The Survival Mode Exaplained

In this episode of the Health Minute series we’ll learn what living in survival mode means, and we’ll discuss the link between fear, stress and survival mode. We’ll start by understanding how fear leads to living in survival mode, and we’ll discuss how stress can have a huge negative impact on our health.

Fear leads to Survival Mode

Fear is one of the basic emotions, and it’s programmed in the autonomic nervous system at subconscious level, working like an instinct.

Living in fear is living in anticipation of the worst case scenarios. When we’re living in fear we tend to select the worst-case scenario from an array of possibilities and we prepare ourselves for it. What’s even worse is that, based on the perceived danger, our body will start to prepare for that imagined threat (event, danger) ahead of anything happening in real life.

If living in fear becomes chronic (if it happens daily for instance) we can say that we are now living in survival mode.

Living in Survival Mode is unhealthy

When we’re living in survival mode, with our stress response turned on all the time, we can only focus our attention on three things: our physical body, the environment and time. As perceived by the subconscious mind, these there are of major importance for our immediate survival.

In survival mode we become obsessed about our physical body and we worry about it all the time. The mind reasons that the body must be kept safe at all costs.

We also become obsessed about the environment and we’re constantly asking ourselves where is the safest place to be in order to escape the perceived danger. We become obsessed about owning certain material things that we reason will keep us safe. In our mind, we need those things outside of us to make us happy or to keep us safe.

Lastly, in survival mode we focus our energy (worries in this case) on time. We obsess by time, constantly asking ourselves how long the threat will last, how much time we need in order to escape, how much time we need to achieve various things (goals, obstacles in life) in order to be safe.

Stress Chemicals and The Body

When we are in survival mode, our brain releases in the body a set of chemicals (peptides and hormones) meant to help us escape rapidly in case of danger. Don’t forget that we are still talking about imagined danger, hence why we’re in survival mode in the first place.

These stress chemicals are designed to be used by the body in emergency situations, in order to escape from immediate danger. We can say that the body is designed to use the survival response for escaping dangerous situations (think accident, trauma, a wild predator, and so on).

The survival response is not designed for everyday emotional stress or imagined danger. If we use the survival response on a daily basis, we will end-up depleting our body of its nourishment. Abusing the stress response on a daily basis will weaken the body and that is exactly when disease starts to happen. Think of all the colds that you may have had after a stressful period … that was your body in a weakened state.

It’s worth noting that, when we live in survival mode for long time, the stress chemicals can also become a drug for the body. After a certain time, at the cellular level these chemicals can even be interpreted by the body as being pleasurable.

The adrenaline rush and its associated cocktail of chemicals are very addictive to the body. This makes it even harder to move out of the stress state, since the rush of chemicals that the body receives can make us feel alive and in control (think negative emotions aimed at a certain situation or person).

Bottom line on The Survival Mode

I hope that by now you’ve understood what the survival mode is and how we can become obsessed with our worries and fears, to the extent that we can harm ourselves without actually living in any real danger.

Our mind is a very powerful tool but it can also become our biggest enemy. We must learn how to be conscious of our thoughts, feelings and emotions, and how to manage them consciously. Only this way we’ll be able to identify the survival mode and move out of that stress state that can make us sick.