Recognising the signs that you have been in fight-or-flight for so long, you forgot how to live

The Morning I Realised I Had Forgotten How to Rest

I was 45 years old when I discovered I no longer knew how to do nothing.

It was a Saturday morning. My daughters were with friends. My husband was travelling. For the first time in months, I had no obligations, no deadlines, no one needing anything from me. I had been fantasising about this moment for weeks, imagining how I would luxuriate in the freedom, how I would finally relax.

Instead, I stood in my kitchen, coffee cup trembling in my hand, feeling like I was about to crawl out of my skin.

My chest was tight. My thoughts raced. My body screamed that something was desperately wrong, that I needed to fix something, do something, produce something. The silence of the empty house felt threatening rather than peaceful. The open hours ahead felt like a void that might swallow me whole.

I grabbed my phone and started scrolling. Then I remembered errands I could run. Then I began mentally composing work emails I could send on Monday. Then I started cleaning the kitchen that was already clean. Anything to fill the space, to quiet the anxiety, to return to the familiar state of constant doing that had become my only way of being.

That morning, I realised something devastating: I had been in survival mode for so long that survival mode had become my identity. I no longer knew who I was when I was not performing, producing, managing, fixing, or achieving. I had forgotten that human beings are supposed to experience joy, ease, pleasure, and genuine rest. I had become a machine designed for output, and the machine was breaking down.

This is what happens when survival mode becomes your identity. You lose access to the parts of yourself that make life worth living. You function, but you do not feel. You perform, but you do not experience. You exist, but you do not actually live.

The Neurobiology of Chronic Survival Mode

Your nervous system has three primary states, described by the polyvagal theory developed by Stephen Porges (2011):

Ventral Vagal: Safe and Social

This is your optimal state for connection, creativity, and wellbeing. When you are in ventral vagal activation, you feel grounded, open, curious, and capable of experiencing pleasure. Your body is relaxed. Your mind is clear. Your heart is open. This is the state where joy lives.

Sympathetic: Mobilised for Action

This is your fight-or-flight state, designed for responding to immediate threats. When you are in sympathetic activation, your heart rate increases, your breathing becomes shallow, your muscles tense, and your mind narrows its focus to survival. This state is meant to be temporary, activating only when real danger is present and deactivating once the threat passes.

Dorsal Vagal: Shutdown and Collapse

This is your freeze response, what happens when the threat is overwhelming and neither fight nor flight seems possible. In dorsal vagal shutdown, you feel numb, disconnected, and exhausted beyond what sleep can resolve. You go through the motions of life whilst feeling fundamentally absent from your own experience.

Here is what you need to understand: these states are supposed to be temporary responses to specific circumstances. You are supposed to move fluidly between them depending on what your environment requires, spending most of your time in a ventral vagal state where connection and joy are possible.

But chronic stress, unhealed trauma, and oppressive life circumstances can trap you in sympathetic activation or dorsal vagal shutdown for months, years, or even decades. When this happens, these survival states stop being responses to threat and become your baseline experience of reality (Dana, 2018).

This is chronic survival mode. This is when your nervous system forgets that safety exists.

The Five Signs Survival Mode Has Become Your Identity

Through my own healing and my work with clients, I have identified five primary signs that indicate survival mode has moved from temporary response to permanent identity. Recognising these patterns is the first step toward transformation.

Sign One: You Cannot Stop Moving

When survival mode becomes identity, stillness feels dangerous. Your body has learned that constant motion, constant productivity, constant doing is what keeps you safe. Rest feels like laziness. Pleasure feels like an indulgence you cannot afford. Simply being, without achievement or output, triggers overwhelming anxiety.

I see this in high achievers who cannot take holidays without bringing work. I see it in parents who fill every moment with tasks and cannot sit with their children without simultaneously doing something "productive." I see it in activists who burn themselves out because they have equated their worth with their output.

The underlying belief is always the same: if I stop moving, something terrible will happen. I will be abandoned, rejected, or eliminated. My value depends on what I produce.

People become addicted to doing, to constant activity, because stopping means they have to face themselves.
(Gabor Maté)

Sign Two: You Have Forgotten What Brings You Joy

When someone asks what you do for fun, you draw a blank. When you have free time, you feel lost rather than liberated. You can list your responsibilities easily, your obligations, your commitments. But you cannot remember what makes you feel alive.

This happens because survival mode narrows your focus to threat detection and response. Joy, creativity, playfulness, and curiosity are luxuries your nervous system believes you cannot afford when survival is at stake. These capacities shut down to preserve energy for what appears to be life-threatening circumstances.

