Decidedly NOT in survival mode?

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💭👀Have you noticed your nervous system is stuck in fight or flight mode, freeze mode, or fawn mode due to chronic stress, trauma, or overwhelm?. It could indicate that you live in survival mode,  it happens when your body and mind are constantly focused on getting through the day and not thriving, just surviving.

 💬This basically means your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are controlled by a constant sense of danger leaving you disconnected, exhausted, and reactive. In survival mode, the brain prioritizes threat detection over logic and long-term thinking, flooding the body with stress hormones and impairing focus, memory, and decision making (Marvar & Liberzon, 2022).

❤Signs you live in survival mode:

🧡You feel overwhelmed, emotionally disconnected, constantly on edge, and trapped in overthinking, self-doubt, and fear that you’re always falling behind.

🧡Your body is tense, exhausted, and restless, often stuck in a cycle of poor sleep, unexplained pain, and hyper alertness that never seems to switch off.

🧡you stay busy to avoid crashing, struggle to rest without guilt, avoid what overwhelms you, and rely on coping habits just to make it through.

🧡you say yes when you want to say no, just to keep peace or avoid conflict.You rely on food, sleep, scrolling, or distractions to escape how you feel.

🧡You feel isolated, unsure of who you are or what you need, disconnected from joy or purpose, and afraid that if you stop holding everything together you will fall apart.

❤Why this happens?

🧡It does not mean you’re lazy or unmotivated. Your body just does not feel safe enough to relax. You might feel numb, disconnected, angry, anxious, spaced out, or like you’re just “pushing through” each day. That is survival mode. And it often starts when you have had to deal with too much for too long, experiences like trauma, instability, being let down by people you depended on, or even just a constant fear of “not being enough.”

🧡Survival mode develops in response to prolonged stress, trauma, unsafe environments, or systemic hardship that teaches the brain the world is not safe. you feel extremely overwhelmed, stuck, depleted, and unable to plan or engage with life beyond daily survival tasks.

❤Shifting Out of Survival Mode:

🧡To exit survival mode, you must first create physical and emotional safety, then gently retrain your nervous system to trust calm through small routines, self-regulation, and supportive relationship. Identifying and reducing sources of chronic threat (to the extent possible), this may include unsafe people, unstable housing, or financial chaos. Add structure, boundaries, and calming routines, even small ones like drinking water at the same time every day or limiting overstimulation.

🧡Try grounding techniques like feet flat, deep slow breathing, somatic practices like yoga, dance, walking, or even long exhales (which stimulate the vagus nerve). Avoid trying to "think" your way to calm, it rarely ever works while dysregulated. The nervous system shifts toward healing when it perceives predictability and control. Survival mode lives in the body, so the healing must begin there too.

🧡Stability tells your brain: “It’s okay to rest now.” You can establish simple, nondemanding rituals like journaling for 3 minutes, stretching before sleep, morning light exposure, doing  something nice for yourself or going on solo walks. Just keep it easy and repeatable. Consistency tells your nervous system it can stop being on high alert. Structure is a powerful signal of safety, and micro routines help retrain the brain to predict calm rather than chaos (Russo et al., 2024).

🧡I personally prefer taking notes and journaling patterns and triggers so you can name what once felt overwhelming, very helpful when you do it consistently. Go slow. Go gently. To get out of survival mode, you often need to unlearn the idea that survival is your only job. When you feel safe enough, work with a trauma informed therapist.

🧡Healing is remembering you are more than your coping. Reengage in things that remind you of your creativity, play, read something, use your imagination, find new hobbies, even rest. Allow yourself moments of curiosity or joy. Let yourself become more than your stress. Restoration of personal identity and agency is a core marker of recovery.

❤Healing is a set of gentle, repeated messages you send to your brain and body:

💓“You’re safe now. You don’t have to fight all the time. You get to be here.”

💓“It is safe to slow down, even just a little.”       💓“I am allowed to rest.”

💓“I do not have to earn peace.”                             💓“I am not behind. I am healing.”

💓“I survived, and now I’m allowed to live.”        💓“Small steps are still steps.”

💓“My body is doing the best it can.”                     💓“I get to take up space without explaining.”

 

 

 

👉Read further:

Marvar, P. J., & Liberzon, I. (2022). Post-traumatic stress disorder: Clinical and translational neuroscience from cells to circuits. Nature Neuroscience, 25(9), 1147–1158. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-022-01128-9.  

Juruena, M. F., Eror, F., Cleare, A. J., & Young, A. H. (2024). Stress and stress responses: A narrative literature review. Psychological Medicine, 54(2), 207–216. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291723001933.

Alon-Tirosh, M., & Hasson-Ohayon, I. (2023). How past trauma impacts emotional intelligence: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders, 338, 124–137. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2023.05.041.

Smith, L. V., Brown, D. L., & Jones, R. M. (2019). Keeping your guard up: Hypervigilance among urban residents affected by community and police violence. Journal of Urban Health, 96(5), 661–672. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-019-00381-4.

Russo, S. J., Murrough, J. W., Han, M. H., Charney, D. S., & Nestler, E. J. (2024). Neurobiological basis of stress resilience. Neuron, 112(3), 389–407. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2023.12.005.

Lanius, R. A., Bluhm, R., & Frewen, P. A. (2018). Neural hypervigilance in trauma-exposed women: An fMRI and biomarker study [Doctoral dissertation, City University of New York]. CUNY Academic Works. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2484/.