Rebelations Newsletter

The Science Behind Why We’re on Edge in Our Survival Mind World

September, 2024

We’ve all heard about our survival instinct. It's one of the mindware programs that's innate in all humans from the time we're born.

The instinct was created as we evolved to become our cave person selves. It had a simple purpose: Protect our early ancestors from being hurt or killed. Nature created it as part of our mind design during a time when threats were occasional incidents. A wooly mammoth or saber toothed tiger attack. Or perhaps an aggressive clan visiting to mix it up.

In our modern world, it's a big problem for many of us.

Fundamentals of Survival Mind

What I call Survival Mind is technically known as our fight-or-flight response, also known as the acute stress response.

Survival mind is triggered by both real and potential threats. You don't have to be experiencing a real threat. The potential for a threat is trigger enough.

A threat or appearance of threat causes the unconscious mind to trigger physiological reaction, which then trigger the nervous system. Specifically, the sympathetic nervous system.

A release of hormones prepare your body to either stay and deal with a threat, or run away to safety. Or, to freeze where you are, which is the most common response at the initiation of the instinct. The resulting physical response can remain for 15 minutes to over an hour, after the threat is gone. Our parasympathetic nervous system waits for us to be safe, then it begins to calm us.

When survival is triggered, our minds go into high alert. We continuously search for any immediate or potential threat around us. For much longer than our body remains on alert.

Imagine what happens to us living in our modern world. Where threats and potential attacks are digitally beamed into our devices and minds, every single minute of every single day.

Survival Mind in Our Extreme World

Our world throws threatening sensationalism at us in rapid succession. Some true, a lot pure fiction. The result is the same.

We remain in survival mind for longer and longer periods of time.

That is not how our survival mind was designed to exist. Nor were our physical bodies designed to stay on high alert for long periods of time. Evolution intended survival mind to trigger for minutes, not days, weeks, months and even years. It surely didn't mean for us to live in constant survival mind.

So here we are with these amazing minds, designed to create the life experiences we want. Living in a world that constantly triggers our fear responses, and away we go into survival mind. Which focuses our attention on anything but what we want.

But there's more than just the sensational media.

We are so divided on so many topics. The division itself serves to fuel our survival response, given the animosity and outright attacks so many experience in our day to day lives, not to mention on social media.

Think about what you endure and have endured. First there was Covid-19. That was enough to trigger us all into survival mind. Add in economic doom and gloom, wars, climate change, political rage, daily mass shootings and more insanity.

No wonder so many of us are in funk, wondering what is going to happen in our own lives, in the world, to kids and grandkids.

Many of us are feeling it, especially those who are more empathic and consequently in touch with their external environments.

The research confirms we are not alone.

In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, global prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by 25%. In a 2021 study, nearly half of Americans surveyed reported recent symptoms of an anxiety or depressive disorder.

My Personal Survival Mind

Survival mind played a really interesting part in a particular belief that wreaked havoc on my life. I thought I'd share it as an example of the raw power of this human instinct as part of our mindware.

What Can You Do?

Survival mind is an instinct. It triggers with no influence from your conscious mind. We often don't even recognize we're in survival mind, even as it impacts our mental and physical health. Sometimes, like with the programming I shared in my video above, it can dominate your life.

Translation: It may not be something you can completely reprogram on your own. It depends on how long and how deeply your survival mind has been creating its own mindware programs to guide your unconscious mind.

For example, my survival mind is way powerful. Way. That's because of my childhood torture that put my survival mind into overdrive when my little girl still still hadn't developed my critical faculty to know true from false.

In my case, simpler mind methods didn't resolve my trauma. I've found that to be the case with other victims of abuse, traumatic events, longterm emotional distress and similar intense negative experiences.

On the other hand, if you're experiencing a non-traumatic version of survival mind, there are mindshifts to limit the impacts of survival mind.

I work with all types of clients to release the nasty fear, anxiety, depression and outright trauma from deep survival mind impacts. I also share simpler techniques for those who can shift their survival mind on their own. It's an individual response so I won'y categorize who needs what here... that's highly subjective since we are all have our own personal mindware and life experiences.

Following are the techniques I share for limiting your survival mind triggers. I use them all. They help me stay in balance in the insanity we're all dealing with today. They're easy and safe:)

First STOP putting your attention on all the negative around you.

Specifically, cut back on your digital news and social media.

I know, you want to be informed in our insane world. But there are ways to stay informed without diving into the abysmal details.

Here's what I do.

