I work on a P.I.C.U ward as a mental health/support worker. I no longer have the “fight or flight” when trouble on the ward happens and now I don’t even flinch. Will I get it back after a while when/if I leave mental health. It’s OK when at work but I am thinking not so good on a night out with everyone drinking “pan galactic gargle blasters” in Bournemouth,
Hi, Sidvees, and welcome to the SDMB. I have moved your post from “general questions”, which is somewhat poorly named, as it’s really for “questions with factual answers” and put it in “In My Humble Opinion”, which is the best forum for posts looking for advice.
I hope you get helpful replies. 
It’s hard to say. I’d recommend hanging on to your mental health as long as you possibly can.
You may not flinch, but that doesn’t mean your sympathetic nervous system is malfunctioning. It means that your ability to quickly assess potentially dangerous situations has improved. That’s healthy - you don’t want your body flooding with cortisol every time something goes bump.
Presumably your body is still doing what it needs to do in genuinely dangerous/stressful situations where you need adrenaline, even if you aren’t feeling freaked out.
I’d say you’ll be able to get it back, but to what degree and how fast will depend on how much outside motivation you receive to do so. By saying you “no longer” have that nervousness in the face of trouble, I presume that you previously did. You learned what situations at work are actually dangerous and how to control the instinct. Anything you learn you can unlearn.
The example I’d look at is younger combat athletes; particularly those known for having good chins/being very tough/durable. You see these guys learn that they can absorb a lot of physical trauma (something we naturally fear) and keep going, and they become more bold and just walk right through it. Inevitable though, as they age and their bodies accumulated more damage, they start losing that ability and begin realizing that yes, they can get KOed or out-lasted. The smart ones change their approach, begin recognizing the dangers they previously ignored, and get more wary. The not-so-smart ones basically crash and burn.
As for being able to turn it on and off, I’d say yes you can do that but it takes some thought. Imagine a police officer being rather fearless when he goes and hangs out with 10 of his armed fellow officers after shift at a local bar. That same guy going on vacation by himself to a different country where he can’t take his weapons, has no back-up, and is seen as the weird outsider will probably be much more cautious instantly.
1st year I was scared constantly. I’ve never been a “fighter” type of person. Now 16 years later, I’m one of the longest serving staff.
I was once so scared (as a patient with hep & HIV was trying to attack/bite me and no one answered the alarms for 10 minuets) that the consultant called an ambulance and blue lighted me to hospital thinking I was having a heart attack. 6hrs of checking me over for the DR to say " you have a very stressful job, if someone was trying to bite me with hep and HIV I’d of rolled over and died ". I can laugh about it now, if I get to full of myself there is always someone who will say " oh but remember the time you fainted ". Work mates and sympathy not here.
Thank you for the replies.
I don’t know what I was expecting from this site but I feel more at ease knowing what I know now. this is second question I’ve asked the last one replied to by our great saviour Cecil himself
PS I didn’t faint. Adrenalin ran out and i had nothing left in me
I worked at the pointy end of mental health including on the psych ward of our maximum security men’s prison. To be honest I still walk in to situations I shouldn’t but am really trying to stop. Recently I deliberately got in the way of a dickhead illegally riding a moped very badly down a pedestrian path used by many elderly folks, despite me positioning myself when he was a couple of hundred metres away he was unable to safely brake which to me proved me right but it was a near disaster. I’m too old and vulnerable to have the local morons mad at me and am unlikely to get up if knocked down.
I figure if I learned to turn it off I can learn to turn it on again. I hope so anyway.
It sounds like it isn’t what’s happening, but I thought I’d mention that what you’re talking about is generally understood now to be a three-part phenomenon: fight, flight, or freeze. Some people, in some situations freeze when those things happen.
In general, it’s good to have more control in those situations. Most people have to struggle to act rationally under those conditions, so I’m unclear what you view as the problem. Are you saying you’ve lost some self-preservation instinct?
There are three ways we can respond to a situation. We can follow the panic response, which is very quick and requires no preparation. This can be fighting, fleeing, or freezing, depending on the individual or situation. This is a useful response to have in our toolkit, because it works at least sometimes, and sometimes, there’s no time for anything else.
Or, we can take the reasoned response: Stopping to think about the situation, and think through all of the implications of everything we might do about it. This is also useful to have in our toolkit, because it will usually come up with a good response, not just occasionally at random. The problem with this is that it’s slow, sometimes too slow: If you suddenly find yourself face-to-face with a smilodon, and take the time to stop and think about how to respond, by the time you reach any conclusion you’re probably already lunch.
Or we have the third option, the practiced response. Here, we consider in advance what situations we’re likely to face (for instance, situations we or other people have faced multiple times in the past), and think about them before they happen, when we have time, and practice how to respond to those situations, so that when they come up for real, we don’t need to stop and think; we just do what we’ve practiced. This combines the speed of the panic response with the good outcomes of the reasoned response.
It’s likely that what’s happened with you is that, as you’ve gotten practice at dealing with the sorts of situations that come up in your work, you no longer need the panic response (or at least, you don’t need it nearly as often). Life is inherently unpredictable, and sooner or later, something will come up that you’re not practiced with, and in that situation, you might still panic, and might be well-justified in panicking. But that’s rarer than it used to be.