Aaron Hartman, MDFunctional Medicine Specialist | Clinical Researcher

Fight, Flight, Freeze_ Are You Stressed | Is Your Exhaustion Actually Stress?

3 Mar 2025 · 1 min

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Aaron Hartman, MD explains the difference between your fight-flight-freeze response and your rest-and-digest mode. If you have elevated heart rate, high blood pressure, insomnia, or irritability, your sympathetic nervous system is activated. The video walks through physical and behavioral signs to help you recognize whether exhaustion is actually stress.

Chapters

So one sympathetic is fight, flight, freeze. So are you always irritable? Do you fight with everybody? Are you anxious? Are you becoming more withdrawn? Are you almost frozen or fleeing? And then the parasympathetic is rest and digest. And so sympathetic is going to rev up your heart rate, bring up your respiratory rate, bring up your blood pressure. Do you breathe a lot? Do you not take deep breaths? Do you have a high heart rate? Are you hypertensive? Do you have insomnia? Do you sweat a lot? Those are kind of the things that I would think of as part of that, beyond the obvious kind of psychological, emotional ones.