Your Stone Age Brain (CYP)
Your Stone Age Brain CYP is an information handout that describes the evolutionary origins of the freeze-flight-fight response, designed for children and young people.
Your Stone Age Brain (CYP)
The Your Stone Age Brain tool helps you understand how your body reacts when something feels scary or unsafe. It explains how freezing, running away, or fighting back helped people survive long ago, even though these reactions are not always helpful today.
Overview
Your Stone Age Brain CYP is an information handout designed to stimulate discussion with anxious children and adolescents. It describes the freeze-flight-fight response: a set of evolutionary adaptations that increase the chances of survival in threatening situations. The ‘hardware’ underlying these responses in modern humans is thought to be unchanged in the last 200,000 years, and psychologists often use a 'caveman metaphor' to explain the purpose and function of these responses. Learning about some of the evolutionary pressures exerted on early modern humans helps clients to understand the consequences of living in the present day in a body that has the same ‘programming’.
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