Stress: What Happens to Your Brain and Body (And How to Stay Grounded)

Stress: What Happens to Your Brain and Body (And How to Stay Grounded) 

Have you ever felt hijacked by your emotions in the middle of a family conflict—and later wondered, “Why did I react that way?” In this episode, Tina Gosney breaks down the powerful brain and body science behind your stress response. You’ll learn what happens when your nervous system senses danger, why it’s so hard to stay calm in high-conflict situations, and how to ground yourself when you feel emotionally flooded.

Discover the truth behind fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses, what it means to experience an “amygdala hijack,” and how you can shift from reactivity to resilience with a few simple tools. This episode will help you normalize your stress response, reduce shame, and take your power back in emotionally charged family moments.

Episode Outline

Understanding the Stress Response
Tina explains how your nervous system responds to emotional threats the same way it does to physical danger, often without your awareness.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn: What They Look Like in Families
Learn how these stress responses show up in real life—especially during arguments, boundary violations, and family gatherings.

The Amygdala Hijack: Why You Can’t Think Clearly When You’re Triggered
Explore how your brain shifts from logical to reactive and what that means for your behavior in high-stakes moments.

Stress in the Body: Cortisol, Adrenaline, and Physical Symptoms
Understand the physical side effects of stress and why it’s not “all in your head.”

Tools to Calm Your Nervous System
Get 5 simple, science-backed tools to help you re-regulate your body and re-engage your thinking brain.

Related Episodes & Additional Resources

“When It Comes Out of Nowhere: Responding to Unexpected Family Hurt” – Learn how to handle emotional “gut punch” moments and move through pain without spiraling.
Bridge to Connection Program –

·         Find out how to identify your triggers

·         Discover how your brain shapes your relationships

·         Gain the strength to stand strong in the emotional storm

·         Move out of destructive conflict and into constructive conflict

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

Tina Gosney is the Family Conflict Coach. She works with parents who have families in conflict to help them become the grounded, confident leaders their family needs.
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Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tinagosneycoaching/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tinagosneycoaching

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Tina is certified in family relationships and a trauma informed coach.
Visit tinagosney.com for more information on coaching services.

