On Survival Mode

By some miracle, I feel inspired to write a lil something at 1:30 pm rather than the usual 1:30 am, and in the spirit of trying to procrastinate less, I’ll share right now. Like many others, I have felt very sluggish over the past year. It’s almost as if adding more items to my to-do list makes me drag my feet more in response, and day after day, I find myself merely doing the bare minimum to survive. However, this action (or rather inaction) is not without consequence- at some point during the day, I feel myself slowly begin to grow more miserable and hopeless in knowing that by merely surviving, I am impairing my current and future prospects of truly thriving.

While I have never personally been a fan of the adage “You are what you eat,” I will admit that the saying holds truth, particularly in the age of consumerism, where almost every action we partake in is an act of consumption in one form or another. We are not only taking in food, water, and air, but also many forms of media whether it be ads, news, photos, videos, blog posts, or the latest status update about our best friend’s neighbor’s son’s dog. By being constantly bombarded by something almost all of the time, it’s almost as if we are forced to sit at a table and stuff our faces without having the luxury of taking that important moment to pause and have the realization of “oh sh*t- I’m really full, I should probably stop eating and unbutton my pants.”

Now, anyone who has been even half-awake over the past year has probably noticed the absurd amount of deep-seated issues, notably but certainly not limited to our lack of preparedness for a global pandemic, that have been unearthed over the past year, and that our day-to-day lives have significantly changed. Your commute to work? Forget it. Jumping over people’s legs to sit in the only empty seat in a crowded lecture hall? Forget that too. Your job? Yup, maybe even take that one off the list.

Given this sudden and rapid shift in the landscape of the world and everyday life, it inevitably makes sense that a lot of us are therefore doing the bare minimum we need to do in order to survive every day. Evolutionarily, we are mechanistically wired to activate “survival mode” whenever we are in danger or being threatened in some way, meaning abandoning whatever makes us thrive in order to solely focus on surviving. While the impending threat of a mountain lion or some other predator attacking us in our sleep no longer poses a huge risk to most of us, the act of consuming copious amounts of negative stimuli such as a new and somehow more awful headline engages our neurological system in a similar way that the stress of an impending mountain lion attack would. Naturally, it makes sense for us to abandon the things that help us thrive if it means we have a shot at survival.

From a biologic perspective (for anyone interested), the introduction of new and significantly stressful stimuli in our environment results in physical changes in the structure of our brains (cool, I know). Normally, we rely heavily on a portion of our brain called the frontal lobe for complex thinking and higher cognitive functions; however, under stressful conditions, there is evidence that our brains undergo a remodeling process that favors the increased activation of the comparatively older and less complex limbic system- enabling us to rely more heavily on the parts of our brain needed for survival. As a result, our reliance on the frontal lobe (higher cognitive center) is reduced, having significant impacts on our ability to engage in comparatively “higher-level” activities such as complex thinking.

Remembering this small fact has definitely helped me be a little more forgiving with myself for my level of inaction lately. While I do realize that we’re all really just doing our best, I couldn’t help but notice that some people have used this past year or so to invest in themselves so that one day they can (or even already are) thriving, and have wished that I was able to do that countless times. Note: I do not condone comparing yourself to others ever- we all have uniquely different circumstances and struggles in our lives that shape how we get to where we’re going; I find that focussing on my own journey and what I could be doing to make my life easier and make myself better than I was yesterday as a much more productive use of time and brain space.

After carefully analyzing just how differently some of us are doing, I concluded that the magic answer that I have been searching for lies in adaptation, and that some of us are just faster at adapting than others. While we’re all unique and shaped by a different myriad of factors, adaptation is a skill that we each intrinsically possess. I believe that adaptation arrives in the form of acceptance- accepting that the world is a crazy place and sometimes there isn’t too much we can do about it, accepting that sometimes we really just need to do our best to merely survive right now, and accepting that we are resilient and programmed to learn to adapt following years of evolutionary fine-tuning.

With that, thank you for reading if you’ve managed to get to the end. I hope that wherever you are, you are doing well and on the road to thriving one day, even if that means surviving today.