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Hello, everybody. And welcome back to the psychology of your 20s.
The podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s.
And what they mean for our psychology.
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show.
Welcome back to the podcast.
New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world.
It is so great to have you here.
Back for another episode as we have caused breakdown, the psychology of our 20s.
How often do you feel somewhat disconnected from your environment or from your thoughts, your emotions, how often do you find yourself waking up in the morning and immediately feeling tense and alert?
How often do you feel the need to be constantly productive and active, and then it be exhausted by the end of the day but unable to sleep or unable to accept the fact that you need downtime?
Or maybe you find that no matter what, no matter how much caffeine you consume, how much sleep you have had, you just cannot absorb new information or learn new things.
The thing about all these statements and what they all have in common is that they are indicative of a stress response called survival mode.
And if you feel like you spend more time being hyper alert and stressed than relaxed and curious and inspired by life, this stress state may be describing exactly what you're going through.
Survival mode occurs when we basically have no energy left to actually be anything more than, I would say, a machine or a survival machine.
We just have to shut down and push through the day, we're operating normally on adrenaline and stress and cortisol and anxiety, basically just trying to survive our current circumstances.
Whether that is work related, family related, school related, money related, trauma related, it often ends up turning us into someone we're not, because all the things that make us us have to be shut down by our brain, basically in order to preserve energy and to survive whatever it is we're going through.
The thing is, is that our body and our mind think that they are doing the right thing, but often our nervous system has become so dysregulated and extremely sensitive from repeatedly feeling overwhelmed or threatened that we are in this state far more than we perhaps need to be.
We all have this very primal ancient system in place for helping us through really dangerous moments, but in the modern world these systems are often triggered by things that won't kill you, that won't harm you, but would still feel really, really stressful.
And being in survival mode for too long can create chronic stress, it can create extreme burnout, emotional, physical, social exhaustion, and it can also just make us feel like we're a bad person, like we've become a mean person or a lazy person.
When none of these things are true, we're just trying to survive without maybe all the information or the support or the resources that could help our nervous system find its way back to safe mode.
So today let's talk about it.
Why do so many of us in our 20s find ourselves in survival mode far too often when a lot of the world would like to think that we don't have too much to be stressed about?
I think we all know that's not true, but why do we feel like we've been this way in longer than we can remember and what is actually going on in our body and our brain to make us feel this dissociated and alienated?
Above all else, how do we find our way back to a place of not just safety or peace, but of regulation, a place of growth where there is room to be human and room to be vulnerable and actually enjoy life?
I'm definitely no stranger to survival mode myself.
I feel like I end up in that space far more than I would like to.
And I'm getting better at admitting that's because I'm not great at managing stress.
And there are probably things from the past that I don't manage as well as I should be.
And I've learned a lot through that process I definitely have and I have so much to share with you today.
So much to help you hopefully understand this state and maybe also understand yourself a little bit better on the process.
So without further ado, let's get into it.
Let's talk about the psychology, the biology of survival mode.
You have probably heard the phrase survival mode if you're interested in the self-help or wellness space at all.
If you've been in therapy before, definitely.
I really like that this concept and this experience has become more accessible to people that we actually have the language to describe what we're going through because not only is it a lot more common, but it's really, really scary.
And I think having full information is probably the first step to getting back to safe mode.
So as always, let's start with the basics.
Survival mode is essentially a psychological and physical state of heightened arousal and awareness.
And it occurs when our brain basically believes we are in danger.
And so it activates what is known as our fight, flight or free system to basically get us through the situation or the threat.
This can be in response to a lot of things.
Firstly, really stressful life periods.
You know, after a loss, after enduring something traumatic during burnout, that's a really huge one for our twenties.
When we've kind of been pushing ourselves to our limits and enduring really extreme mental conditions for far too long, sometimes that can trigger survival mode.
And it can also come up in response to past trauma or environmental stresses like during natural disasters or during war.
