Fighting, running and freezing are the ones everybody can name. There is a fourth: going along with things, smoothing them over, making yourself easy to be around so that nothing bad happens.
It gets read as being agreeable, or as a personality, and it is often neither. If you grew up being criticised, or spent years around someone unpredictable, appeasing becomes the quickest way to make a threat stop. The tell is that it happens before you have decided anything. Underneath, the body is in much the same state as it would be if you had run, which is how a person can be pleasant on the outside and shaking on the inside.
Qur’an and Sunnah
We are well aware that your heart is weighed down by what they say (Quran 15:97). The weight of other people's reactions is taken seriously there rather than dismissed as being too sensitive.
وَلَقَدۡ نَعۡلَمُ أَنَّكَ يَضِيقُ صَدۡرُكَ بِمَا يَقُولُونَ
We are well aware that your heart is weighed down by what they say
Qur’an 15:97read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
This four way description comes from clinical practice, and the studies gathered here do not test it. What they do speak to is the second half of it. A meta-analysis of 24 studies of heart rate variability biofeedback, which trains people towards a slow steady breathing pace, found stress and anxiety fell substantially from before to after, with a more moderate advantage over control conditions. So if you catch the appeasing reflex, slowing the breath is a reasonable thing to do about the state underneath it.
Goessl VC, Curtiss JE, Hofmann SG. (2017). The effect of heart rate variability biofeedback training on stress and anxiety: a meta-analysis.. Psychological medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Appeasing ends a threat quickly, so the body learns it the same way it learns to run.
When not to
If appeasing is how you get through a relationship you are still in, the first question is safety and not self-work.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
The soft sound and the feel of this breath in your throat give your attention somewhere to sit. When the mind is loud, something you can hear holds better than something silent.
There are two skills here rather than one: letting your body move and settle in its own way, and being able to steer yourself deliberately towards rest or alertness. It is worth having both.
Let the in breath come however it comes, then breathe out through pursed lips as though through a straw for a count of eight, finishing with two more counts through the nose. Three ordinary breaths, then go again.