50 Unsettling Photos You Shouldn’t Look At Alone

Looking at these images on the screen can be spooky, sure. But seeing these things in real life is another level of terrifying. When you find yourself in a dangerous situation or you get extremely stressed, your body reacts in one of four main ways. You probably already know about fight or flight. But you might also freeze or fawn.

When stressed, your body goes for the strategy that ensures the best chances of your survival. It’s instinctive. For instance, you might enter fight mode if there’s a fairly good chance of you overpowering the threat you face. However, if the danger is something that you have a better chance of outrunning, you might go into flight mode.

Alternatively, if neither fight nor flight is a good strategy, your body might simply… freeze up. Another survival strategy is to enter fawn mode. This is essentially a socially-focused strategy where you try to present yourself as someone who is agreeable and overly helpful. You hope that by keeping the threat happy, you reduce the danger to you.

While feeling stressed isn’t a lot of fun, a well-functioning stress response is what helps keep you safe.

However, problems start to pop up when you’re constantly stressed and alert when there is no real, tangible danger to be found.

If this continues for a long enough time, it can damage your physical and mental health. It can contribute to anxiety, depression, and damage your immune system.

“Our fight-or-flight response was designed to help us survive under life-threatening circumstances. Today, there are, arguably, less threats to our survival,” registered psychotherapist Natacha Duke, MA, RP, explained to the Cleveland Clinic.

“Our fight-or-flight response can also be activated from psychological or mental stress, such as an important work meeting or even attending a social gathering. This is only usually a problem if the fight-or-flight response becomes frequent, chronic, or disproportionate to the situation.”

According to Duke, people become more easily triggered when they are overwhelmed with stress.

For instance, if you have a ton of chores to do, you might be less patient with your loved ones.

This is an indication that you need to spend more time focusing on self-care. What’s more, you should strive to find healthier strategies to cope with stress.

When you find yourself in a traumatic situation, you might develop a generalized fear response to a situation that isn’t dangerous anymore. For example, if you’ve been in a car accident, you might be scared of driving again. The same thing can happen at work or in your relationships, too. What you can do is identify your signs and symptoms of stress.