Benefits of the Freeze Response

If someone were to attack you, completely by surprise (no warning at all), with a knife, slashing at your face what would you do? Hopefully, your startle reflex, would be activated by the motion and your arm would find itself moving to protect your face – if you’re a Krav Maga practitioner and you think that in that moment, you would make a simultaneous punch at the same time, you may be surprised if this doesn’t happen – remember this attack was a complete ambush and surprise. You may be fortunate enough to connect with your attacker’s arm, and not get cut, but they will already be starting to recoil their weapon in order to make their next attack; knife attacks are generally repetitive affairs, and although they may start with large movements, these will soon start to shrink, partly due to the way body movements naturally begin to get smaller under the effects of adrenaline, and partly due to the attacker closing distance etc.

What happens next is crucial. Does your fight/flight response kick in, and you start to quickly engage or disengage, or do you freeze? Hopefully your time training, starts to pay you back and you move to action, whether that is defending yourself and starting to fight back, or managing to disengage and run – perhaps scanning for improvised weapons as you do so. However, you may freeze in this moment, taking longer for you to react and respond. In this article I want to look at why we sometimes freeze when confronted with a threat and consider some ways to reduce the risk of this happening.

A long time ago a student asked me in class, why I was always so “pessimistic” about the outcomes of techniques i.e., I always train the failure points of any solution I teach, and how to adapt and move on if/when this happens etc. The reason I do this is because I’ve experienced and seen enough real-world violence to know that failures happen – even to the best and most experienced individuals – and we should not be so confident and optimistic in what we have been, and our own abilities, to recognize that in a dynamic, fast-moving altercation, we are probably going to perform sub-optimally and feel pressurized by our attacker. From my own experiences I have always found that you run out of time and space very quickly; two things that we often have when training. This is why I believe there are benefits to training from a position where you have frozen – and directly training methods to help prevent this from happening.

To understand why we freeze, we need to look at our psychological and physiological responses to threats. In the scenario presented at the start of this article, with somebody making a slash that stimulates your flinch/startle reflex, your body has not become adrenalized – this process, unlike the startle reflex is not instantaneous, and takes some time. Our nervous system has two systems, one for heightening and increasing our ability to physically defend ourselves (the autonomic nervous system – ANS), and one for decreasing our heightened state, and bringing us back to “normal” – the parasympathetic nervous system. The ANS prepares us for fight or flight, whilst the PNS deals with the effects of our heightened emotional state once the danger has passed, and we can relax again. Sometimes though when a threat is detected, both systems are activated, and there may be times when the PNS dominates the ANS, and parasympathetic dominance occurs. When this happens, we freeze. Part of the reason we have this response is the coevolution that we’ve experienced as being both predator and prey animals e.g., freezing, or “crouching” as it was originally called, where we engage in a complete absence of movement, was/is a good response when dealing with predatory animals who rely on movement to identify their prey. This is one of the reasons why we shouldn’t see freezing as a “passive” response to a threat, it is in fact an active one. The other reason it is believed we sometimes freeze, is for observation purposes, so that we can get a better understanding of the danger we face.

The problem is we rarely train from a position of being frozen, and so don’t have an emotional/physical reference point to work from – we’re not understanding the purpose of freezing in that moment, and that it should be a very temporary state for us e.g., we might bring our arm up to defend the initial slashes and freeze as we do so, but we should in that moment be gathering information, and starting to move. Historically, in our evolutionary past, when we spent a much larger part of our existence as prey creatures, we would have been better at understanding, the “next steps” that needed to be taken when we would freeze – and have been better at making the linkage between situations where staying still and observing were more effective solutions than fighting or running, along with when it would be time to move from that freeze state. In many senses we have the tools – fight, flight, and freeze – to deal with danger, and these are by-and-large, effectively triggered (from a species, if not always individual perspective), but as live safer and safer lives, we have lost touch with them.

One of the simplest ways I’ve been taught to respond and react from a frozen state, is to have a student stand with their eyes closed (the target), and have another student (the attacker) assume an “attack” position e.g., to stand as if they are about to make an icepick style attack, arm up, knife pointing down towards the target etc. the instructor can then shout “eyes open!”. There is a moment of hesitation, to allow the target a moment of observation (training them what to do in the freeze state), and then the attack itself continues, with the target responding. When training to respond from the freeze state, the experience must be non-traumatic and low stress. The reason for this is that many studies have shown that people who have a greater experience of traumatic and stressful events tend to freeze more when threatened/attacked, rather than less.

The freeze response shouldn’t be viewed as a bad thing, as it is an active rather than a passive response to threats and dangers. Instead, we should recognize its purpose e.g., mass shooters’ attention may be drawn to movement, and so in the initial moments of a killing rampage, freezing may well be a good response, as we observe and work out where the shots are coming from (meaning we can now move away rather than towards the killer) i.e., we still have predators who hunt by movement etc. Importantly we should also train from the position of being frozen, so that we can learn to take advantage of the moment and use it as a strength.