A big one that we all went through together was of course the pandemic.
So many people found themselves completely exhausted despite being home all the time.
Because of how unpredictable and scary the circumstances were, it meant that our brains were constantly in a state of alertness that eventually took its toll on all of our mental emotional physical resources.
In other words, a lot of us were pushed into survival mode.
The important thing to know about survival mode is that although it may feel totally alienating, it actually means that your brain is trying to do the right thing or what it believes is best.
Given your environment, given the stress as your experience, given how it's hardwired.
And the way that it does that is by essentially switching on the parts of us that are very ancient and primal, which have evolved for millions of years as a way to protect us when it perceives danger.
And the other thing that happens is that it switches off all those systems that it sees as unnecessary or frivolous.
That is the really crucial word to remember here survival.
We want to survive. That is our natural drive.
And all of the systems in our body that are controlled by our brain are blindingly trying to do that when they encounter stress.
The problem occurs when this response is activated for far too far much longer than it should be.
Or continues to be activated even when the immediate danger is disappeared.
Like when you're getting flashbacks or relieving something traumatic, even though you are not currently in danger, there is still the sense of urgency and intensity that doesn't subside.
There is also the fact that these primal and stingial systems have evolved and adapted for a completely different environment than what we are now.
So there was this fantastic article written back in 2012 by Dr.
John Montgomery. And he wrote it for the magazine Psychology Today, which we refer to a lot in the podcast.
And basically what he suggests is that we have the brains that we have evolved to have over millions of years.
And for the majority, and I mean the sizeable majority of human existence, those brains were made for hunting and gathering.
And they were made for encountering threats and either escaping them, running away from them, fighting back.
And that kind of being the end of it.
And these threats were very tangible.
So many of the threats we encounter nowadays are not.
And the best example of that is a sense of threat from social media or online.
Like you read a really terrible news article and you know, you're not in any immediate danger.
But our brain doesn't know that our brain can't always tell the difference because it just listens to our stress response.
And so because it has spent millions, thousands of years evolving to respond in a certain way, it automatically activates that system.
And it makes us hypervigilant and afraid and anxious.
Even though the threat is something pretty intangible and probably very far away.
So that is where the concept of media overload to take a little, have a tangent here.
What I'm specifically referring to is this idea of news anxiety, right?
The world feels very dark and dangerous at the moment.
And because we are exposed to all the terrible things going on, even though they don't immediately threaten us, it can actually trigger a survival mode state.
So the American Psychological Association actually spoke about this all the way back in 2012.
There is a psychological strain that comes from not only living through, but absorbing all that terrible news.
It's where terms like doom scrolling have come from because you know, social media has definitely heightened that for this generation.
And with that, it has heightened our automatic states of anxiety and sense of overwhelm and subsequent, someone say like a detachment from reality in order to cope.
So this can eventually create a state of hyper arousal where we experience difficulty sleeping or switching off.
We are in a constant state of, you know, baseline panic or anxiety.
And we could also be really irritable and we have, you know, have these strange emotional outbursts when nothing seems to be wrong.
We have these heightened emotional reactions and sensitivity.
We get frightened really easily.
And we can also be looking for ways to numb ourselves to that and really escape all this extreme nervous and misplaced energy in our body.
Survival mode, whatever has triggered it.
And I said this before, it can turn us into completely different people.
You may forget to fulfill your most basic needs like eating or sleeping or showering because all of your energy is going towards just getting through what you're going through.
It's why people who are in like the real depths of grief often lose a lot of weight not only because their body is demanding more from them, but you also just don't feel hungry because all of those hunger cues and digestion is suppressed, right?
Like that's part of the frivolous unnecessary systems that our brain is switching off.
We may also feel more tired than usual, sleeping 10, 12 hours a day and still feeling exhausted because those hours that we are awake are so intense and exhausting, we just could never sleep off that exhaustion.
It can really get us into such a spiral, especially if your survival mode is the result of being an overachiever or from perfectionist burnout.
