What if fatigue, irritability, allergies, sensory overwhelm, learning difficulty, and frequent illness aren’t the brain doing something wrong, but actually part of an intelligent and adaptive response?

Nearly half of all children in the United States are reported to currently have at least one chronic health condition, including developmental delay, environmental and food allergies, learning disability, ADD/ADHD, chronic ear infections, anxiety, and depression. More and more young children (including toddlers!) are being prescribed antidepressants and psychostimulants like Ritalin, and over-prescription of antibiotics has been an increasing concern for decades.

In all these health challenges, the body’s own built-in mechanism for coming down from the fight-or-flight response has been largely overlooked. A chronically elevated fight-or-flight response is probably the most common challenge I see in my patients and loved ones, and it’s also a fairly simple one to solve.

Imagine for a moment you are standing in a field when suddenly an angry tiger comes out of nowhere. Your brain responds with an entire symphony of physiological changes to help you survive. This response is commonly referred to as “fight or flight.” It is the body’s innate resource for adapting to stress using the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system.

However, our bodies were never designed to stay in fight-or-flight mode for more than a few hours or days. What is the cause for chronically elevated sympathetic nervous system activity, keeping people in a state of fight-or-flight? Well for one, the brain doesn’t know the difference between a tiger attack, fighting with your sister, eating too much sugar, sitting in a chair all day, too much screen time, or anxiety over a social event. We are constantly bombarded with stress triggers on physical, chemical, and emotional fronts.

It’s not difficult to see how the intelligent fight-or-flight response can turn into depression, anxiety, hypersensitivity, ADD/ADHD, learning difficulties, aggression, developmental delays, emotional instability and reactivity, digestive distress like bellyaches and indigestion, picky eating, food sensitivities, chronic ear infections, frequent colds and other illness, environmental allergies, a chronic runny nose, signs of chronic inflammation like asthma and breathing difficulties, and more, when the body is in a chronic state of fight-or-flight overload.

While avoiding negative stressors is definitely a part of the solution, a huge missing piece of the puzzle lies in how we can improve the internal resilience of our body so stress doesn’t knock us off-kilter so easily. As the name suggests, the fight-or-flight stress response is built on the idea of fighting or fleeing something we perceive as dangerous. In either case, we must move our body to solve the problem. This is what nature intended, and this simple fact is key to understanding how we can come down off the fight-or-flight response and return rhythmic, healthy function to our nervous system.