Psychological

20/11/2025

‘You are stronger than you think.’ (Lori Gottlieb)

In How to Master Anxiety, Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell identify several common indicators that people may be experiencing anxiety or depression. When describing situations they face, individuals often fall into what the authors call the ‘3 Ps’: personalising (“It’s all my fault”), pervasiveness (“This will affect everything”) or permanence (“This will go on forever”). Although these beliefs are essentially assumptions or hypotheses, they can feel absolutely real in the moment. They also reinforce themselves, intensifying the person’s stress or distress.

Therapist Todd Schmenk has noted that anxiety often arises as a psychological response to something imagined or anticipated in the future, while depression frequently stems from how a person interprets or evaluates events in the past. This idea of temporal perception matters because it provides a way to explore the assumptions or predictions people make about what may lie ahead, as well as the beliefs and meanings they attach to what has already happened. Both perspectives can shape profoundly how a person experiences the present.

When feeling anxious, threatened or stressed, people often exhibit a predictable set of behavioural responses. Walter Cannon (and later Pete Walker) described these as the ‘4 Fs’: fight (confronting the threat), flight (avoiding it), freeze (becoming immobilised) or fawn (appeasing to reduce tension). These reactions operate largely subconsciously as protective strategies designed to minimise harm. While they may serve an immediate survival need, they can gradually become limiting or counter-productive if relied upon too rigidly or too often.

One of the skills of psychological coaching is to help people recognise and understand these automatic patterns, whether they stem from the 3 Ps or the 4 Fs, and to explore them. Through guided reflection and supportive challenge, the coach offers a person a way to test unhelpful assumptions, develop new behavioural choices and build greater emotional flexibility. This can not only reduce the intensity of anxiety or low mood but also strengthen their capacity to respond to life and work pressures with greater clarity, resourcefulness and resilience.

Are you curious to work with a psychological coach? Get in touch!

15 Comments

Maya Henson

21/11/2025 10:32:05 am

Hi Nick. This is such a clear breakdown of how our minds trick us into panic mode. The 3 Ps and 4 Fs feel like default settings we never asked for but it’s empowering to know they can be rewired. Love the reminder that awareness creates choice.

Helena Stroud

21/11/2025 10:33:54 am

Hello Nick. What I find most compelling in this piece is the connection between temporality and emotional experience. You describe anxiety as future-focused and depression as past-facing, and I think this has profound implications for how we understand human suffering. It suggests that the mind is not merely reacting to stimuli but actively constructing timelines that can either trap or liberate us. The 3 Ps amplify this by transforming moments into narratives: a mistake becomes an identity (“It’s all my fault”), a setback becomes a worldview (“Everything is contaminated”), and a difficulty becomes a destiny (“Nothing will ever change”). These are not random distortions but attempts, albeit misguided, to impose order on uncertainty. Likewise, the 4 Fs are not just primitive reflexes but living artefacts of evolutionary history. They reflect a body trying to protect itself using an outdated operating system. What your coaching seems to offer, then, is the modern equivalent of a firmware update: the chance to re-examine inherited scripts, to question absolutist narratives and to cultivate a more elastic relationship with the present moment.

This blog articulates that opportunity beautifully.

Samuel Drake

21/11/2025 10:35:00 am

Hi Nick. While the overview is helpful, I’d love to see a deeper acknowledgment that the 3 Ps and 4 Fs don’t emerge in a vacuum. They’re often shaped by systemic pressures, trauma histories or workplace cultures that reward hypervigilance. Coaching is powerful but it works best when the broader context is part of the conversation too.

Elise Van Vessem

26/11/2025 12:38:04 pm

Agreed 💯.

Hannah Coleridge

21/11/2025 10:37:18 am

Hi Nick. I really appreciate how this article breaks things down in a way that feels usable rather than just theoretical.

The 3 Ps and 4 Fs aren’t just labels. They’re patterns you can spot in real, everyday moments. I’ve noticed them in my own life, the way a work email with a vague tone suddenly becomes “proof” that I’ve messed up (personalising), or how one stressful week makes me feel like everything in my career is falling apart (pervasiveness). And don’t get me started on permanence. My brain loves to pretend that bad feelings come with lifetime memberships.

What I like is that you don’t frame these responses as weaknesses. You describe them as protective instincts, survival tools that simply get overused. That reframing alone is powerful. It removes the shame and lets you approach things with curiosity.

As someone who has been coached and now coaches others, I’ve seen exactly what you describe: the shift that happens when someone realises, often for the first time, that their thoughts are hypotheses not certainties. That moment of “Wait… what if this isn’t true?” is one of the most liberating experiences a person can have.

Darren Miles

21/11/2025 10:38:19 am

The concepts are useful but there’s a risk in treating all emotional responses as patterns to optimise. Sometimes anxiety or anger is a rational signal that something needs to change externally, not internally. Coaching needs to remember that not every distress reaction is a “distortion”. Sometimes it’s a wake-up call.

