We live in a world that often tells us the answer lies in more data. More functional testsIf you have ever been told, ‘your blood tests are normal’, not ‘normal’ or not yourself, then you have already discovered one of the reasons functional testing has become so popular. Functional tests are designed to provide additional information about how the body is functioning. They may explore areas such as hormones, digestion, nutrient status, fatty acids, the microbiome, genetics, metabolism, or stress physiology. Think of them as gathering more pieces of the health puzzle, ideally before a dis-ease ‘shows up’. Sadly, most people turn to functional tests, once they have a dis-ease. , more wearables, more supplements, more personalised nutrition plans. And yes, those tools have value, they give us pieces of the puzzle. BUT….
Often, what’s really driving symptoms isn’t just physiology, it is the mindbody connection. It’s how our nervous system holds onto survival strategies long after the danger has passed. It’s how unmet needs, unspoken resentment(s), and swallowed grief turn into inflammation, autoimmune conditions, gut disruption, and fatigue etc.
Think about the ‘Super Mom’, who goes to bed with her ‘cape’ on. Even Superman had more time without his cape than with it on. But for many mothers, the cape never comes off. Always saving, fixing, managing, holding everything together.
And then September comes, the school gates open, and there’s a secret sigh of relief, space, at last. Then comes the guilt, ‘what kind of mother feels glad her kids are gone?’
Loving your children and craving time away from them are not opposites. They can both be true. Relief at school starting again does not make you a bad mom. Sometimes it simply means your needs, rest, space, being cared for instead of always caring are unmet. And if you tend to your needs (yes, even daring to ask for help instead of always being the one asked), not only will you feel better, your body, your health, and your family will feel it too.
A reflection practice:
Set aside 20 minutes, grab a notebook, and try this two-part practice.
Journal prompts
Write freely, without censoring yourself. No one else will see it. The goal is to let the nervous system release what it’s been holding. Then, tear it up when you’re done.
🗨 ‘If I could be brutally honest, the thing I resent most about summer holidays is…’
🗨 ‘What I really need but rarely ask for is…’
🗨 ‘The part of me that feels like a ‘bad mom’ is scared that…’
🗨 ‘If I could have one guilt-free day to myself, I would…’
Remember: these words do not dictate who you are, they free the emotions your body has been carrying. Some call this the mindbody connection.
Body awareness check-in
After journaling, close your eyes and notice your body.
- Where do you feel lighter?
- Where does it still feel tense or heavy?
- Can you place a hand there and breathe gently into it, as if saying, “I am safe and I hear you?”
This small act of noticing can shift the pattern. It tells your nervous system it can let go — it doesn’t have to hold this alone anymore.
Try this regularly and then re-test your antibodies, inflammation markers, or cortisol rhythm in a few months. You may be surprised what changes when emotions are allowed to move.
We teach the nervous system differently
At the New School, we don’t teach the nervous system the way anatomy textbooks do, all brain parts and nerve names, with some neurotransmitters, we teach it through real-life cases, such as:
- The mother who resents the summer holidays but can’t admit it.
- The partner who always has time for the gym but not dinner with the family.
- The student freezes in front of her laptop, scrolling instead of starting her assignment.
We show how these lived experiences line up with functional test markers, such as a flattened cortisol curve, or a weak cortisol awakening response, low DHEA, raised CRP or IL-6, high zonulin, low HRV etc. In other words, nervous system dysregulation written into both symptoms and lab data.
And the bridge between the two? The Four F’s: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn.
Want to know more about our syllabus?
The Four F’s: The hidden survival strategies running your everyday life
These aren’t just abstract psychology terms, they are patterns most of us live out every day without realising it. They are the invisible ‘programs’ that once kept us safe in chaos, conflict, or fear, but now show up in arguments with our partner, how we parent, how we work, and even how we relate to ourselves.
They don’t make you weak, lazy, or difficult… they make you human. And once you start to see them in action, you realise just how much of life is shaped by the nervous system’s ancient playbook. What’s that saying?…..
Don’t let your biology become your biography
Fight: the snapping point
Imagine a mom who’s been ‘on’ all day, juggling work, kids, meals, and endless to-dos. She is tired, but she holds it together…until she walks into the bathroom and finds yet another wet towel on the floor. Something in her snaps. The words come out sharper than she meant. It is not just the towel, it is the feeling that nobody sees how much she is carrying. That is fight.
It doesn’t always look like screaming or throwing things, sometimes it’s simmering resentment, the controlling tone in a meeting, the irritation you can’t quite swallow down. Fight is anger as a survival move, the nervous system’s way of saying, this isn’t okay.
