Things to expect while leaving survival mode

Often life throws us challenges and we keep dodging them, till we cannot – so we start to get affected by it. Slowly it creeps inside us and changes us, making us seek the survival mode to be in. We start being in the fight or flight mode where we fail to understand the changes that we are undergoing. And when we finally do, we have changed significantly - “It doesn’t make sense at first, until one day you look in the mirror and there’s a completely different person looking back at you,” wrote Psychologist Nicole LePera as she explained the way survival mode can change us and put ourselves in autopilot.

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However, it is not impossible to leave the survival mode and embrace life all over again. “Waking up is painful. It sucks to feel like you’re the only one who can see the dysfunction or the only one who wants deeper connections or more meaning in life,” Nicole further explained. The expert shared the things that we must expect when we are leaving the survival mode:

Reasons: From over exhaustion due to work to the trauma faced by us, we enter survival mode due to a variety of reasons. And it slowly makes us live life in autopilot mode.

Rock bottom: Rock bottom is inevitable. By the time we realise that we are in survival mode, we start to sink in further and hit rock bottom. And that is when we start to leave survival mode.

Wakeup call: The wakeup call happens then when we start to get clarity on the way we are living all this time, the relationships we have, the people that surround us and the way our childhood and adulthood impacted our mental health.

Overwhelming: This feeling of surge of honest emotions coming together all at once can be extremely overwhelming at first.

Self-care: The next step is to embrace ourselves and find joy in being ourselves. Initiating self-care and self-love helps in getting through the journey.

Confidence: This helps us to build our confidence and the trust we have in ourselves. We no longer want to fit into stereotypes set by society. Instead, we start to search for our true selves.

Choices: We stop being pleasing people. Instead, we learn to value ourselves and our choices before anyone else.