I experienced this profoundly. For years, I could not name a single thing I enjoyed that was not connected to productivity or relationship maintenance. Reading felt wasteful unless I could justify it as professional development. Exercise only made sense if it improved my health metrics.

When survival mode becomes identity, joy becomes incomprehensible. You intellectually understand that people experience pleasure, but you cannot actually access that experience yourself.

Sign Three: Your Body Is Breaking Down

Early stress and early trauma also triggers inflammation in the body. It triggers inflammatory processes that are measurable in adulthood. Inflammation predisposes people to malignancy and autoimmune disease. So there are multiple mechanisms (Gabor Maté). Your body was not designed to maintain a high alert status indefinitely. The stress hormones that are life-saving in short bursts become toxic when continuously elevated.

By my early 40s, my body was screaming. Chronic back pain that no physiotherapist could resolve. Stomach issues that required medications but never actually healed. Sleep disturbances left me exhausted, no matter how many hours I spent in bed. Frequent illnesses as my immune system collapsed under the constant assault of stress hormones.

I explained these symptoms as normal consequences of busy life, of being a working mother, of managing multiple responsibilities. I never questioned whether the level of stress I was experiencing was actually sustainable or whether my body was trying to tell me something urgent.

Your body does not lie. When you are in chronic survival mode, your body knows, and it tells you through symptoms that escalate until you pay attention. The tragedy is that most of us have been taught to silence our bodies with medications, caffeine, alcohol, or sheer willpower rather than listening to what our bodies are desperately trying to communicate.

Sign Four: You Experience Emotions as Threats

When survival mode becomes identity, emotions feel dangerous. Sadness might overwhelm you. Anger might make you lose control. Fear might prove you are weak. Joy might make you vulnerable. So you shut down your emotional experience, moving through life in a narrow band of "fine" that prevents you from feeling much of anything.

Unfortunately, when people face stress or conflict, they often try to calm their body rather than settle it. When their body quakes or constricts or hurts, they don’t lean into that experience. Instead, they try to use meditation, or yoga, or a mantra, or MBSR, or a visualization to lean away from it. Rather than becoming present to their own pain or discomfort, they dissociate or move into a trance state. This process is sometimes called bypassing (or spiritual bypassing). If you have long experience with meditation, yoga, mantras, visualizations, or MBSR, you know that this is a misuse of these practices, which are designed to make bodies more present to whatever is happening, not less.(Resmaa Menakem)

I spent decades proud of my emotional control, my capacity to remain calm under pressure, my ability to set aside feelings and focus on practical solutions. I did not realise I was not actually regulating my emotions but dissociating from them, creating a barrier between my conscious awareness and my actual emotional experience that left me disconnected from my own inner life.

Sign Five: You Have Lost Your Sense of Purpose

When survival mode becomes identity, life narrows to getting through the day. You lose connection to why you are here, what matters to you beyond immediate survival, what you would choose if choice were actually available to you.

Purpose requires spaciousness to emerge. It requires the capacity to imagine beyond current circumstances, to feel into what your soul longs for, to envision what you might create or contribute. But survival mode eliminates spaciousness, keeping you trapped in reactive mode where you simply respond to whatever demands arise without ever asking whether this is how you actually want to spend your one precious life.

I worked in corporate environments for 17 years without ever questioning whether this was my calling or simply what felt safe. I maintained relationships that drained me because ending them felt more threatening than continuing them. I organised my entire life around avoiding discomfort rather than pursuing meaning.

When someone asked me what I really wanted, I had no answer. I had been surviving for so long that I had forgotten that wanting, desiring, longing for something beyond mere survival was even possible.

How Survival Mode Gets Locked In

Understanding how you become trapped in survival mode requires examining both the circumstances that activate it and the patterns that maintain it long after the original threat has passed.

Childhood Programming

For many people, survival mode begins in childhood. Perhaps you grew up in a home where emotional or physical safety was unpredictable. Perhaps you experienced poverty, violence, or neglect. Perhaps your parents were themselves in survival mode and passed their dysregulation to you.

Children's nervous systems develop through co-regulation with caregivers (Schore, 2015). When caregivers are regulated and present, children learn that safety is possible, that emotions can be felt and released, and that rest and play are natural parts of life. But when caregivers are dysregulated, children learn that the world is dangerous, that constant vigilance is necessary, that survival depends on managing others' emotional states.

These early patterns become your baseline. If you experienced chronic threat as a child, your nervous system may have never learned what safety feels like. Survival mode is not something that happened to you. Survival mode is the only state you have ever known.

Systematic Oppression

For people experiencing systematic oppression based on race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, or other marginalised identities, survival mode is not just personal history but ongoing reality. When you live in a society that consistently dehumanises people like you, that creates barriers to your safety and wellbeing, that threatens your existence through policy and violence, survival mode is a rational response to a genuine threat (Menakem, 2017).