Transcript

Tina Gosney: 0:03

Have you ever felt totally overwhelmed during a conflict or a tense moment with someone in your family? Maybe your heart was racing. Your chest felt really tight. You couldn't think straight. You don't know what to say, so you just lash out in anger, or just words just come pouring out of your mouth, and you have no idea they don't make any sense. And maybe even later, you ask yourself, well, why did I react that way? Or maybe later, you think of all the good comebacks You should have said in that moment, and you're wondering, well, what's wrong with me? Why didn't I think of it then? Well, you're not alone and you're not broken, you're just human. Today, we're talking about what's really happening inside your brain and your body when you get stressed, especially in family situations where emotions are running really high stakes. Feel super personal in these situations. Have you noticed that when you understand your stress response, everything starts to make more sense, and when you have these tools to calm and ground your body, you can start responding instead of reacting. I'm Tina Gosney, a family relationship coach. I help parents navigate the hardest seasons of their family life, the you know, the seasons when there's conflict, disconnection or pain in their families. And today, we're going to talk about stress and what to do with it. Now, stress is it's not just something that you feel it's something that your nervous system and your brain go through. You can think of stress as your body's internal alarm system. Its job is to protect you from danger, and it's really, really good at that. But here's the problem, this stress response evolved to keep us safe from tigers. How many of you are still finding Tigers around every corner like our ancestors were. They needed that stress response to stay alive, because they did have constant threats to their very life and the people that didn't pay attention to that danger, well, they died, and they did not get to pass their genes down. So now we have evolved with a hyper focus on interpreting danger that could threaten our life. But here's the problem, we don't have those Tigers hiding around every corner. We don't have things that are constantly threatening our life, but our brain is still looking for danger, and it's interpreting our everyday situations as life threatening. This is what our brain is threatened by an emotional conversation, a text message, an unreturned phone call from somebody that we love, being late, a deadline that we missed, a bill that comes in that we are not sure if we can pay. Those things are not threatening to our life, yet our brain is interpreting them as threats to our life. It reacts to those situations like their life or death. So when someone says something hurtful to you or your spouse withdraws and shuts down, or you have a parent that criticizes you, your body can respond like you're in danger, even if there's no threat to your physical safety. So let's break this down just a little bit more. When your brain perceives a threat, it sends a signal to your body to enter survival mode. This is known as the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. So you might fight like lash out and get defensive you're ready to fight, or you might flight, which means walk away, stop talking, avoid maybe pull out your phone and start scrolling. It's like a barrier between you two, right? Or maybe you freeze, you go numb, you shut down. You could start eating your feelings. You could start binge watching a show on Netflix. Or maybe you fawn, you try to keep the peace at all costs. This looks like people pleasing. It's kind of like saying, What do I have to do right now to make this okay so it will go away. Well, each one of these is a protective response. These are not character flaws. There is nothing wrong with you. This is not a sign of failure. It does not mean anything except that. This is the way that you have adapted to life, to keep yourself safe. And everybody has a little bit different way of adapting to life, to stay safe. This is your nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do. But here's the catch, if you don't know what's happening, you could blame yourself or someone else for what is really a biological response. Here's a little bit of brain science. There is a small part of your brain called the amygdala. Now its job is to scan for danger and keep you safe. When it senses a threat, it hijacks your rational brain, which is your prefrontal cortex, and it puts you into survival mode. Have you ever heard of an old phrase that people say? They see someone acting crazy, the phrase is she's flipped her lid. While there's actually a lot of truth behind this phrase, because when we go into a nervous system response like fight, flight, freeze or fun, our body will take the oxygen and the blood away from our higher thinking brain, and it will send it into the your limbs and into your core, because you need to prioritize survival, and your prefrontal cortex actually flips up. Kind of crazy to think that your brain can flip, but your brain flips up. This is what's mean. What we mean by flipped your lid. This is the amygdala hijack. That's why you say or do things that you regret. That's why you can't think clearly. That's why your body feels flooded with emotion, your thinking brain is offline, your survival brain is driving the bus, and until you calm your body, that will not change. So here's what's happening. Physically, your body releases adrenaline and cortisol. Your heart races, your breath becomes shallow, your muscles tense and your digestion slows down. Your body is preparing to fight or run, even if the danger is just emotionally painful, it's prioritizing those body functions that will keep you alive, like running, fighting or shutting down and playing dead. It does not prioritize higher thinking, so your higher thinking brain goes offline, and over time, this kind of stress takes a real toll on your body. That's why you feel exhausted after a hard family interaction. It's why your shoulders are tight, why you feel like you need a nap after a phone call that just lasted for a few minutes. But something that makes stress even more complex is the emotional memory behind it. If you've experienced emotional pain or trauma in your past, especially in your family, and everyone has experienced emotional pain and trauma in their past, especially in our family relationships, your nervous system will hold onto that memory, and then when something similar, even slightly similar, happens in the present, your brain doesn't just react to the present. It reacts to all the moments that it remembers when it happened before. That's why a single comment can feel devastating, or why silence from somebody that you love can feel like you're being abandoned. And it's not just about now, it's about then too it's about the memory, and it doesn't make you like too sensitive. Doesn't make you wrong, it just makes you human. So let's just put this into a real life scenario. Let's say you're at a family gathering, you and your siblings are catching up, and out of nowhere, they bring up a sensitive topic, maybe how you handled a parent's care decision, or how you're parenting your own children. Your sibling says something that triggers all your previous memories, and in an instant, you are right back in it. Maybe they're criticizing you for how you handled something. Let's just put it into the how you handled your parents care. They're saying something like you think you know everything you're you think you're always right. You don't even consult any of the rest of us. And when you hear that, it hits really hard, because it brings up all the past times where you have felt misunderstood, when you have felt unfairly criticized. And so what happens is you get instantly defensive. Well, if you're in the flight response, you might say something like, Well, you never step in to help anyway, so Don't lecture me about decisions that you weren't even involved in. So this is just escalation. It's defensiveness. You're going on the verbal attack. This is the fight response. Maybe you go into the flight response, you grab your keys, you walk out, you