You want to keep pushing, right?
That's how you have been, you've almost trained your brain to perform is to keep pushing, but your body is telling you to rest and to restore itself.
And so you end up just experiencing even more guilt that means you end up compensating by extending yourself even further.
And that is how we see burnout cycles that turn into survival mode.
Our emotional regulation, I think I already mentioned this also goes out the window.
We snap at our loved ones for the smallest things.
We never know when we're feeling sad or mad or bad about a situation.
I was actually in preparation for this episode.
I was speaking to my friends.
Like when I'm about to do an episode I love to just kind of like talk to them, we say bring it up, they ask how's work doing and I said to one of my friends I was like doing an episode on survival mode.
And I was explaining to her what it feels like, what it means.
And she said to me, she was like after I was in a car accident, she broke her leg in a car accident back in like 2021 maybe.
After she was in that accident, even after her leg was healed, she still felt so like emotionally fuzzy and she would be angered by the smallest things.
And she was like, maybe it was because all of my mental energy was being devoted to processing that trauma and trying not to feel afraid anymore.
That's a big part of it. Things like multitasking become more challenging.
We can't actually relax because it always feels like something terrible is going to go wrong.
We have memory issues. You know, it's almost like a zombie state, like a heightened alert zombie state where our brain is kind of switched on, but everything else is really intense.
You know, the other way that I can describe it is there is like this filter up between you and the rest of the world, like a blurriness to all your waking hours or your waking moments.
Like when you get into a car and like, you know, when you turn on the radio and it can't find a channel, it's just this like high frequency noise and meaningless chatter.
That is what survival mode feels like.
This specific experience that buzzing, that high frequency, that noise, that detachment blurriness, that is also indicative of something else going on here.
Disassociation. There is a huge correlation between survival mode and disassociation because detaching ourselves from our motions and our surroundings is kind of one of the only ways that our body is able to firstly mentally compartmentalize what's going on.
But also tolerate hard and stressful things.
That's why dissociation is known as a stress response often in response to anxiety.
And it basically occurs when we unconsciously disconnect from our reality as a way of surviving.
It's very much an adaptive instinct and adaptive process.
You know, disassociation can help somebody feel like they can shut off from overwhelming circumstances by muting, distorting, going on autopilot and pushing through the extreme situation.
However, when the trauma is ongoing, even if you know the physical trauma has passed if the memories of the trauma ongoing, disassociation can become what some researchers would call fixed and automatic.
Your body is basically saying, listen, we can't trust you with this right now.
Trust us. We're going to take over.
We're going to numb you all these experiences.
And you know, when it's time to come to wake you up, don't worry.
We'll get you there. I feel like that so rarely happens because whilst you're in this survival state, you're going to continue to do things feeling like you need to survive.
That doesn't include things that are important for self-care.
It doesn't include moments of relaxation.
It's kind of like you're locked in.
There's no way out once you let this mode take over.
So what's actually happening in your body and your brain to create this?
Well, we spoke kind of briefly about it before, but it's basically the fight or flight response.
Now we also tend to include freeze or fawn, but this is an automatic physiological response to danger.
If you have ever done like a basic psychology course, you know about this.
But when our sympathetic nervous system takes over a response to a stressor or a stressful event, we get a racing heartbeat.
We get our dilated pupils release of adrenaline and cortisol.
Our breathing rate goes up.
This response is meant to prepare our body to get away or survive danger.
The other thing that has meant to happen is that response is meant to go away when the danger has passed.
But if not, if we don't ever perceive the danger as passing, eventually staying in that stress state for too long leads to exhaustion and breakdown.
The other thing to note about what's happening in your body and your brain when you're in this mode is that your brain is operating entirely differently than what it would normally be.
The amygdala, which is the part of the brain responsible for emotional processing, especially for things like fear, it becomes hyperactive and hyper reactive.
