Survival Mode is a favourite topic of mine. It’s one of those things that, if everything goes well for you, you rarely have an opportunity to experience. We all have one. And how we’re going to react when we get there is as unpredictable as just about anything else.
There are various groups who make livings optimizing your Survival Mode - think, the military, police forces, first responders, Emergency Medicine, etc. Knowing how you are going to respond when sh*t hits the fan can be very advantageous. As can learning how to push the bar for yourself so it takes more and more stimulus before you get to a survival mode response… It’s a fascinating area of study. The optimization of the limits of the human condition has long been a fun side hustle for me.
That said, for those experiencing their survival mode for the first time, or maybe it’s your 30th time but without proper guidance and support, either way, survival mode can be a bewildering and terrifying experience. You react in ways that are completely out of character. Your judgement processes become completely compromised. You think you are the only person seeing things clearly, but your judgement is wildly compromised and you are easily swayed into making terrible decisions based entirely on ego and emotions…
My first forays into exploring survival mode reactions were with disaster preparedness simulations. There are a bunch of great groups who are professionals to take you through preparing for various scenarios, based on your likelihood of encountering them, or even just your interest in getting to experience them. These are excellent to do from the standpoint of a) getting to know yourself, your tendencies, and being able to really get to the meat and potatoes of how your specific nervous system is hardwired so that you can better understand the ways to take the best care of it, and b) being that much more ahead of the game should anything terrible actually happen. One of the tenants of disaster preparedness is to, you know, prepare BEFORE anything ever goes horribly wrong.
The pandemic has been an excellent example of why it’s so important.
Remember all the toilet paper hoarding? The crazy crowds of people in stores? The videos of people in the streets just randomly attacking cars? All the yelling and melting down? The rioting and looting and near collapse of many societies?
Yeah, cause of all of that.
You know what’s amazing about all of that? All of those behaviours are 100% predictable and happen with every pandemic. They happen with just about any major event. People evolve VERY slowly. We have not changed much in thousands of years. We live longer and have some cooler technology, but really, people are the exact same as they’ve always been.
Why this is useful though, is that one of the MOST important parts of gaining control over your survival mode response is creating predictability. Knowing how you and the people around you are likely to behave come crunch time is one way you can increase your likelihood of survival during crazy times.
Most mammals hate new experiences. One of the most stressful things you can do is throw a mammal, any mammal, into a brand new open space. The brain can’t handle that many conflicting possibilities all at once. Think about it, one of the stressful parts of any unknown situation is all of the possibilities for what might happen, right? As soon as you have an answer, any answer, half the problem goes away. You now have a direction and can take steps towards whatever that might be.
So, one way we learn how to manage our survival mode response is to learn a predictable set of patterns and behaviours for how you’re going to approach any new or novel situation.
In all of my experiences and research on optimizing this response, I’ve come up with a few things that are relatively universal - meaning, they’ll help no matter your specific situation or coping styles - but there are a lot of nitty gritty’s to this work too that have a lot to do with how your specific nervous system is set up, what your coping styles are, and what previous experiences you’ve had.
So, first, we’re going to drop a bit of science and then we’ll get into ways to work with what you’ve got. As always, if you have questions about your own unique situation, feel free to reach out and drop me a line. I love questions!
Okay - ready to learn so much more about human survival responses than you probably ever wanted to?
Tuck in, friends! We’re about to go on a journey!
This particular journey starts on a warm summer evening in ancient Greece… Heh heh, little Big Bang Theory humour for you there.
We’re actually going waaaaaaay further back than that, to when humans were still tribal groups living in little packs in various climates and environments. Our nervous systems are still set up like that. Again - we evolve VERY slowly. So to understand how the survival mode response works, we have to understand how we, as mammals, work.
So, first up, there are two ways we get to a survival mode response - being attacked by something, be it a predator, bad food or other illness, or not having enough food (which is actually a slightly different offshoot with it’s own unique responses, but it’s included in survival responses); and repeated exposures to a potentially life threatening situation.
So we’re going to break this into Group 1 and Group 2 and use the same scenario - you run into a bear in the woods.
Group 1 people - you get to engage with the threat directly. Group 2 - you just see the bear but get to escape unscathed.
Group 1 people, you’re going to go through a very specific spike in your stress response that we call the survival mode response. We’re going to talk a bit more about that in a second. It’s a much more direct route to your survival response.
