5 Signs You’re Living In Survival Mode
Disclaimer : Hey there, Psych2goers! Before we start, a friendly disclaimer, this article is not meant for a professional diagnosis or treatment. If you notice you or your loved ones experienced any signs stated below, please don’t hesitate to seek help from Psychiatrists or other mental health professionals.
One weekend, you decide to spend your time hiking a hill near your house, alone. It is early in the morning, you have not met any hikers along the way. The path to the top is surrounded with tall trees and greenery. Suddenly, your ears pick up a strange rustling sound which comes from the bush, and it appears to be heading towards you. Your mind is actively thinking of what that could possibly be. Is it a bear? Or a strange person who wants to harm you? This activates your body’s stress response system, causing a stream of cortisol, adrenaline, and other hormones to be flowing inside of you, providing you the energy to fight or flight the approaching peril.
Psych2goers, now, let’s review our daily life and see what could be the potential “bears” and “harmful person” in our life…These can actually be the stressors, such as the challenges at work, money troubles, or impending assignment deadlines, that cause you to experience the rush of hormones in your body system, giving you that push that you require to go through the motions.
Yes, indeed, stress response is natural and adaptive, and it is not all that bad. It is crucial to aid us in responding well to stressors. However, when we are in a survival mode for a prolonged period of time, it can be detrimental to our own wellbeing, causing exhaustion and detachment from life.
So, Psych2goers, have you ever wondered what are the signs that a person is living in survival mode? Below are the signs that we should look out for:
- Get “tired” easily
You wake up in the morning after a good 8 hours of sleep. However, you still feel unrefreshed. You walk downstairs to your kitchen, the sink is filled with unwashed dishes. Then you make a cup of tea to start your morning. You go outside, water your lawn, but you still cannot shake out the feeling of fatigue and exhaustion.
When a person is “surviving” for too long, one can feel exhausted very quickly, despite just doing a normal day-to-day routine. An overexposure to stress-response hormones may lead to emotional exhaustion, which can be manifested in emotional and physical symptoms. Physically you will feel tired all the time and emotionally you may feel that you are “trapped” in a situation with no way out (Legg & Cafasso, 2019).
2. “Snap” easily or breakdown over something small
You are working overtime to fulfill a work deadline. That day, you have a bad day at work since you have been scolded by your boss over a small mistake in front of your colleagues. You actually just return to work after a 2 days leave to handle your mother’s funeral. You are still grieving. You try to hold in your anger and dissatisfaction, the only thing you look forward to after work is to drive back home while listening to your favourite music, lie down on your cozy bed, and fall asleep. When you arrive home, you notice that you have lost your house key. It is nowhere to be found. All of a sudden, you break down and cry heartily in front of your doorstep, unable to get inside and have a good rest like you have planned.
An individual who is in survival mode will constantly feel on edge, cry easily over something minuscule, and become irritable all the time. This is because they have carried a huge burden for so long without trying to address and process it healthily.
3. Struggle to engage in conversation or become emotionally distant
You notice that recently your partner is uninterested in spending quality time with you. Your partner has become emotionally distant, and your conversations only revolve around superficial things like, who’s going to pick up the kids, or who’s going to throw the trash.
Psych2goers, in relationships, it is definitely common to experience emotional drifting which may be due to several reasons. One of the reasons is, perhaps your partner is experiencing high levels of stress and emotional distress, thus your partner responds by withdrawing (Winch, 2016).
4. Prioritise “immediate comfort” when they’re burned out at the expense of their long-term health (eg comfort eating)
You have made a New Year’s Resolution to eat healthily this year. However, you always found yourself indulging in your own version of “comfort food” i.e. ice cream or a slice of your favourite Tiramisu cake.
People who are in survival mode will often experience negative feelings which lead to an emotional void. Therefore, in order to soothe those feelings and to fill the emptiness, they resort to emotional eating, which creates a false sense of “fullness” (Marcin & Legg, 2018).
5. Feel like they’re “existing” rather than “living”
“A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”
(Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert)
Picture this! You arrive home after a long day at work. You park your car in the garage, alight your car, and step into your house. However, your drive back home is a blur. You surely don’t remember waiting for the traffic light to turn green multiple times, switching any lanes, or making that left-hand turn. Yet, you still manage to reach home, regardless.
Psych2goers, people who are in survival mode are acting on inertia and living a life on autopilot. They feel like they are merely existing rather than living. Most of the activities are done mindlessly rather than mindfully. Two Harvard University psychologists, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, conducted a study that showed that 47 percent of the waking hours of the average person was spent on “mind wandering”. It is a situation whereby they are thinking about past, present, or future events, which makes them unhappy.
Final thoughts
It is quite challenging to stop the cycle of survival mode, especially for those who have a history of complex trauma and prolonged stress. For these people, even when it is not needed, survival mode becomes an automatic response to stressors. They respond to a situation excessively, like it is a “bear”, when it is in fact a harmless “squirrel”. Therefore, if you find that you resonate to most of the signs stated above, do know that you can seek help from mental health professionals to relearn and rewire your nervous system and to learn how to live instead of just surviving.
REFERENCES
Cafasso, J., &; Legg, T. J. (2019, April 9). What is emotional exhaustion and how do you fix it? Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/emotional-exhaustion.
Killingsworth, M. A., &; Gilbert, D. T. (2010, November 12). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6006/932.
Marcin, A., &; Legg, T. J. (2018, August 29). Emotional eating: Why it happens and how to stop it. Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/emotional-eating.
Turmaud, D. R. (2020, June 30). Why survival mode isn’t the best way to live. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/lifting-the-veil-trauma/202006/why-survival-mode-isnt-the-best-way-live.
Winch, G. (2016, March 3). 5 reasons someone Close may become emotionally distant. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-squeaky-wheel/201605/5-reasons-someone-close-may-become-emotionally-distant.
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