word stress for the body's state under that kind of sustained demand (Selye, 1950); Cannon had used the word earlier for the forces acting on the body. So fight or flight is one episode, and stress in Selye's sense is what a body shows when the episodes keep coming or the demand does not end. The alarm reaction at the start of his syndrome is the response this post describes.

What Does the Response Explain about Work?

Threat at work. The two features that produced the largest laboratory responses are the ordinary conditions of a performance review, a reorganization, a public correction, and a new system (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004), and the response runs in each of them, starting with the moment someone says "we need to talk".

Why change is hard. When people are offered a change, the option labeled as the current state draws substantially more choices than its merits explain (Samuelson and Zeckhauser, 1988), which is why doing nothing feels safer than changing, and losses loom larger than gains of the same size (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979). Both operate inside a defensive system set, in Randolph Nesse's signal-detection analysis, to trigger at the first sign of danger and to accept many false alarms as the price (Nesse, 2005), the setting that makes the brain treat small things as emergencies.

What Helps, and What Is Myth?

Trust and safety. In a cross-sectional study of 51 work teams at one manufacturer, Edmondson (1999) found that teams whose members believed they could raise a problem or admit a mistake without being punished learned more, and that the learning predicted their performance. David Rock's SCARF model, a practitioner synthesis with no original data behind it, names five social conditions that people react to as threats at work, among them standing and certainty (Rock, 2008), which is why a reorganization feels threatening to people whose jobs are safe. William Bridges, also a practitioner, separated the external event of a change from the internal process of letting go of the old way, which runs on its own timeline through an ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning (Bridges, 2009), the difference between change and transition.

The toolkit. Emotion can be regulated at five points between the trigger and the response, by selecting the situation, modifying it, directing attention, changing how the situation is interpreted, or adjusting the response once it is underway (Gross, 1998). In one imaging study of 30 people, putting a name to the emotion in a face lowered amygdala activity and raised activity in a prefrontal region (Lieberman and colleagues, 2007). Those are the mechanisms behind staying calm under pressure at work, and the appraisal research above is the mechanism behind why the same message calms one team and panics another.

Which Popular Claims about the Response Are Wrong?

The popular account of this response leans on a layered brain with a reptile at the bottom. Comparative neurobiologists discredited that model, because evolution reshapes existing brain structures and does not stack new ones on top of old (Cesario, Johnson and Eisthen, 2020). The same account calls the amygdala the brain's fear center. Joseph LeDoux, whose laboratory mapped its circuits, has written that it detects threat and that the feeling of fear is produced elsewhere (LeDoux, 2014). Both claims are among the tells for spotting bad brain science.

What Fight or Flight Means

Fight or flight: the common name for the body's emergency response, a coordinated set of changes run by the sympathetic nervous system and adrenal hormones that ready the body for physical effort (McCorry, 2007). Walter Cannon described the changes in 1915 as preparation for fighting or flight (Cannon, 1915). The response starts when the brain judges a situation as threatening, including a social threat, and its size varies with the situation.

Is the Response Only Fight or Flight?

The phrase is shorthand. The full response has more stages than two. A clinical review by Kozlowska and colleagues (2015) describes a cascade. Arousal comes first. Then comes either freezing, which the authors describe as flight or fight put on hold while the body assesses, or flight or fight itself. If neither resolves the threat, the body can go into tonic immobility or collapsed immobility, which are last resorts. The review adds a final stage, quiescent immobility, in which the body rests and recovers once the threat has passed. Its account of the immobility stages leans on polyvagal theory, which is a contested framework. Going quiet in a meeting instead of pushing back is the freezing stage in a workplace setting.

Taylor and colleagues (2000) proposed that women's behavioral responses to stress are often better described as tending to others and befriending. That proposal is contested (Geary and Flinn, 2002), and its authors allowed that fight or flight may still describe the primary physiology in both sexes.

The response is also built for episodes. The laboratory recovery clock above runs once per stressor, and a working day that supplies one stressor after another with no recovery between them has a cost of its own.

The next time your heart rate climbs at work, write down what you saw or heard in the seconds before it started, and whether the situation involved being judged, having no control over the outcome, or both.

FAQ

Is it normal to have a fight or flight response at work?

Yes. The response is standard physiology, and the laboratory task that produces it reliably resembles work. Participants give a speech and do mental arithmetic in front of evaluators (Kirschbaum, Pirke and Hellhammer, 1993). Across 208 studies, being judged by others with no control over the outcome produced the largest stress-hormone responses (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004).

How long does a fight or flight response last?

The sympathetic part arrives within seconds and the hormonal part peaks later. Across 208 laboratory studies, cortisol peaked 21 to 40 minutes after a stressor began and was back at its starting level 41 to 60 minutes after the stressor ended (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004). Thinking about the event afterward keeps the response running past that window (Brosschot, Gerin and Thayer, 2006).

Is stress the same as fight or flight?

No. Fight or flight is Cannon's acute emergency response, which rises within seconds and minutes and resolves within the hour when the demand ends (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004). Stress in its biological sense is Selye's term for the body's state under sustained or repeated demand, the general adaptation syndrome he described in 1936 (Selye, 1936; Selye, 1950). The alarm reaction at the start of his syndrome is the fight or flight response.

Does everyone have the same fight or flight response?

The size and the form both vary. In the laboratory, the size of the cortisol response depended on two features of the task, social evaluation and controllability (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004). The form varies too, since the defensive cascade includes freezing and immobility as well as flight and fight (Kozlowska and colleagues, 2015).

Why does a meeting start the same response as physical danger?

Because the response starts on the brain's judgment that something is at risk, and standing among other people counts. The Trier Social Stress Test, a speech plus mental arithmetic before evaluators, raises cortisol two- to fourfold with nobody in physical danger (Kirschbaum, Pirke and Hellhammer, 1993). A meeting where your standing is at risk and you cannot change the decision has the same two features.

Where did the phrase fight or flight come from?

From Walter Cannon's 1915 book Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage, which reported that fear and rage release adrenaline, stop digestion, raise blood sugar, and move blood to the muscles, and interpreted those changes as preparation "for fighting or flight" (Cannon, 1915). The exact phrase fight or flight does not appear in the book.

What do people get wrong about fight or flight?

The response is a cascade with several stages, including freezing and immobility, and fight and flight are one stage of it (Kozlowska and colleagues, 2015). It comes in degrees that track how the situation is judged (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004). And it does not come from a reptile brain underneath a human one; comparative neurobiologists discredited that model of brain evolution (Cesario, Johnson and Eisthen, 2020).

What can I do about a fight or flight response at work?

Identify which feature of the situation set it off. In the laboratory research, the two features that produced the strongest responses were being judged by others and having no control over the outcome (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004). Being judged calls for information about your standing, and having no control calls for a decision you can still influence. In one study of 30 people, naming the emotion in a face lowered amygdala activity (Lieberman and colleagues, 2007).

Related Posts:

Why Does My Body Stay Switched On after Work?

Why Do I React to an Email Before I've Finished Reading It?

Why Do I Make Worse Decisions When I'm Stressed?

Why Is Change at Work So Hard?

What Happens in Your Body When Someone Says We Need to Talk?