As a Palestinian living in Europe, I experienced this acutely. The constant anti-Palestinian racism, the Islamophobia, the pressure to hide or minimise my identity to stay safe, the exhausting work of educating people about my own humanity, whilst they debated whether my people deserved to exist. This was not paranoia. This was an accurate threat assessment.

The challenge is that even when you develop awareness of these patterns and begin healing personally, the systemic conditions creating survival mode continue. This means healing must include both individual nervous system regulation and collective work to transform oppressive systems.

Work Cultures Designed for Extraction

Modern capitalist work cultures are explicitly designed to keep people in survival mode. When your income, healthcare, and basic security depend on meeting arbitrary productivity targets, when taking time off is punished rather than supported, when rest is treated as laziness rather than necessity, survival mode becomes the condition for employment (Frayne, 2015).

I worked for multinational corporations where employees worked through illness, answered emails at midnight, and who sacrificed family time for projects. These behaviours were not seen as problems to address but as virtues to emulate.

This creates entire workplaces of people in chronic survival mode, competing with each other for resources, whilst the systems extract their labour profit from their dysregulation.

Trauma Responses That Become Identities

The body adapts to stress and trauma to help you survive, but those adaptations later create emotional and physical difficulties.(Gabor Maté).

Hypervigilance keeps you safe when danger is present, but it exhausts you when you maintain it in safe circumstances. People pleasing protects you from conflict when conflict is dangerous, but it prevents authentic connection when a genuine relationship is possible. Emotional shutdown allows you to function during overwhelming circumstances, but it kills joy when joy would be available.

The tragedy is that these survival strategies often become core aspects of how you understand yourself. You are not someone experiencing hypervigilance. You are an anxious person. You are not someone who learned to people-please. You are someone who is naturally giving. The survival pattern becomes your identity, and letting it go feels like losing yourself.

The Palestinian Teaching on Sumud

Palestinians offer a profound teaching about maintaining humanity whilst living under conditions that demand survival mode. The Arabic concept of sumud (صمود) means steadfastness, the practice of remaining rooted in your values, dignity, and connection to what matters despite systematic attempts to eliminate you.

Sumud is not a denial of the threat. Palestinians face genuine, ongoing, life-threatening oppression. Israeli occupation, military violence, economic strangulation, and systematic dehumanisation create conditions where survival mode is a rational response to actual danger.

But sumud refuses to allow oppression to define your entire existence. Even under siege, Palestinian families gather for meals. Even under bombardment, Palestinian children play. Even facing genocide, Palestinian artists create beauty. This is not spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity. This is the revolutionary act of maintaining access to joy, connection, and meaning even whilst fighting for survival.

When I began working on my own healing, I initially thought the goal was to eliminate survival mode, to reach some permanently peaceful state where threats never existed. But my Palestinian heritage taught me differently.

The goal is not to never experience survival mode. The goal is to be able to access states beyond survival mode even when survival is genuinely threatened. The goal is to maintain your capacity for joy, connection, and purpose alongside your capacity for vigilance and response to threat.

This is what Palestinians have practised for 77 years. This is what every oppressed community throughout history has had to learn: how to hold both the reality of threat and the insistence on living fully, how to be in survival mode when necessary without allowing survival mode to consume your entire being.

The Practices That Create Freedom

Breaking free from survival mode when it has become your identity requires systematic practice of states your nervous system has forgotten or never learned. This is a patient process and compassionate work of teaching your body that safety is possible.

Practice One: Nervous System Regulation Through Somatic Work

You cannot think your way out of survival mode. Your nervous system must experience safety in your body before your mind can believe safety exists.

I use several practices daily to regulate my nervous system:

Grounding: Stand barefoot on earth. Feel the solid support beneath you. Notice five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can touch, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. This practice interrupts the threat detection loop and brings you into present moment awareness.

Voo Breathing: Inhale deeply through your nose. Exhale whilst making a "voo" sound, feeling the vibration in your chest and belly. This stimulates the vagus nerve, signalling to your body that you are safe enough to engage the parasympathetic nervous system responsible for rest and restoration (Rosenberg, 2017).

Resourcing: Identify places, people, memories, or sensations that help your body remember safety. Practice deliberately calling these resources to mind when you notice survival mode activating.

These practices work by giving your nervous system direct experience of safety through sensation rather than trying to convince yourself intellectually that you are safe.

Practice Two: Reclaiming Joy as Practice

When you have been in survival mode for years, joy does not return spontaneously. You must deliberately practice activities that create pleasurable sensations, even when they feel foreign or uncomfortable at first.

