Survival Mode Activated…

When we are under constant stress, always worried we won’t get our needs met, and living dangerously close to our tolerance limits, our brains often enter what we’ll call “survival mode”. 

You may remember from biology class that fight or flight mode is how our body’s react to threats: we defend ourselves or go on the attack (fight) or run away to safety (flight). Fight or flight is a reflexive response from the autonomic nervous system, meaning actions are spinally mediated, not controlled through the brain. This allows us to respond quickly and instinctively – looping in the brain would be too slow to take the swift action needed to ensure survival.

When we’re being chased by a lion, fight or flight reactions are fantastic – helping us adeptly navigate short term, life or death situations. However, if our brains feel consistently under threat for long enough, we enter survival mode. 

Survival mode is an adaptive state that allows us to remain primed for fight or flight. It’s our body in a state of war. Non-essential systems are shut down to focus energy on survival. Quite literally, digestion, cell repair, growth, reproductive processes pause in fight or flight mode – why invest in the future when you aren’t certain there is one? (Highly recommend watching this lecture by Robert Sapolsky if you want to learn more)

Because fight or flight mode reinforces bypassing the brain for more instinctive or impulsive autonomic reactions, if we stay in survival mode for long enough, our sense of agency – of being actively in control of ourselves and our actions – becomes diminished. 

Instead of experiencing ourselves as being able to choose how to interact with the world, we instead may feel like objects battered around against our will, helpless against an unpredictable and cruel world. 

In this state, we tend to fall back on a few specific, instinctive and reflexive “moves” — these are patterns of behavior, “coping mechanisms”, or personality strategies that we develop, typically in childhood, to effectively navigate the intolerably stressful situations we face. These strategies are often quite effective at getting a few, critical needs met (even if at the cost of many others). Because these behaviors work, we double down on them, and become rigidly attached to them — often feeling at our core like not using these strategies could threaten our very survival. 

As we enter adulthood, we find ourselves in new environments but with personalities that are often rigidly stuck in the past — well adapted to one specific context but unable to adapt to the current life we want to live. “Maladaptive” patterns that don’t actually meet our needs are called personality difficulties. When these patterns are so maladaptive that they make it hard for us to survive and function in the world, we call these personality disorders. 

These rigid, maladaptive personalities can lead to a lifelong pattern of understanding and reacting to ourselves and others in ways that cause problems and make it challenging to build and maintain a fulfilling life.