Leo Hart

21/11/2025 10:39:02 am

The 3 Ps and 4 Fs are basically the brain running outdated software with way too many pop-ups. Time for a reboot.

Marcus Llewellyn

21/11/2025 10:40:46 am

This blog highlights something that organisations often underestimate: emotional literacy isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s a performance variable. Leaders under chronic stress routinely act from the 4 Fs, snapping at colleagues (fight), avoiding difficult conversations (flight), stalling on decisions (freeze), or over-accommodating to keep the peace (fawn). Meanwhile, the 3 Ps quietly escalate burnout, a missed target becomes a catastrophe; a setback becomes identity-defining.
Coaching that teaches leaders to recognise and interrupt these patterns has a measurable impact on team culture.

The clarity you bring to these psychological dynamics could form the foundation for an entire leadership development programme. If more workplaces understood these mechanisms, we’d see fewer reactive decisions and far healthier environments.

Amina Caldwell

21/11/2025 10:42:24 am

What you’ve written Nick resonates with what many trauma-survivors experience daily. The 4 Fs, especially fawn and freeze, are often misunderstood or trivialised yet for many people they were once life-saving strategies. These responses become wired in during periods when appeasing or shutting down were the only viable ways to remain safe.
Your explanation avoids blaming people for these reactions, which is crucial. It’s easy to misinterpret trauma responses as personality traits rather than adaptations. Coaching that recognises this can help individuals develop a compassionate understanding of their own behaviours before attempting to change them.

Equally important is your emphasis on exploring the stories people tell about the past or the future. Trauma has a way of distorting time so that the past feels present and the future feels dangerous. Coaching that gently widens a person’s sense of possibility without dismissing their lived experience can be transformative.

Daniel O'Connell

21/11/2025 10:43:46 am

Thanks Nick. Learning about the 4 Fs a few years ago helped me realise I default to “flight” more than I thought. Having language for these patterns actually made it easier to change them.

Naomi Feldman PhD

21/11/2025 10:45:56 am

From a clinical perspective, Nick, your synthesis of the 3 Ps and 4 Fs aligns well with contemporary integrative models of distress. What you’ve highlighted, particularly the temporal orientation of anxiety and depression, is highly consistent with what we see in cognitive theory, predictive processing frameworks and trauma-informed formulations. Clinically, it’s crucial to distinguish between the content of a thought (e.g. “It’s all my fault”) and the process producing it (e.g. globalising, catastrophising, assigning excessive agency).

Your blog touches on this elegantly. These cognitive patterns are not random deviations; they’re attempts by the mind to reduce uncertainty through overgeneralisation. Similarly, the 4 Fs reflect conditioned threat responses that often operate far below conscious awareness.

Good coaching doesn’t replace therapy, of course, but it can play a vital role in reshaping a client’s relationship with their internal cues. What you describe, guided reflection, testing assumptions, behavioural experimentation, is very much the territory where coaching and clinical practice overlap in healthy, productive ways.

Helen Barstow

21/11/2025 12:09:02 pm

Nick, from an HR leadership standpoint, your piece is highly relevant to modern workplace wellbeing. The 3 Ps frequently show up in performance management conversations such as an employee receives constructive feedback and immediately interprets it as a total failure or a permanent indictment of their abilities.

Meanwhile, the 4 Fs are visible every day in workplace behaviour such as avoidance of conflict, reactive aggression, decision paralysis or excessive people-pleasing.

I believe understanding these responses is key to building psychologically healthy work cultures. Your framing of coaching as a way to increase perspective-taking and emotional flexibility is precisely what organisations need if they want resilient and adaptable teams.

This isn’t “soft stuff” but a capability that directly impacts productivity, conflict resolution and leadership maturity. Thank you for writing this.

Martin Elwood

21/11/2025 12:09:47 pm

Spot on. These psychological patterns appear in performance issues more than people realise. Coaching that helps employees recognise reactive thinking and stress responses isn’t just supportive. It prevents conflict, reduces turnover and improves decision quality. It’s good for people and good for business.

26/11/2025 12:42:13 pm

For many, including myself, my anxiety triggers are triggered by CPTSD reflexes in a bid to protect myself from a perceived danger. One of my early breakthroughs was understanding what CPTSD was in the first place and that what happened to me wasn’t my fault. It was constant trauma that enabled me to create amazing coping mechanisms. Now that these self-preservation behaviours are no longer helpful, my challenge now is re-writing my mental scripts and self-talk - ones based on truth and unconditional love for myself.

Nick Wright

26/11/2025 08:28:05 pm

Hi Elise and thank you for sharing so honestly from personal experience. Yes, traumatic experiences can be very challenging to resolve. Have you read 'The Body Keeps The Score' by Bessel van der Kolk? It's the best resources I've seen in this complex arena. I hope you continue to recover well.

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