It sends signals to hormones like cortisol, which that's what really triggers your fight or flight response.
But when the cortisol tap isn't turned off, you start to get muscle tension and pain and sleep problems.
And it even sometimes means that we get sicker more often.
So this is interesting.
If you've just done a series of exams, if you've just graduated, whatever, you've just done midterms, and you've been pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing.
Do you ever notice that you immediately get sick straight afterwards?
That's basically what's happening here.
Obviously, that's just like a brief period of stress, but when we live in survival mode for months on end, it's basically like having a stressor constantly poking you, constantly poking and poking and poking and you can never relax.
And over time, this disrupts the body's natural balance.
And it puts you at risk for a whole lot of mental health issues, also physical illnesses like we spoke about before.
There was a series of studies published in Scientific America back during the pandemic that showed that prolonged stress can even alter our brains structure.
It can lead to long-term memory issues, reduced academic performance, poor decision making.
And if you think that wasn't enough, our prefrontal cortex, which controls rational thinking, also seems to kind of take a backseat.
It seems to be almost overwhelmed by the parts of the amygdala or the inner cortexes that are really just shooting out dangerous signals at all time.
This is also why we see a difference between what we would call a learning brain and a survival brain.
If you've ever noticed that the more stressed you get, the more difficult everyday tasks become, that is because you are experiencing this difference, the difference between learning brain and survival brain.
A learning brain is one that is really able to take in new information.
It also means that you're able to perform daily tasks that you are accustomed to with that much issue.
You don't find those tasks stressful or frustrating.
And there is all this space for creativity and for inspiration and for growth.
Your brain is clear and it's just soaking everything up.
If you're experiencing, currently experiencing, I will say a healthy life, you have managed to really navigate your stress response, you've taken care of your mental health, you're on holiday, you're probably in learning brain mode.
It's why when you go on vacation, you suddenly have like a million ideas for your future and you're suddenly so much more relaxed and you're really interested in going to museums and you have all these plans and all these ideas and you're reading your own learning brain.
Survival brain is what we described before.
There is no space for anything new.
There is no space for new information, for curiosity.
Everything is done on adrenaline and on fear.
If you're just trying to survive, your brain is focusing only on what it thinks is important for your survival.
If you're just experiencing something traumatic and you step into a classroom or you step into work and you have all these tasks to do, you're not going to be able to do them.
There's this brilliant YouTube video from a creator called Jacob Ham and he talks about this so perfectly.
He talks about how individuals who have endured a lot of trauma as children or people who have just escaped toxic situations, toxic workplaces who are burnt out.
They are operating on an empty tank.
It takes so long for that tank to be replenished.
And so yet it may look like you're lazy or you're procrastinating and you're disorganized.
But actually when we have a bit more compassion and we look deeper, it's because your brain is still in that survival mode and it doesn't see learning as a current priority.
To sum up all this doom and gloom, this can have a blade on effect.
It's really hard to be a good partner or a good girlfriend or a good boyfriend.
When every part of your brain is looking for danger, there is no room for softness when you're just trying to survive.
And it can mean that you often self sabotage your relationship or if you're really really irritable, it's not that you have an excuse for being angry or agitated.
But it's really hard to think clearly about what you want from your relationship and how to show up as a good partner if there's no brain space for that.
The same goes for friendship.
I've seen really great, amazing friendships fall apart because one person just had no mental capacity to be present.
It was for no other reason other than that they were stuck in the survival mode and everything to them became less important because they were just trying to get through.
And when all your you know your cues and your drive for sleep and hunger and water and socializing when all those cues are out of whack when your immune system is compromised, it's really hard to pull yourself out of that and to kind of find your way back to who you were before, who were you without the stress, without the tension, without the adrenaline, without the fear.
That is exactly what we are going to talk about next exiting survival mode, getting back to safe mode, back to our learning brain.
I have all the tips and the psychological advice I could find that I could extract from the research, stay with us after this short break.
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