But underneath anger often hides something softer. A fear that your needs will never be met. Grief for the help you didn’t get. Exhaustion that is been ignored.
Anger is aboundary emotion. When it gets suppressed or swallowed too often, it doesn’t disappear. Research shows it gets lodged in the body as inflammation, raising CRP, IL-6, even cardiovascular risk.
So the next time you snap, it might not be because you are ‘bad tempered’, but, It might be because your nervous system is doing its best to guard your boundaries.
Flight: the escape artist
Imagine, the mom who never truly enjoys summer holidays. She adores her kids, but the relentless demands…’Mom, can I have…?’ ‘Mom, where’s my…?’ make her nerves buzz. She secretly feels a wave of relief when the school bell rings again in September. Then she feels guilty, so she hides that truth behind constant activity: playdates, baking, crafts, errands. Every day filled with motion. That’s flight. Not obvious, a tad unbelievable?
It is not always running out the door, sometimes it’s running inside and filling every moment so you don’t have to feel what’s underneath.
Or take the partner who gets home from work too exhausted to eat dinner with the kids, but somehow always finds energy for the gym. That is not hypocrisy, that is the nervous system choosing escape. Physical motion feels safer than sitting still with family conflict, messy feelings, or the weight of unspoken resentment.
Flight is driven by fear, fear of stillness, fear of being overwhelmed, fear of what might rise up if you stop. In the short term, society rewards it… ‘you are so productive, so disciplined’, and you get a larger Christmas bonus than anyone else! But over time, flight ‘frays’ the HPA axisThe HPA Axis stands for the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis. Sounds complicated, but it is essentially one of the body's main communication systems for responding to stress. It is like your body’s internal stress-response network, linking the brain and adrenal glands in a constant conversation about what is happening in your environment. Whether you are running late for work, worrying about finances, doom-scrolling at midnight, or genuinely facing danger, the HPA Axis helps coordinate the release of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline to help you adapt and survive., cortisol stays high until it starts to drop, sleep gets disrupted, digestion falters, burnout creeps in.
The body whispers, ‘you can’t keep running forever’, do you listen, or do you wait until a chronic condition is diagnosed?
Freeze: the disappearing act
Now let’s shift to the student sitting at her desk, laptop open, assignment due tomorrow. She scrolls TikTok instead; it’s not laziness, it’s freeze. The nervous system has pulled the handbrake, too much, can’t move, maybe ‘if I stay still it will pass’.
Freeze is the collapse response. You are ‘there but not there’. It can look like procrastination, zoning out, or hours of Netflix instead of that hard conversation with the Principal. It feels heavy, numb, like moving through molasses.
Think of the partner who slumps on the couch every evening, remote in hand. Not because they don’t care about the relationship, but because facing the bills or the tension in the air feels overwhelming. Their system has chosen stillness over confrontation.
Freeze often comes from old helplessness. Growing up in situations where no action made things better. The body remembers and says, ‘if I go still, I will be safe’, after all it has worked in the past.
However, long-term freeze doesn’t just stall emotions. It slows the body too, metabolismMetabolism is not a calorie-burning furnace that sits somewhere near your belly button, deciding whether you can fit into last year's jeans. Metabolism is the set of chemical processes taking place inside your body every second of every day, keeping you alive., energy, even immune resilience. It can show up as a flat cortisol diurnal rhythm, a calcium shell, a low vitality ratio, low HRV and fatigue that sleep does not seem to fix.
Fawn: the peacekeeper
And then there’s fawn, the art of saying ‘yes’ when every part of you wants to scream ‘no’.
Picture the friend who agrees to host Christmas yet again! She dreads it every year, the chaos, the politics, the sheer labour, but she can’t bring herself to refuse. So she smiles, cooks the feast, clears the plates, and later cries in the bathroom.
Or the employee who never says no to extra projects, nods politely through every request, and ends up drowning in work while everyone else leaves on time.That is fawn.
It looks like kindness or generosity on the outside, but inside it is survival. It is a nervous system trained to keep the peace, to merge with what others want, to avoid the risk of rejection or conflict.
But fawn has a cost. When you override your own boundaries again and again, the stress hormones don’t stop. The HPA axis beginning to ‘give up’, anxiety becomes the ‘norm’, sometimes even triggering flare-ups of your autoimmune condition, even the boundaries in the gut become leaky.
What looks like people-pleasing is often a body saying, ‘if I keep everyone else happy, maybe I will be safe’.
Why we do it?
Each of these patterns is the nervous system doing its best.
