We are wired with an innate fear of being out of control.

Imagine waking up to news of a mysterious and deadly virus spreading across the globe. Every day, the situation worsens: hospitals are overwhelmed, death tolls rise, and scientists scramble for answers. Suddenly, the world feels unstable, dangerous, and completely out of your control.

The COVID-19 pandemic delivered this shock to billions of people. But it wasn’t just the virus that caused fear—it was the unsettling realization of powerlessness. You couldn’t protect yourself fully, and you couldn’t predict what would happen next.

This fear of losing control, born from shock, doesn’t happen in the abstract. It activates the brain’s survival mechanisms, setting off a cascade of responses that can linger long after the initial crisis.

In today’s world, we are experiencing more and more of these shocks, in rapid succession. Read the headlines and you feel your heart race, your breath catch, your joy drain away. It’s a new reality for our world, we all need to recognize and adapt.

Understanding how these mechanisms work—and how they can trap us in cycles of fear—is key to reclaiming control over your mind and your life.

Fear of Losing Control Triggers Our Survival Mind

When faced with sudden shocks, like the realization during the pandemic that you could be next, your brain activates a sophisticated survival system designed to protect you. This process is fast, automatic, and driven by ancient evolutionary mechanisms that prioritize survival above all else.

The first responder is the amygdala, a small but powerful part of the brain that acts as your internal alarm system. The amygdala constantly scans for threats, and when it detects danger—like news of skyrocketing COVID cases—it triggers the HPA axis (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis).

The HPA axis floods your body with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones prepare you for action: your heart races, your breathing quickens, and your muscles tense up. This state, known as the fight, flight, or freeze response (what I call Survival Mind), directs your focus to lock onto surviving the immediate threat.

During the early days of COVID, this response was adaptive.

It drove people to stock up on essentials, stay informed, and take precautions. But for many, the realization of personal mortality—I could die, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it—kept the alarm bells ringing far beyond early adapting.

That’s because our survival system wasn’t designed to stay on indefinitely, but your mind doesn’t always know when to shut it off. When it doesn’t shut off - we cycle into more and more fear and repetitive worst case worries, not to mention damaging our physical health.

Neuroplasticity: How Fear Gets Wired Into Your Brain

The brain doesn’t just respond to fear—it learns from it.

This ability to adapt, called neuroplasticity, allows the brain to rewire itself based on repeated experiences. While this process helps us learn and adapt, it also makes us vulnerable to getting stuck in patterns of fear.

Take the example of economic uncertainty during the pandemic. As grocery shelves emptied and businesses shuttered, people began imagining worst-case scenarios: What if I lose my job? What if I can’t feed my family? What if this never ends?

Each time these thoughts replayed, the brain strengthened the neural pathways associated with fear and anxiety. The cycle repeats as it gets stronger and stronger.

Here’s how this works on a structural level:

Fear Pathways Strengthen: The amygdala becomes an overachiever, sensationalizing anything around you as a threat which then triggers your survival mind- whether you are in a threatening situation or not. We turn on the high alert button and constantly search for and expect the worst possible case. I found myself scanning my entire world, looking for threats,expecting threats and even creating and preparing for as yet unrealized and highly unlikely threats.

Hippocampus Shrinks: Chronic stress is not healthy for your hippocampus, which controls how you learn and remember things. This shrinking minimizes our ability to learn or to apply rational thinking to those threats. My brain fog was so bad I couldn’t remember what I did the day before, couldn’t think or write. My normally positive self became a negative, fearful entity. I didn’t even recognize myself. I couldn’t stop it.
Amygdala Enlarges: Your amygdala expands, stimulating your emotional triggers and lets fear take control. This is why I felt those knee jerk (or is it heart dropping) reactions to headlines, social media, and over time, pretty much everything I experienced in life.

These changes explain why many people became trapped in worst-case thinking during the pandemic or any time we feel threatened. The mind, wired for survival, focuses solely on potential threats, shutting out logic, context, and positive possibilities.

Even after the immediate crisis passes, the fear pathways remain, leaving the mind stuck in survival mode.

The Cost of Staying in Survival Mode

While survival mode is crucial in life-threatening situations, staying in this state for too long can take a serious toll on your mind and body.

Short-Term Impacts: When we head into survival mind, we prioritizes immediate action over common sense. That can lead to:

Hypervigilance: You can’t relax because you are on high alert for any and every threat that you know is coming, any minute now. As I noted in my last newsletter, hypervigilance leads to a nervous system that is constantly expecting an attack. We never relax, and we damage our bodies as we stay on high alert. Scientists now believe that the rise in chronic illness is in part due to the coincident rise in hypervigilant states. My hypervigilance kept me in chronic illness for the 3 years after black mold toxins decided to make a home of my body. I couldn't get onto the healing medications because my body decided those, too, were a threat.
Physical Symptoms: Headaches/migraines, stomach and digestive issues, heart and breathing irregularities, insomnia, chronic fatigue, brain fog ...I could go on. Massive stomach cramps and nausea (and worse.) My heart would beat out of my chest and I couldn’t breath. Constant physical aches and fatigue, respiratory issues... I was sick and nothing seemed to help.
Narrowed Focus: Our mind stays focus on the same threatening stories, repeating and even expanding them, while still on alert for more threats. Threats become the only priority. There were hours when I had difficulty thinking about anything other than the perceived threat. It was like a movie reel playing and playing again, sometimes different versions, sometimes a repeat, growing more aggravated awaiting the next threat.

These short-term effects are manageable, if the threat is resolved quickly.

During prolonged crises, like a pandemic, shifts in our world, threats of violence and even potential change that is fear-laden, compound into long-term consequences.

