But for chronic fawners, that feeling of alertness is a daily occurrence, and it’s exhausting. Anything and everything feels like a threat to the body. This hypervigilance carries over into emotional monitoring, which means we’re constantly scanning other people’s emotional states to gauge what they may be feeling so that we can adapt. Again, this occurs naturally through a part of our brains and is highly useful. But for those stuck in the fawn response, hypervigilance is on overdrive and happening when we’re actually safe, leading us to analyze, ruminate, and worry: Are you mad at me?