- Fight: defends boundaries.
- Flight: avoids overwhelm through motion.
- Freeze: shuts down to conserve energy.
- Fawn: smooths the edges to prevent rejection.
The brain orchestrates it all. The amygdala scans for threat, the hypothalamus fires off to try and get that cortisol out, the periaqueductal grey picks the program (fight, flight, freeze, fawn), and the prefrontal cortex, the part we use to think clearly, goes ‘offline’. That is why in these moments, clarity feels out of reach, such as the mother who ends up shouting at her children, when she knows that it is not what she wants to do.
The question is not, ‘why am I like this?’ But ‘what is my nervous system protecting me from?’
Read our blog on the drama triangleThe Drama Triangle sounds like something you might find in a soap opera, reality TV show, or the family WhatsApp group! In reality, it is a psychological model developed by Stephen Karpman that describes three common roles people can unconsciously move between during conflict, stress, and relationships. The three roles are the Victim, the Rescuer, and the Persecutor. The important thing to understand is that these are not identities. They are roles that most of us step into from time to time. This is about awareness, no judgement and no gold stars for avoiding them., and see if you can spot the four Fs
How does your brain pick the ‘programme’?
Deep in your midbrain sits a structure called the periaqueductal gray (PAG). Think of it as your nervous system’s program selector
.
When the amygdala sounds the alarm and the hypothalamus triggers the stress hormones, the PAG decides which survival script to run:
- Fight if pushing back might protect you.
- Flight if escape feels possible.
- Freeze if neither fight nor flight seem safe.
- Fawn if appeasing feels like the only way to stay connected.
But, the PAG doesn’t ‘think’ about this. It works reflexively, pulling from the patterns that were reinforced in your past.
- If running away worked when you were little, the PAG wires in flight.
- If keeping everyone happy kept you safe, it leans toward fawn.
- If nothing you did ever changed the outcome, freeze becomes the go-to.
Each time that same choice is made, the neuronal pathway gets stronger, like a groove worn deeper in a record. Over time, it feels automatic and you don’t choose it, your nervous system chooses it for you.
There is hope! as these pathways are not permanent. With practice and nervous system tools, you can build enough space for your prefrontal cortex (the thinking brain) to come back online. That’s where you start to rewire the script and create new options.
If you keep finding yourself in the same ‘F’ again and again, it’s your PAG re-firing an old pattern. And neuroplasticity means it can change.
How to start shifting
The good news is that these patterns are NOT fixed. With awareness and practice, you can build new pathways.
- Notice the story. Are you snapping, running, zoning, or appeasing? Call it by name.
- Pause before reacting. Even one deep breath helps put space between sensation and action.
- Ground the body. Feet on the earth, slow breath, vagus nerve stimulation.
- Somatic tools. Shaking, humming, EFT tapping, gentle movement to complete stress cycles.
- Boundaries. Start with micro-no’s before the big ones.
- Check your body’s signals. Functional tests can reveal what your nervous system is carrying: cortisol rhythms (DUTCH), inflammation (CRP, IL-6), gut integrity (zonulin), gut inflammation, neurotransmitter metabolites, or resilience through HRV.
In essence
The mom who dreads summer holidays, the partner who always finds time for the gym but not the dinner table, the student lost in scrolling, the friend who says yes when she wants to say ‘no’, none of them are broken/bad/mean.
They are living out nervous system strategies that once kept them safe.
The Four F’s are not the four flaws, they are survival patterns.
And the moment you see them for what they are, you get the choice to write a new one.
As we say at the New School, you are running a nervous system program that was ‘safety’ and now you can update it, as you are no longer that child.
Why we teach psychological coaching at the New School
If you have made it this far, you have probably noticed that this is not just about stress or food or supplements. It IS about the whole human, the mind, the body, the story, the survival patterns, and how they play out in health.
This is one of the many reasons as to why, at the New School of Nutritional Medicine, we integrate psychological coaching into our curriculum. You can run every functional test under the sun, but if you miss the story, the resentment, the boundaries, the freeze, the fawn, you will miss the real shift.
Our students don’t just learn nutrition, they learn how to hear the body’s language of stress and survival, how to spot patterns like the four F’s, and how to guide clients into safety and self-trust.
Healing is never just about food. It is about being seen. And that’s the education we believe in.
If you want to train in nutritional medicine and psychological coaching, qualifying as a nutritional therapist and psychological coach, we still have a few spaces left.
From the team at the New School Of Nutritional Medicine
Learn about the Founder & Principal of the New School of Nutritional Medicine, Dr Khush Mark PhD, HERE.
