There is more to life than simply increasing its speed. 

—Mahatma Gandhi

Survival mode is a state that your nervous system enters when it senses danger. It is a common part of PTSD or CPTSD. If you experienced a physical, sexual or emotional trauma that you did not find healing for, you might be living in survival mode. It is this message that your nervous system receives from your mind and pushes out to your body: I am not safe. CPTSD is confirmation that time doesn’t heal all wounds; inner work heals inner wounds.

Think about fight, flight, and freeze; your brain is designed with a fail-safe so that when you are in danger, it will always protect you. Your safety is your brain’s highest priority. It wants you to survive above all else. When your survival is threatened, nothing else is more important. But the safety mechanisms in your brain are meant to be short-term threats to your survival, for use in emergency situations. What happens when your brain thinks you’re still in danger, long after the threat is gone?

Survival mode is a way of living that keeps humans locked into a primitive danger state. Simply put, you are living for survival rather than creation. The most basic animal need is to survive. Most organisms spend their entire life cycle just trying to survive until the next generation is born and raised. Humans alone have the unique gift of consciousness. We alone have the gift of creating—not just more humans, but more newness and goodness. We create technology, art, advanced knowledge, physical structures, questions, and solutions. 

We don’t just have offspring—rather, we create families. We create legacies and heritages. We design our lives just as we want them to go—with infinite possibilities. Animals do not have this gift. Sometimes we need to tap into our survival instincts—like when we are in danger and we need to protect ourselves or those around us. But a healthy human life is so much more than surviving. Survival mode keeps us thinking and living as though we were still animals. It robs us of experiencing the fullness and actualized potential of human life. You live to survive, rather than living to create a life full of your manifested desires. 

Manifestation is the act of creating a physical product out of a non-physical thing—a thought, a belief, an idea. When you manifest your desires, you make them real on a physical level. In a creative state, you manifest your desires and purpose and ultimately live a fulfilled life. In survival mode, believing that you are at the same level as an animal with limited creative capacity, you manifest a lifestyle of surviving. 

Signs you are in survival mode:

• You feel a false sense of urgency—a need to rush or hurry up with no particular reason. You find it difficult to relax and be patient. 
• You do not spend any quiet time with yourself—just thinking, being alone, journaling, opening yourself up to your thoughts. Your day-to-day schedule is regularly packed with events with little time to rest, and you prefer it this way. It’s uncomfortable for you to slow down and relax without distraction.
• You don’t do things just for the pleasure of doing them, just for fun—your main goal in life is productivity and performance. When you do have alone time, you fill it with distractions, watching TV, going on your phone, or starting small arguments. Your brain does whatever it can to make sure it never has to quiet down and face the pain. 
• You walk and talk very fast. You find it difficult and even unpleasant to try to slow down, to walk and talk slowly. 
• Your lifestyle has caused you injury or chronic pain but you ignore it or simply try to live with it. 
• You eat your meals very quickly and see eating as something to “get it over with.”
• You put pressure on yourself to do certain things in a certain way, especially things you don’t want to do. You do not, however, ask yourself if you even want to do them. You view things as obligations that are not required of you; only you require them of yourself. You subject yourself to your own oppressive laws. 
• You store excess fat on your body in ways that weigh you down. This is a sign that your body thinks it needs extra protection in that area. It doesn’t feel safe in the outside world because your mind tells it that it isn’t safe to be you, it isn’t safe to be seen, or it isn’t safe to be healthy. 

The quickest way to get out of survival mode is to connect with your body. This is the last thing you want to do because it feels unsafe. Why would you step outside of your house if there is danger out there? The thing about survival mode is that there is actually no danger. But your body and brain are 100% convinced that there is. You get out by figuring out the event that put you in survival mode and realizing that it is over and you are safe. You have to teach your brain and body that you are safe. 

When your brain hasn’t fully processed an intensely fearful, sad or upsetting situation, it thinks you are still in danger. Your brain tells your body you are still in danger. Your body is lying to you, but only because it loves you and wants to protect you. If you are a house, your body is the walls and structure of you, protecting what’s inside you from outside threats. Say thank you to it often. Show it love and kindness. It is not your enemy, even though it may feel like it’s against you. If that is the case, it means that you are against you. 

Ask yourself, what part of me hates myself? What parts of myself do I not like? Why do I not like them? Can I learn to accept them, change them, or let them go? Exiting survival mode requires awareness, stillness, and establishing a base of safety in your body. To do that, you might need to deal with whatever put you in a survival state in the first place. It is a process.