Group 2 people - you may or may not go into survival mode response. Some of you will, some of you won’t - that’s that individual nervous system functioning I was talking about. Most of you will have some varying level of stress response though. Say, weeks later, you run into a bear again, still just seeing it and get away. Now, more of you will shunt to your survival response, depending on how many other previous life threatening encounters you’ve had and individual tolerances. But you will all be experiencing what’s called ‘hypervigilence’ at this point. You will be fortifying your living dwellings, wondering if you should move to a safer area, not sleeping as well, etc etc. If you see a third bear - welcome to your survival mode response! 3 is the magic number for our nervous systems. And it doesn’t have to be the same bear. It could be an illness, a snake, and then a bear - just have to be 3 potentially life threatening situations and you’ll wind up in the same place as 1 actually life threatening situation.
My point is - you don’t have to actually be in a life threatening situation to have your survival mode activated. You wind up at the same place as Group 1 folks - those who have actually been in a life threatening situation - as long as you have been in 3 or more situations where there was the potential for them to be life threatening, even if the outcome was positive and you weren’t in any actual danger.
So, now that we’ve covered that - I’m going to go forward talking like you’re all Group 1, because it’s really just a matter of time and life before all of you will be.
So, you come across a bear in the woods and it is a life threatening situation (or it’s your 3rd potential life threatening encounter) and you are now in your Survival Mode response. How your individual response is going to go depends on a few factors, some situational, some are learned, and some are dependent on how your particular system is wired.
You attack that bear directly. These were the folks at the start of the pandemic who we saw randomly attacking cars in the streets. I actually have a lot of respect for these folks. Like, good on ya. It’s not necessarily the best response - your survivability depends on the likelihood of you being able to actually defeat the bear - but it’s at least a God’s honest response. You see a threat and you just go right for it.
If you are unlikely to win in a bear-human face off, you are going to look for something weaker that you can defeat, throw it at the bear, and then make your getaway. This is the old adage ‘I don’t have to run faster than the bear, I just have to run faster than you’ situation. These were the folks yelling at store clerks about masks and stuff. You can’t attack the pandemic directly, so you attack the weakest thing around you. Survivability wise, it’s a decent strategy, but I find I have less respect for it.
Run away. This one you tend to pick if you know you can’t defeat the bear, don’t have something close by you can attack, and figure you might be able to get away. Some people are more hardwired for this response. Survivability wise, the folks who run at the first sign of danger are the ones who tend to survive. It’s one of the reasons anxiety is so rampant in our populations. Being afraid of everything is actually a very effective survival strategy.
Play dead. Or the less often talked about ‘freeze response’. If your nervous system thinks it’s about to die, you’ll just freeze in place. It floods your system with endorphins and prepares for death. This response tends to be the one folks have the most guilt over, however.
So, these are the most common survival responses. But there are some more that tend to crop up that are less functional and a bit more rare. These responses actually decrease your survivability.
There is no bear. Some people, when confronted with a life threatening situation, deny the existence of that situation. This one actually is an offshoot of the freeze response, when the chemicals released because your brain thinks it’s about to die, actually induce an almost delusional state.
Sure, there’s a bear, but it’s this poisonous flower that I really have to worry about. Similar to the one above, but this one has more of a deflection coping style to it. This is brought about by control tendencies - you can’t control the bear, but you CAN control whether or not you avoid the flower. Doesn’t in any way save you from the bear, but your ego feels safer about it.
My personal favourite - if it’s my time to die, I’m not going to worry about the bear. Just straight up does not care either way. Bear or no bear, they’re gonna do whatever they were doing anyway.
There are a few other even more rare ones, but let’s just stick with these for the time being.
What’s neat is everyone of us has these responses, and again, which one you actually use depends on the situation. There are things that make you more likely to default to one over the other, but the fun thing about survival responses is that you never really know how you’re going to react until you are in a very specific situation, and you might not even react the same way every time.
A LOT of research goes in to trying to figure out who is going to respond which way most often. There are other lines of professions that are entirely dedicated to training you to respond the exact same way every time. There are personality traits and testing you can do to figure out who’s suitable for what professions based on it. But, at the end of the day, you never really know until it happens what someone is going to do in any given situation.
See why I find it so fascinating??
So, what can you do to figure out what your most common Survival Mode is? Think back over stressful situations and figure out what your usual reaction is - do you get all mad and huffy? Do you rage out at someone not at all involved who had the bad luck of being in your path that day? Do you obsess over the things you can control, like food or cleaning? Your typical Survival Mode will be whatever that is, just totally over the top, so it can be a handy guide to try to predict what you might do and ways to mitigate it before it happens.
Write down what your typical response is, and then we’re going to talk about how to get a bit more control over the process in the next post. Knowing what you’re likely to do is the first step in making your individual response more functional.
So, till next time, folks! Happy self-reflecting!