Can We Reduce Bullying by Seeing It as a Stress Response?

In my 2022 book, The Bullied Brain, I explore how the bullying and abuse cycle has at its core a stress response. When the brain, nervous system, and body feel seriously threatened, they often activate the sympathetic stress response: Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

Essentially, those four reactions fuel the bullying cycle. The fight response is aggressive, and violent in word or act. It underpins bullying whether it's yelling, humiliating online, or belittling. The flight response is avoidant, looks the other way, and tries to escape the crisis. The freeze response watches and feels paralyzed. Along with flight, freeze results in bystanders on an individual level, and institutional complicity on an organizational level.

The fawn response identifies with the aggressor; it aligns with the bully. Some respond to the threat by protecting themselves by aligning with the one wielding power in a harmful way. This colluding response is as much a stress reaction as the others. Those who fawn may echo the bully’s harm, laugh along, or defend the bully, perhaps saying the targets deserve maltreatment. Flight, freeze, and fawn responses, those that rarely take responsibility for the bullying, may still lead to re-victimizing the target.

What if bullying was framed as a stress response issue?

The moral framework treats bullying as a bid for power and positions it as harmful behaviour resulting from a power imbalance. In contrast, a stress response framework treats bullying as an evolutionary, biological stress response akin to anxiety, dysregulation, and various types of disordered behaviour.

Dr. Stan Rodski has found great success in showing his patients on a computer what is going on in their brains when feeling stressed and anxious. His patients practice mindful activities and can watch their brains calm down, and show less stress and agitation. Neurofeedback has been one of his tools that works to bring about a sense of empowerment in his patients.

Biofeedback, focusing on the body’s response, can comparably offer information and empowerment that may slow or even halt the bullying cycle. If we shifted our focus from ethics and the pressing issue of who has the power (manifested in aggressive conduct) to medicine and the pressing issue of who has the mental strength to regulate their stress response, it would change how bullying shapes our society.

When bullying is regarded differently, we start seeking remedies

The moral framework responds to bullying, harassment, and abuse with measures that frequently fail to address the crisis. Punishment is meted out to either the perpetrator or the targets and normalized bullying continues. The moral framework has an essential flaw in that sometimes it holds the bully accountable, but just as often, even when done by adults in positions of power, prestige, and credibility, bullying in public, the maltreatment occurs with impunity.

In contrast, a different framework treats the whole bullying cycle as a series of stress responses to threats. Rather than blame, shame, and punish, it educates individuals on how to regulate their sympathetic stress response (whether it manifests as fight, flight, freeze, or fawn). The bullying cycle requires all of these stress responses to flourish.

If someone reverts to the fight response, and begins bullying, harassing, and abusing others, and witnesses speak up, insist the maltreatment stops, become active and vocal, and courageously refuse any benefits from identifying with the aggressor—actual or psychological—bullying cannot triumph. The target remains part of the community and the one resorting to a fight response becomes isolated.

How do we teach people to self-regulate their sympathetic stress response?

In 2017, researchers into biofeedback noted that technological advances are creating opportunities for society to recognize stress responses through biosensors that can use “skin conductance assessment” to identify when we are struggling with “emotional regulation, expressing thoughts and feelings” which may result in “challenging behaviors.”

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This 2017 research was conducted with children who have neurodevelopmental challenges, but anyone who feels threatened and has an activated sympathetic stress response, as we see in bullying scenarios, may well struggle to regulate their emotions, express their thoughts and feelings, and succumb to challenging behaviours.

In a systemic review and meta-analysis, researchers in 2023 “analyzed the effects of biofeedback-based interventions on psychological outcomes” for children. They used EEG to examine activity in the brain and ECG to measure heart-rate variability. They found that providing feedback from the brain and body supported children in reducing their anxiety. Other research cited in this study showed that “individuals can gain insight and control” from biofeedback “over their internal and external situations.” If we applied this intervention to bullying, individuals may well gain insight into their sympathetic stress response and thereby gain better control over how they react.

Calm the Stress of Bullying with Mindful Biofeedback

Source: Emsfuse Ems Fuse / Pixabay

Making the unconscious impulse to bully a more intentional experience

Imagine if students at school and employees at work all had a biofeedback device at their desks. When they felt an impulse to be aggressive or a desire to humiliate someone, they could use their device to get some real-time feedback on their physiological processes. In a recent study, research was done into new technology that operates like the devices we now use to measure whether or not we did our 10,000 steps or how much REM sleep we had the night before. The device is a round ball that you hold in your hands as opposed to a watch. It provides biofeedback and even one step further, it supports your efforts to self-regulate.

Rodski’s patients learn to change what’s happening in their brains when they do a mindful activity. Individuals who hold the “orb” can also engage in mindful activity to change the colours of the device. If you calm your breathing, thoughts, and heart rate then the illuminated band on the feedback ball will change to white. By this time, you should no longer feel the impulse to bully someone else.

Imagine if those who react to the stress response with flight, freeze, and fawn were also able to retreat to their desk and instead spend some quiet time receiving biofeedback from their device, but also feeling empowered to change their neurological and physiological stress responses by actively calming down and striving to enter into a parasympathetic state of rest and digest. We would live in a world with less bullying and more insight into how our systems respond to threats.