Same Situation. Different Day. Different Response.

Think back to the classroom presentation, again. Being told unexpectedly that you're presenting this afternoon could send your heart racing. (It would send my heart rate soaring, because I never learnt how to prepare ahead of time.) But would everyone in the class react exactly the same way? Probably not.

Someone who has presented many times, knows the material and finished their presentation yesterday might think, Okay. I've done this before. I can do this. Someone giving their first presentation, who barely slept and thought they still had two days to prepare, may experience exactly the same announcement very differently.

What Do You Have Available Right Now?

Your capacity to deal with a stressful situation will be different from one day to another. What determines that?

• Previous experience matters.
• Being rested or already stressed matters.
• How prepared you feel matters, and
• Having people around you who can support you can matter too.

That helps explain why experience can be so powerful. When you've successfully handled something before, your brain has information from that experience: I've been here before. I got through it. Being prepared can do something similar because you aren't trying to solve everything at the same time the stressful situation arrives.

Now change the conditions of the day. Maybe you barely slept the night before. Schoolwork has been piling up, something else has been worrying you, and then you find out that your presentation has suddenly been moved forward by two days. Your brain and body aren't starting from a calm, rested state. You already have a lot to deal with, and you have less capacity available to deal with one more thing.

When One More Thing Feels Like a Lot

The comment hasn't changed, but dealing with it may now be much harder. It is what you bring  to the moment. Your stress response will rise quickly, initially, narrowing your attention around what was just said. At the same time, it can become harder to pause, think about what the person meant, consider your options, and choose how you want to respond. You’re nearly tapped out.

This is where those four protective responses can show up differently. Fight might look like snapping back or starting an argument. Flight might mean walking away or avoiding that person afterward. Freeze might leave you standing there unable to say what you wanted to say, while fawn might mean agreeing or apologizing simply to make the situation stop.

When people are highly stressed, they may become unusually irritable or defensive, withdraw, avoid talking, misunderstand someone's intentions, or make a quick decision they might not make when calmer. They may already be close to tapped out, with less capacity left to pause, think things through and choose how they want to respond. What happens next can affect friends, family, classmates, other people in the community and even how they feel about themselves.

Understanding the biology helps explain why behaviour can change under stress, but it doesn't excuse harmful behaviour. Being stressed does not make hurting someone else acceptable. What this understanding can give us is a better chance of recognizing why a response happened and, eventually, learning how to respond differently.

The Response Is Not Fixed

There is something encouraging hidden inside all of this.

• Previous experience can change.
• Preparation can change.
• Sleep and recovery can change what you bring into tomorrow.
• Support from friends, family, teachers, counsellors and other trusted people can make a difference, and
• the skills we use to handle difficult situations can be learned and practised.

That doesn't mean you can simply decide not to have a stress response. Remember, the stress response is automatic. But it does mean the same situation does not have to produce exactly the same response every time.

There is one more part of this story, though. The stress response is designed to activate and then settle again.