This depends on each person. When one is living with freeze (the brake), that automatically means there is also a big sympathetic activation in the system (the gas), because remember — the freeze response only comes on after fight/flight has been unsuccessful, so where there is freeze, there is also fire, though one may not feel that.

The most common thing we see when someone has been living with both unresolved freeze and fight/flight in their system for a long time is autoimmune disorders, what we call Syndromes (fibromyalgia, chronic pain, Crohn’s, IBS, etc.). This is because the nervous system is so darn exhausted and confused! We have these big survival energies always running in the background, and over time that wreaks havoc with all the functions the autonomic system is supposed to support: immune function, heart rate variability, breath, digestion, cell repair, etc.

The gas on/brake on experience can also show up behaviourally or emotionally; manic depressive episodes and borderline personality disorders are one way that we, as nervous system experts, believe this shows up. Always being ON or OFF is essentially flip-flopping between the high Sympathetic arousal and the high Parasympathetic arousal. This may also show up more mildly as episodes of both anxiety and depression.