leave without saying goodbye to anybody. You're avoiding. You're just physically withdrawing, or maybe you go into the fun response. I'm sorry. You're right. I always mess everything up. What's wrong with me? I don't know. Why do I even try to help? You're appeasing. You're abandoning, abandoning yourself just to keep the peace. So what does a grounded response look like? When you're giving a grounded response, it's not coming from your flipped lid brain. This is coming from your calming yourself before you respond. These responses don't mean that you're calm on the inside, but they come from awareness, not reactivity. So we pause and we name the feeling we say. This is very upsetting to me. I was not expecting that. Even if we say that internally, you know, it is creates space before we react. It models emotional ownership. We're not trying to push our emotion. Emotions onto somebody else, because we own our own emotions. A boundary response might look like I really hear you right now. I hear that you felt left out. You know, I don't think right now is a great time to talk about it, because I don't think either of us are very calm. I don't think it would be a really great conversation. But let's, you know, let's maybe think about it, and can we talk again tomorrow when we both had a chance to calm down. You know, this acknowledges the situation without being defensive, and it sets a boundary, like, I'm not going to talk about this when I am not feeling grounded. Another response we could come out of gentle curiosity. We might say something like, can you help me understand why it felt hurtful to you and how I handled that? I really want to know. I'm trying to understand this better, trying to understand you and me better. Can you really help me understand this when we respond like this, that is, this is not a fun response. It stays open. It's inviting dialog without abandoning ourself. So the difference in that whether we are responding or reacting is not whether we're feeling upset, because both versions of these scenarios are feeling pain and feeling upset. The difference is how you let that pain guide your response. One path is going to keep you stuck in survival mode, and the other one invites connection, even when there's disagreement. I want to introduce you to a concept from Dr Dan Siegel called the window of tolerance. Now this is the zone that you get in in your body when you can think and you can feel and you can respond without getting overwhelmed. When you're in your window of tolerance, you can stay grounded, you can hear feedback, you can regulate your emotions. Life feels doable, and then stress pushes us out of our window of tolerance, and we go into either hyper arousal, which is fight or flight or hypo arousal, which is the freeze and shut down, the more trauma or more stress history that you carry, the smaller your window of tolerance may be. But we can practice. We can make our window expand, and we can make that window widen. It takes practice. It takes consistent effort over time. What can you do when you're feeling overwhelmed? Here's five tools to bring your nervous system back online. The first one is to ground yourself in the present moment. Use your senses. Name five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things that you smell and one that you taste ground yourself in your five senses that will bring you back into your body and let you deal with what's happening internally, which is super important. Second one is breathe intentionally. Now you're always breathing unless you're dead, but your breathing needs to become intentional. It needs to be slower, it needs to be deeper, because when we go into these responses, our breathing gets very shallow and it gets quick, and that escalates the feeling inside you of your body. You want to intentionally slow your breath down and push that air all the way down into your into your belly. So inhale for four seconds, exhale slowly for six and repeat that for a few minutes. You might need to do that 10 times, but if you do that 10 times, I promise you, you're going to calm yourself down. The third thing you can do is to name what you're feeling, say it out loud. I'm feeling anxious, I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling defensive, I'm feeling angry. When you name the emotion that you are feeling, it re engages your thinking brain. It takes the response out of the amygdala, and it puts it into your prefrontal cortex. So name the what you are feeling. The fourth thing you can do is use compassionate self talk. Try this is hard, but right now I'm safe. I am not in danger. I am safe. And this is hard, or something like this is just a response my body is having. This does not mean I have failed. It does not mean anything except I'm human being that's alive, and I'm having a response inside of my body. This is totally normal. Speak compassionately to yourself. Number five, reach out for co-regulation. So for so many people, it's really helpful to reach out and talk to somebody, and not to talk to somebody and telling them your story and reliving the whole thing so that they agree with you and you gather an ally, but talk to someone who helps you feel grounded. Good talking and sitting near someone helps our bodies settle down faster. Even having a gentle touch from someone or having a voice on the other end of a phone call, it can be super helpful in helping our nervous system to calm down. Okay, so stress, these stress responses do not mean that you are weak. It means you're wired for survival. Which you are, we all are when you understand what's happening inside of you, you can stop blaming yourself and other people, and you can start caring for yourself. You can widen your window of tolerance. You can learn to notice the stress before it takes over. You can teach your body that you are safe even when things feel hard. This is what healing looks like. It begins internally, not externally, and you don't have to do it alone. So if you are ready for more support, I invite you to check out my program, bridge to connection. This is a beginning entry level foundational program. It helps you identify your triggers, those things that send you into these responses that we talked about today. It helps you to open your perspective and widen your perspective, your perspective of what are you making the circumstances and the difficult things in your life mean, what are you? How is your brain interpreting those it helps you to know how to stand strong in an emotional storm and hold on to that strength within yourself. And it will help you to know the difference between destructive conflict and constructive conflict and how to move towards constructive conflict. Now that's a lot for an entry level program, but you can take these lessons at your own pace, and you can revisit them as often as you need. You know, we often think that if we could just get our circumstances to change, or if we could just get that other person to change, then we could be happy and our problems would be solved. This is not true. This is a brain error. It's a thought error. It's not true. Our brain is going to keep us from focusing on the one thing that would actually change our life experience and give us more joy, and that is the ability to look inward and change ourselves. Our brain does not want us to look inward because it thinks doing that is harder, and then I'm wrong and I'm not allowed to be wrong. Our brain wants to hold on to being right all the time. But I'm here to tell you that doing your inner work is not harder than trying to control things that are out of your control, things that were never your job to control in the first place. That is harder than challenging your brain what it's trying to tell you and looking inward to do your own work first. Now, if you don't know where to begin doing your inner work, the bridge to connection is a great place. It is the perfect place. It's going to hit all of these major issues that keep you from having a more connected family. You'll find a link in the show notes that's going to give you more information about bridge to connection. And until then, be kind to yourself. You're here. You're doing the work, and that is great. You.