Make a list of activities that brought you joy before survival mode took over, or activities that sound pleasurable even if you cannot currently imagine enjoying them. Schedule these activities into your week like appointments you cannot cancel.

Initially, joy practices might feel mechanical or even anxiety-provoking. Your nervous system may interpret pleasure as dangerous because it requires letting down your guard. This is normal. Keep practising. Over time, your nervous system learns that joy does not make you vulnerable; it makes you more resilient.

My joy practices include walking in the forest and hugging trees, sitting in the kitchen on the sofa by the window while drinking my coffee and enjoying nature from the window (I learned that from my husband), and going on walks with my dad enjoying the sunshine.

These activities serve no productive purpose. They are not exercises improving my health or learning expanding my professional capacity. They are pure pleasure, and practising them regularly has been essential for teaching my nervous system that life can include experiences beyond survival.

Practice Three: Boundary Setting as Self-Compassion

Survival mode often develops because you did not have permission to set boundaries. Perhaps saying no was dangerous in your childhood. Perhaps your financial situation made boundary setting feel impossible. Perhaps your cultural conditioning taught you that your needs matter less than others' comfort.

Learning to set boundaries when survival mode has become identity requires recognising that boundaries are not selfish. Boundaries are how you protect your capacity to function sustainably rather than burning out.

Start with small boundaries in low-stakes situations. Say no to a social invitation you do not actually want to accept. Leave work at the designated time rather than staying late. Ask family members to handle tasks they are capable of managing rather than doing everything yourself.

Notice the anxiety that arises when you set boundaries. This anxiety is your nervous system signalling that boundary setting feels dangerous. Use your regulation practices to stay present with the discomfort rather than immediately backing down to relieve your anxiety.

Over time, setting boundaries becomes less terrifying as your nervous system learns that other people's disappointment will not actually kill you.

Practice Four: Therapeutic Support for Trauma Resolution

If survival mode developed through genuine trauma, you may need therapeutic support to heal the underlying wounds keeping you trapped in survival activation. This is not a weakness. This is acknowledging that some patterns are too deeply embedded to shift through self-help alone.

I work with modalities that address trauma through the body rather than just through talking like EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), NLP and visualisations.

These approaches work because they address trauma where it lives in your body and nervous system rather than only addressing the stories you tell about trauma. They allow you to discharge the survival activation that has been locked in your system for years or decades.

Practice Five: Community and Connection

You cannot heal survival mode in isolation. Your nervous system regulates through connections with other regulated nervous systems. You need a community that can hold you whilst you practice, states you have forgotten how to access alone (Porges, 2011).

This might look like therapy groups, peer support circles, activist communities committed to collective care, or simply friends who understand what you are working through and can witness your process without trying to fix you.

I gather with other Palestinians and Palestine allies doing similar work. We practice being present together, regulating our nervous systems collectively, and reminding each other that we are not alone in this transformation. This community witnessing is as essential as any individual practice.

The Question Your Soul Is Asking

Survival mode served you. It kept you alive through circumstances that could have destroyed you. It deserves your gratitude, not your judgment.

But survival mode that has become identity is killing the parts of you that make life worth living. Your capacity for joy. Your connection to purpose. Your ability to experience genuine intimacy. Your access to creativity and play.

Your soul is asking: Are you ready to live rather than just survive?

This question is not about whether your circumstances have improved. Palestinians are still facing genocide. Economic oppression continues. Systematic racism persists. The threats that created survival mode may still be present.

But the question remains: even with an ongoing threat, can you find moments of genuine aliveness? Can you practice states beyond survival even whilst maintaining vigilance when necessary? Can you refuse to allow oppression to eliminate every capacity for joy, meaning, and connection?

This is not easy. This requires tremendous courage because it means allowing yourself to be vulnerable in a world that has proven itself unsafe. It means practising regulation when your nervous system screams that letting down your guard is dangerous. It means choosing to live fully, even when living fully hurts more than numbing out.

But the alternative is spending your one precious life in a state designed only for temporary crisis, never experiencing the beauty, connection, and meaning available to you right now.

References

Dana, D. (2018). The polyvagal theory in therapy: Engaging the rhythm of regulation. W. W. Norton.

Frayne, D. (2015). The refusal of work: The theory and practice of resistance to work. Zed Books.

Maté, G. (2003). When the body says no: The cost of hidden stress. Wiley.

Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother's hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.

Rosenberg, S. (2017). Accessing the healing power of the vagus nerve: Self-help exercises for anxiety, depression, trauma, and autism. North Atlantic Books.

Schore, A. N. (2015). Affect regulation and the origin of the self: The neurobiology of emotional development. Routledge.