[00:00:00] Vesna: Welcome to the PIC Revival Podcast. My name is Vesta. Today I'm gonna talk about how to get out of survival mode and why it's important in order to have a better life. So being in survival mode is a term used to describe a part of the nervous system response. So we've got the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. So it's two divisions of the nervous system. And when we're in that sympathetic response, it's the stress response, also known as if you've been in there for a long time as being in survival mode.
And that can occur due to what's happening in our life and what's happening in our mind. So a lot of our thinking can. Trip us up into being into that stress response. So when we're in survival mode and when our system's in sympathetic dominance, our body is trying to survive a life threatening situation, which is what it thinks, right?
Something that it deems as being, dangerous or threatening to our life, and that trips up the fight or flight response and we start to have a reaction from that. So when we're in this response, we are not thriving, we're surviving. Okay? And so people can stay stuck here for a long time, for many years, not feeling real joy and excitement and pleasure in their life, but it can also make you sick.
So being in this high stress survival mode or sympathetic dominance, it leads to elevation in adrenaline and cortisol as stress hormones, but also changes other [00:02:00] hormones like progesterone, which is our natural anti-anxiety antidepressant. It also affects glucose and insulin, so we get more cravings, we get a rollercoaster of energy, we get belly fat, weight gain, and it leads to metabolic issues as well.
It also breaks down the gut. It breaks down liver detox pathway. It affects the thyroid so much because this survival mode hijacks the system. So when our bodies in this state, it doesn't think that digestion is important. It doesn't think that our reproductive system is important. So balancing our hormones, falling pregnant, digesting food, all of that stuff is not.
Important when we're in a life threatening situation. So as you can imagine, when we're in this survival mode, a lot of these important processes in the body are not happening. And so we start to get sick and our body starts to break down.
So it's kind of like the system is hijacked, right? It's hijacked just to do what's important to help you survive this life threatening situation. And like I said, we are mostly tripping up this sympathetic. Response or this survival mode through our day-to-day thinking. So what's happening in our head that noisy chatter, is often tripping up our fight or flight response.
So when we look at stress, like a little bit of stress is good. Okay. And I think, you know, even I talk about the negative effects of stress it tends to be what we focus on, but there is a positive side. So a little bit of pressure, a little bit of stress helps to enhance our performance, right? We get better brain power, better memory.
Better focus and learning. We get more fuel for energy and so much more. So a little bit of stress helps to prime our body for better levels of performance. So I was, you know, doing a workshop the other day and I said, you know, like when I run these things, if I don't feel a little bit of nerves, I don't have the energy that comes with it, right?
It's almost like my body is prepping for the event. And if sometimes I'm like, ah, I can't be bothered, I don't really feel like doing this, I'm not going to get the energy right? And so. A little bit of that stress, a little bit of that nervous energy, whatever you wanna call [00:04:00] it, helps to prime our body
for performance.
But as soon as we shift from moderate stress to kind of high levels of pressure and high stress, we get a lot of shift in our brain and in our hormones, and it moves us away from optimal performance and starts to drop our performance and productivity. So basically what we find is our brain power drops.
We don't have the mental clarity. We get really tunnel vision, so we can't decipher. What is important and what is irrelevant, and it's the worst time to make decisions. It's the worst time to make judgements because of that tunnel vision. And the stress hormone is really taking our prefrontal cortex offline.
This is our processing center, and so we move away from this optimal performance or prime for action, and we move towards avoidance. We move towards the freeze response. And this is more so if we've been in this stage for a long time. So when we look at stress, stress shifts our brain from, you know, the prefrontal cortex.
So this is the, in the frontal brain, we get executive functioning. We're rational, we're decisive. We know how to calm ourselves down. We know how to make decisions, we know what we need to do. But stress pushes us into the amygdala part of our brain. And this is where we get strong emotions. we don't have clarity about what's happening.
And the amygdala is there because it's designed to detect threats in our environment. Okay? so it's a very normal part of our human existence, but. We can often trip up the amygdala with our own thinking and with with our own worries, and keep us in a perpetual state of stress.
So when we think of the amygdala, and I talked about this in a previous episode, that the amygdala works to detect threats in our environment. And so if you are walking later at night down the street and your amygdala sees a shadow in the corner, it will already activate your defense responses and then.
What happens is the prefrontal cortex, you know, kind of scans and says, everything's all right. There's nothing to worry about here, [00:06:00] calm down. But when we're in higher states of stress, the prefrontal cortex is shut down, that rational part. And so we have the amygdala just yelling all day long. Okay. And just activating just more and more stress.
And with that, we really see a hormonal shift. Okay? We see our cortisol levels rising, which frees up energy, but it makes us more anxious, makes us more tense, and makes us less responsive.
So one of the things that I look at when I'm working with clients is they can be stuck in survival mode and everything's all about work and success and drive. And maybe it's about making more money, maybe it's about achieving more. And we tend to have our focus on the things that bring us some kind of satisfaction, but not really a lot of fulfillment.
And so when I work with clients, and even within my programs, I ask women to do a life balance assessment and. What it is, it's basically looking at all these different areas of your life to see where your focus is, where you are losing energy, where you are not focused at all. And one of the things that they notice is that as they're going through it, some women will notice, you know what, I have a lot of focus and I spend a lot of energy on my career or my business, or.
You know what I'm creating in my business, or I spend a lot of focus and energy on my children, or I spend a lot of focus on whatever it is, right? And so as they go through that, they really see the gaps, right? That their life is not balanced because every part of our life should be medicine. For us, it should be a sense of fulfillment.
We, you know, we obviously, we can get fulfillment in our work and in our families, but we want to look at, well, where are those areas of our life that. Are not fulfilling, that we're not getting any energy from, or we're not even spending any time thinking about it.
So a few of the areas that we talk about is looking at work. Is your work fulfilling or does it just pay the bills? can there be a way that it is fulfilling because it has to pay the bills? You know, there is a way at looking at your [00:08:00] work as being able to provide fulfillment as well. What is your purpose?
What are you here for? What do you feel called to do in this life? What do you feel like you are here for? What is the thing that you feel like you can bring to the world? Because a sense of purpose is probably the one of the most fulfilling things that we have in our life, and if we aren't focused on what we feel our purpose is, we are going to miss that level of fulfillment, which gives us a lot of drive and it gives us a lot of energy.
The other things that we look at is relationships, creativity, physical health, and mental health. So they're just some of the things, but we wanna look at everything. How much time are you spending in creativity? How are you looking after your physical health? What are you doing to look after your mental health?
A lot of this stuff we think would just happen as we go, but we're not putting any focus or energy towards it or putting any habits in place or taking any time to consider it. When women go through this assessment, it's quite a long one that I get them to do. But you could just do one now as I'm speaking to you.
Like, where is your focus on work? Where is your focus on purpose? Where is your focus on your relationship? What about your creativity, your physical health, your mental health? How much time are you spending, looking after those areas? Right? And so what I find is that women spend about two hours going through this and it's.
Really important exercise because they walk away from it and go, wow, it's, my life is really unbalanced. Okay? I am really focused 80% in one area and maybe 20% spread across the others, and therefore it doesn't add the joy to life. It doesn't bring the medicine that we can get from all of those things in our life, and it doesn't bring fulfillment.
So, as you've listened to this, I want you to let me know in the comments below what has kind of popped up for you. Where do you really spend a lot of your time and focus and energy and what's lacking? What's the first thing that popped into your mind? What's really lacking? Because it's gonna be important for you to identify.
Let me know in the comments below. [00:10:00]
