Survival is a top priority for the brain. You feel physiological and psychological stress when you encounter a survival-threatening or traumatic situation. When you’ve dealt with the threat, the stress fades, and you return to psychological and psychological balance.
However, when a stressful event is high-impact or low-impact but continuous, it’s hard for the mind to deal with it. You get stuck in prolonged stress and cannot resolve the stressful situation. You get stuck in survival mode. When stuck in survival mode, you prioritize survival over anything else. Much of what you do on a daily basis revolves around ensuring survival.
What causes survival mode?
Life-threatening events can come from:
- The external environment (natural disasters, wars, accidents, pandemics, etc.)
- The internal environment (hunger, sickness, etc.)
- Other people (abandonment, neglect, hatred, etc.)
When you’ve experienced a traumatic event, you become hypersensitive to cues connected to that event. This is your mind’s way of protecting you. It does not want you to go through the same experience again. You have a lower threshold for getting triggered by potentially threatening events.
This leads to hypervigilance, which can lead to over-detection of threats. You might misinterpret neutral events as harmful. Hypervigilance is a double-edged sword. While it can give you false positives, it can also be a superpower in that you’re unlikely to miss the subtle cues of danger that others are likely to ignore or overlook. You can see danger from 1000 miles away, while others only see it from 100 miles.
Hypervigilance is just a fancy term for anxiety and worry. The other side of the trauma coin is depression. When you go through the symptoms of survival mode, you’ll see that they’re mostly a combination of the symptoms of anxiety and depression. Depression is a symptom of survival mode because it reduces your energy, gives you time to process trauma, re-evaluate life, and invest your energy and resources into more survival-enhancing strategies and activities.
Symptoms of survival mode
Following is an exhaustive list of the symptoms of survival mode. If you’re stuck in survival mode, the combination of symptoms that you will display will depend on the types of life-threatening events you’ve faced.
A) Emotional dysregulation
- Mood swings
- Irritability
- Short temper
- Aggression
- Emotional reactivity
- Feeling overwhelmed
- Difficulty feeling positive emotions
B) Cognitive impairments
- Memory issues
- Indecision
- Lack of focus
- Cognitive paralysis (inability to perceive or think)1Leach, J. (2012). Maladaptive behavior in survivors: dysexecutive survivor syndrome. Aviation, space, and environmental medicine, 83(12), 1152-1161.
- Unable to plan or delegate
C) Physical symptoms
- Sleep disturbances
- Headaches, stomach aches, or muscle tension
- Digestive issues
- Racing heart
- Dizziness
- Frequent colds or weakened immune system
- Exhaustion
D) Behavioral Responses
a. Avoidant Tendencies
- Dissociation2Morgan III, C. A., Hazlett, G., Wang, S., Richardson Jr, E. G., Schnurr, P., & Southwick, S. M. (2001). Symptoms of dissociation in humans experiencing acute, uncontrollable stress: a prospective investigation. American Journal of Psychiatry, 158(8), 1239-1247.
- Numbness
- Emotional detachment
- Wanting to numb out
- Social withdrawal
- Neglecting responsibilities
b. Overcompensation
- Overworking
- Excessive burnout
- Micromanaging
- Nit-picking
- Stinginess
- Security-driven (comfort zone feels safe)
- Hyper independence
E) Relational struggles
- People-pleasing
- Overly dependent on others
- Having trouble setting boundaries
- Unable to handle criticism
- Defensiveness
F) Anxiety
- Hypervigilance
- Imagining and preparing for worst-case scenarios
- Worrying too much
- Highly analytical
- Overly cautious
- Untrusting
- A sense of urgency
G) Loss of motivation
- Lack of motivation
- Loss of energy
- Loss of initiative
- Lack of interest in usual hobbies
H) Addictive tendencies
- Addiction-proneness
- Impulsivity
