How Trauma Turns Fear Into Hustle, Overworking & Burnout; The Flight Response.
About this episode
The episode explores how trauma influences the flight response, leading to chronic busyness and burnout.
In this episode of Trauma Rewired, Jennifer Wallace and Elisabeth Kristof explore the flight response through the lens of trauma, nervous system regulation, emotional processing, and Neurosomatic Intelligence. The flight response doesn't always look like physically running away. More often, it shows up as chronic busyness, overworking, overtraining, perfectionism, emotional avoidance, and the inability to slow down. What many people call discipline, productivity, or high performance may actually be a nervous system mobilized for survival. Jennifer and Elisabeth unpack how fear becomes wired into the body through developmental trauma, emotional neglect, structural trauma, and chronic stress. They explore why the nervous system learns to associate stillness with danger, how chronic flight becomes reinforced by modern culture, and why so many people feel trapped in constant motion despite desperately needing rest. In this episode you'll learn: • What the trauma flight response actually is • Why stillness can feel unsafe after trauma • How fear gets expressed through overworking, urgency, perfectionism, and burnout • The role of interoception in emotional awareness and regulation •…
More episodes of Trauma Rewired
- Grief Is a Body Experience: The Neuroscience of Loss
- From Shame to Self Expression: Healing Body Boundaries After Trauma
- How Self-Compassion Changes the Brain and Rewires Shame
- Why You Shut Down: Freeze, Flop, and Tonic Immobility Explained
- The Fight Trauma Response: Suppressed Anger, Inner Critic & Nervous System Repatterning
- How Trauma Shapes the Brain, Body, and Nervous System
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