Hi friends it's Sarah May and this is an episode about survival mode.

So it's for anybody that has been in that kind of anxious, panicky place,

just feeling like just overwhelming sense of danger or threat or

imminent doom and that's based on past traumas or maybe recent ones.

So this is for Heather, and I hope this helps even the tiniest bit,

and thank you for writing to me a really good topic.

So you guys might be able to tell I have a little bronchial action going on. I have like

the remnants of some sort of sickness and so I sound

very devoiced and mature. So apologies if it sounds not soothing in any way. So survival mode is kind of the term that we are going to give a pervasive sense of fear and stress and anxiety over issues that are basically not really threats, though they are experienced in very vivid form in your mind in the form of

constant brain chattery hypotheticals. So basically obsessive thinking about painful,

dangerous, worrisome things, things past, things to come, things that probably won't ever possibly come just analyzing, solving

endlessly. In other words, it's just like the worst version of brain overdrive

that you can imagine and it's all the time and it's so powerful that it takes over your life it takes over your reality.

So this survival mode is kind of like living in the worst version of reality and that's because it's it's

removing you from all that is good and keeping you stuck mentally in all that is to be feared and it can come in

varying degrees so you might have anything from the intolerable writhing in

panic type of survival mode or you might have

manageable but still potent survival mode but regardless it's always something that

will keep you outside of your life experience and

unable to truly enjoy and witness the life that is actually happening. You are removed from the actual

truth of your experience because when you live in survival mode you are you're perceiving your thoughts. You're only living in your thoughts and like just

the damage that has been done to your thoughts and like the way your brain works.

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