At last, the third and final installment of the 3-part Safety Series!
This one is all about reading the body language of violence.
Fight or Flight is an involuntary biological response to stress, pain, and fear. Whether you’re lying to someone or about to be in a fight for your life, when your brain perceives any type of threat or harm to your physical or emotional wellbeing, it triggers your glands to release hormones into your bloodstream, among them cortisol and adrenaline. How much and how fast depends on the level and immediacy of the threat. These two hormones (drugs) get you ready to fight, survive injury, and or flee by producing physiological effects on your body to help with that task, like making you faster and stronger.
Those physiological enhancements, and like all powerful drugs, will produce side effects. In fact, many of these side effects are designed to help you survive this harmful event. If you can spot the effects, or symptoms, of these physiological changes, you can tell when someone might be going into ‘fight or flight’, possibly cluing you in to an impending attack.
It’s important to note that none of these observable symptoms by themselves alone are indicative of fight or flight. What you are looking for are “clusters” of behaviors outside of an already established “baseline” (normal) behavior. It’s vital to remember that establishing a baseline early will help you define changes and make better, more educated decisions.
This short guide is meant to give you a brief overview of observable symptoms, and some basic understanding of what’s happening and why. This is not meant to be a study of psychology and behaviors, and again should only be used to make decisions early on to avoid a situation.
Here are the main groups of physiological responses to those hormones, otherwise known as fight or flight, that we’re focused on regarding how the body reacts to help you survive a harmful event, completely autonomously of your conscious processing, meaning it’s not something you are able to control:
- Cardiovascular and Respiratory: Your body wants to deliver higher levels of oxygen to the blood and deliver it as fuel to your large muscles and life support systems faster, so your heart beats faster and your breathing accelerates.
- Sensory Systems: Your eyes will hyper focus or broaden focal points to get more information on the bad thing and your body will take steps to enhance or protect your vision. Your skin and hair will also be affected to enhance reception of tactile sensory input about your environment
- Mental and psychological: Your brain power will shrink down to primitive operations (instinctive or old brain, sometimes called reptilian brain) and will cause you to take involuntary actions about your situation and affect how memories are processed as well as simple processes like answering a question.
- Non-vital functions shutdown: Think of it like Star Trek, whenever the ship was damaged in battle, the captain would reroute all power to life support, shields, and weapons. Your body will do the same, shutting down non-essential functions like digestion.
I bet you can already feel what we’re talking about here. Safe to say that everyone reading this, at some point in their life, was very scared. It could have been a ‘spooky’ situation like walking through a graveyard alone at night, or something more sinister like being a victim of a crime or targeted by a bully.
For instance, you felt your heart beat faster. Your breathing quickened. Maybe you felt the hair on the back of your neck stand up or got the chills, you probably started hearing every darn noise in the night that you normally ignore or don’t even hear or process normally, you might have gotten tunnel vision and lost track of your surroundings, and, importantly especially in a sinister event or attack, you may have found yourself struggling to communicate or think things through. Those things all happen to help you survive in some way, as we briefly touched on above. And, each of these things produce visible cues that they are happening.
What’s happening and what are we looking for, in no particular order:
Cardiovascular and Respiratory:
- Blood flow concentration changes: the blood has moved away from the surface of the body and limbs to protect from bleeding, and to supply the large muscles with power and the keep the immediately vital organs (heart, lungs, brain) functioning in trauma.
- Skin goes pale and/or the face gets red (due to blood rushing to the head for vital functions)
- Rubbing neck, face, and hands. Small muscles in the face, neck, and hands receive less blood, causing stiffness, which elicits a subconscious effort relieve the symptom by massaging them or ‘working them’ out swinging the arms forward and backward.
- Opening and closing the hands, or spreading the fingers out wide. Also relieving stiffness.
- Quickened breathing to get more gas exchange happening faster
- Look for visible heaving of the chest and flaring of the nostrils
- A “committal sigh”: It’s a large inhale with a visible exhale, like a giant sigh, once a decision has been made, usually followed by a change in symptoms and sometimes stillness for a period of time.
Sensory Systems:
- The Eyes:
- Pupils may dilate to allow in more light.
- Tears will be produced to pre-protect the eyes in case of a fight to keep dust and dirt out and may be visible.
- If tears are not visible, look for rapid or forceful blinking to clear vision.
- Touching the corners of the eyes and rubbing eyes are side effects of tearing.
- Sniffling. The water works are all connected in the face so tearing will also cause sniffling. If you’ve ever cried, you also sniffled or blew your nose.
- Hair and Skin:
- Hair stands up (piloerection, or goosebumps) to make you look bigger and for greater tactile sensitivity.
- Hairs in the nose and ears also stand up causing irritation. The subject may subconsciously relieve that irritation by rubbing, squeezing, or pressing the nose or ears.
- Adjusting glasses, jewelry, hair and hats due to the same irritation.
- Perspiration:
- You might be able to see perspiration forming
- Even if you can’t see it, the subject may constantly adjust clothing, hats, glasses, and jewelry due to discomfort from sweat just as from the hair standing up on the body.
Mental and Psychological:
- Target or Exit glances. The brain is trying to get information on how to exit if needed, causing the eyes to glance towards perceived safety often. Or may be glancing at an object that they want or need.
- Subconscious “limbering up”. Swinging the arms, pushing the hip out to one side, tilting the head over to the other side, crossing the legs or arms fully. All of this could be the subconscious mind getting the body ready for action by stretching
- Numb face is a complete lack of emotion in the face. Usually happens when the subconscious brain is working overtime to solve a problem and the conscious brain takes a back seat momentarily. Often accompanied by a committal sigh
- Grooming is the act of fixing clothing or hair, or generally trying to make oneself more presentable. It’s an involuntary act in an attempt to convince the other person of something or back them down.
- Touching or “prepping” areas of the body should be noted as the brain may be subconsciously sending their hands to an area where a weapon is concealed.
Non-vital Function Shutdown:
- Your digestive system is the first casualty of Fight of Flight. Initially and most visibly saliva production will cease causing cotton mouth. Touching the corners of the mouth, licking teeth, gums, and lips. Taking multiple small sips of water (called “trauma water”)
While this short guide is a good start, context and further understanding is absolutely necessary. We offer a full course with many visual aids called “Nonverbal Precursors to Violence”, a body language study specifically for self-defense. Contact us for details to get the class presented for your group, company, or agency.