I don't watch any form of news as video on a digital screen. Today's screens are designed to put us into a light hypnotic trance. That's the last thing I want with our news, or anything else. Every screen does this, from your tv and computer to your tablet or phone. This hypnotic effect is part of our addiction to our digital devices.
Instead, I skim headlines on news websites, primarily offshore news. I do scan Associated Press, along with BBC, Al Jazeera and a few others. Scanning the headlines is intense enough - they are designed to stimulate our survival minds. Scan quickly and don't dwell. Some days, when I'm feeling less than powerful, I don't scan at all. The world will go on, hopefully.
I have dramatically cut back my time on social media. I still chat with friends and keep up, but even after carefully curating my streams, there's still too much sensational negativity. If you notice that your heart rate is increasing and you're feeling down as you scan your stream, STOP. Your body is telling you it's moving into survival mind. It took me a long time to realize why I'd wake up in a great mood and then dive into the depths after five minutes on Facebook, or any other social platform. Lesson learned.

Second - FOCUS on what you want.

Your unconscious mind uses your attention to define what it thinks you want in your experience. It controls the information your conscious mind uses to deliver that experience. So what you focus on, pay attention to, heavily influences your daily experience.

Survival mind compels us to focus on all the negative and potential negative around us.

We have to pay even closer attention to what we want, be grateful for all the positives in our world and remain focused on all the goodness around us and that is coming to us.

That doesn't mean being Pollyanna and ignoring the chaos. It means we balance our good things within the chaos - focusing on every single thing that is positive and gives us joy in our world.

I write my 10 grateful things every am and pm to make sure I begin and end my day with positive attention and focus.

When I first recovered the memories of my childhood torture, I became trapped in my little girl's dank cellar, alone and praying to God to please, please let me die.

The standard therapy for PTSD put me into a light trance. Focusing on the horror over and over again imprinted it into my unconscious mind as my reality.

I became as powerless, in terror and trauma, as my little girl was. The only way to move beyond that was to focus on the good things in my current life. I knew enough about our minds then to begin that shift on my own. I would sit and write about, then visualize, happy times from the past, invent happy times for my future.

That attention to positive hope helped me lift myself out of the powerlessness and begin a search for answers. As soon as I began that search, more positive things began to occur around me. Then, I was guided to the right places to find my healing. Step by step.

That's a valuable lesson I share with clients. You don't have to shift everything from negative to positive in a minute or a day.

What you can successfully do is to begin to pivot from a negative thought to something positive. Again and again and again. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither were your unconscious programs, especially those related to your survival mind.

Shifting your attention to shift your emotional state on your own takes time and commitment. You can do it!

Here's a simple little technique to help with the shift. I use it all the time, throughout the day.

I call this method the Idle Mind Shift.

I usually catch myself in negative self talk when I'm in idle mind time. That's when I'm not actively focusing on something. For example, driving, doing the dishes, cleaning the house, cleaning horse pens... the list goes on and on.
Begin to pay attention to your idle mind and its chatter. When you find yourself focusing on something negative, stop. I catch myself grousing about things like the following; someone said or did something that was mean, out of integrity or a blatant lie, a conversation or act that was unfair, some world event like another mass shooting that gets my righteous indignation going.
When you catch yourself in those negative mind conversations, STOP. Then laugh. Lovingly tell your Unconscious Mind the following. "Unconscious Mind, I understand why you might want to believe (insert scary voice here). The truth of what I want is THIS." Then close your eyes and imagine a moment in time when you have what you do want in opposition to that scary voice. Create a picture of that moment in your mind and be in it. Make it highly sensory, meaning note all the details of that moment, see the colors, feel the feeling or power and joy and all the other positive emotions you can muster, notice the details and rest there for a bit. Then, go back to life.
Every time you catch yourself in negative idle mind, pivot as above. If you're like me, you have a few favorite scary voices that come to you and lend their doom and gloom again and again. Create a moment for each of them, or use the same moment.
I'd recommend using the same moment initially. Create one where there is pure joy, gratitude, power, and completeness for your life experience. Then, use it for all the idle mind scary chatter. As you move forward you can create more specific moments for specific nagging voices if they still bother you.

The Bottom Line

I'd love to say that our world will change and survival mind will relax. I'm not sure that's the case given our accelerated access to digital media from unknown and unvetted sources. Anybody can claim to be an expert on the digital divide, expound ridiculous and quite scary "facts," and scare the bejesus out of their audience. Or enrage them.

Then there's the fact that our world has changed. Not in a positive way for our minds or our emotional lives. Rage and anger, aggression and wars.

Which is why we need to learn how to shift our minds to manage our attention. Protecting our sanity and our personal truths from the onslaught of sensationalism designed to trigger us all.

There are so many techniques you can use. The ones I shared here are my personal methods. Especially Idle Mind Time. It's quite powerful and will help you shift your mind to stop the negative chatter and focus on what you want.

That alone will begin to shift your world.

Learn to Use Your Attention

If you'd like to learn more about the science behind your attention, download my short ebook, The Power of Attention.

It explains our minds in simple terms, giving you the insights you need to Pay Attention! Along with some powerful methods you can use at home to proactively tune your attention toward the life you want.

Just click here to request your download.