Long-Term Impacts: The resulting long term impacts of living in this state can deliver powerful physical and emotional compromise. For example:

Cognitive Impairments: Chronic stress affects the prefrontal cortex, reducing your ability to concentrate, make decisions, or remember important details. We all remember times when we literally couldn’t think because we were scared for ourselves, our families, our friends, the things we hold dear or our world at large. I had days when I couldn’t think at all, couldn’t process data, couldn’t read a sentence and remember what I read. Which is not my normal state. My friends used to call me the elephant...
Emotional Exhaustion: Living in a heightened state of fear drains your emotional resources, leading to anxiety, mood swings, and eventually burnout. I was so emotionally drained I could barely function. Some days I didn't even try. The joy that had pervaded my life disappeared, and my emotional state became one of constant feelings of a bereft future.
Physical Health Risks: Persistent stress raises blood pressure, weakens the immune system, and increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases. I'd been sick since I was a kid. "Too many antibiotics ruined her immune system." I was bedridden in my 50s. Massive inflammation, chronic infections, fatigue, always respiratory issues. I was diagnosed with chronic lyme disease and a few of its companions. I could barely get out of bed, and when I did, all I could think about was going back to bed.

Worst-case thinking fuels these impacts. By repeatedly imagining catastrophic outcomes—like losing your home or never recovering financially—you reinforce survival-mode pathways, making it more and more difficult to shift into a calmer, more balanced state.

How difficult is it to focus on the bright side when you're living in the dark?

Recognizing the Signs of a Survival-Mode Brain

For many people, survival mode becomes so ingrained that they don’t realize they’re stuck in it.

Recognizing the signs is the first step to breaking free.

A Bit Of My Story

I was stuck in survival mode for most of my life and I didn’t know it. As a child, I experienced traumatic circumstances that left me in a constant state of fear. My brain, wired for survival, treated every situation as a potential threat.

As a professional, I worked 80 hours a week to prove I was worthy, which I now realize was compensation for my fear of being imperfect. Imperfection meant pain and terror as a kid.

My desperate need for perfection wired my mind into strong and long survival mode. It created health issues for most of my life. Now I'm peeling back the layers on lovely chronic physical issues in my older age...things I didn’t connect to my childhood until this past year.

Watch for These Patterns

These patterns have been consistent in my own and my clients' experiences.

You replay "what if" scenarios constantly, unable to let go of worst-case thinking. I would go through periods when I could not think about anything other than being a homeless bag lady, in the dark with the rain pouring on me and my precious pups - everything gone. Alone in the dark like I was as a child. My mind applied my childhood reality as a threat to my adult life to keep me on high alert.
You overreact to minor stressors, as though every inconvenience is a major threat. My big AHA moment was when I started paying attention to my Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and the “flinches” that signaled its response. I started paying attention to my phsyical energy. I got an email about a late payment that was incorrect. and I felt my body trigger into high alert. Wow. That gave me the key of what to “feel” for. Within an hour I realized I was rebbing up because of headlines, conversations, thoughts in my mind. What a Rebelation! Everything in my world was triggering me, and I never knew it.
You experience persistent physical symptoms, like tight shoulders, stomach problems, or unexplained fatigue. Over time, the symptoms become chronic and your immune system becomes so weak you can’t fight off anything. You get colds and sickness, toxins and critters come into your body and you are literally sick sick sick. I was sick, as long as I can remember. I tried everything to heal myself. I couldn't seem to get healthy. New things kept popping up, or just popping. Didn't matter what I tried for my black mold. Tiny doses made me sicker. My mind in hypervigilant mode was preventing me from healing myself since anything in the environment was a threat. Even myself.

These signs are your brain’s way of telling you it’s stuck in survival mode.

The good news? You don’t have to stay there.

Why You’re Not Stuck in Survival Mode

Neuroplasticity, the same process that wires fear into the brain, also allows us to rewire for resilience and calm. This means you’re not stuck with the patterns your brain has learned—you have the power to create new ones.

How do you do that?

Your focus and attention create mindware programs. We create our challenges because we focus our attention on something that is scary, that makes us extremely anxious. We fixate on it. Covid news, war news, economic news, political news, shooting news, death news, It’s all around us and we get sucked in - and hooked into this cycle. The more attention you give something, the more of it comes into your mind.

You change the pattern when change your focus and attention. It really is that simple, and that difficult. You spent a long time focusing on the threats, so it can take a while to shift that pattern on your own.

It takes commitment, but you can do it.

Here’s a simple technique to get you started.

Pay attention to your attention. When you catch yourself paying attention to something negative. STOP.
Daydream. Create a happy sensory place in your mind where you are safe, the world is as you want it and you are living as you want. Detail it in every way…. See it, feel it, hear taste and smell it. Crank it up til it’s a sensory experience that feels absolutely real.
Practice. Day Dream often. Create more amazing places in your mind.

THEN,

Whenever you catch yourself focused on the negative - go to one of your places; live in it, breathe in it, immerse yourself in it. STAY in it for a few minutes.
Then go on with your day. Pay attention and repeat the above whenever you catch yourself in a fearful negative thought pattern.

You'll shift the pattern over time with consistency, attention and practice.

If you want to know more about using your attention, check out my free and open ebook, The Power Of Attention.

If you want more techniques to shift your life out of the panic and back under your control, check out my free and open ebook, 7 Mindshifts to Take Back Control of Your Life .

I’m always available to help as well if you need a shoulder or some advice. Just reach out on my website.

The Bottom Line

When life feels out of control, fear is a natural response.

You’re not at the mercy of your survival mind. Regardless of how dire you may feel.

With the right focus, attention and commitment, you can rewire your mind to move beyond fear, break free from worst-case thinking, and reclaim control over your life.

You deserve that.