Season 2, Episode 6: Transitioning from Survival Mode

What happens when a person becomes so good at surviving… that they forget what it feels like to truly feel alive?

In this episode, we talk about the hidden emotional cost of survival mode — and why so many high-functioning adults secretly feel disconnected from themselves even while appearing successful on the outside.

This is not a conversation about “fixing yourself.”

It’s about understanding:

•  how survival patterns become identity, 
•  why high achievers often feel emotionally numb, 
•  the exhaustion of constant functioning, 
•  emotional suppression, 
•  performance-based self-worth, 
•  and how people slowly begin reconnecting with themselves again. 

We explore the difference between:
 surviving life…
 and actually inhabiting your life.

If you’ve been feeling emotionally flat, disconnected, burned out, or like you’ve lost touch with yourself underneath years of responsibility, this episode is for you.

Because losing connection to yourself is not the same thing as losing yourself permanently.

✨ Becoming Irresistible is designed to help people reconnect to their confidence, identity, emotional presence, purpose, communication, magnetism, and deeper self-awareness in a world that constantly pulls people away from themselves.

#SurvivalMode #Burnout #EmotionalHealing #SelfAwareness #PersonalGrowth #MentalWellness #EmotionalIntelligence #HealingJourney #Purpose #Confidence #Identity #BecomingIrresistible #Podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Welcome back to Becoming Irresistible. And I've still got construction going on outside. So if you hear something, I apologize. But I'm glad you've joined us back. I'm your host, Jay. I'm a high achievement lifestyle strategist and irresistibility expert. Now, today I want to talk to you about how to reconnect with yourself if you've been in survival mode, which a lot of people are, for a long time. And I think it's one of the saddest things that can happen to a person is that they get so good at just surviving their days that they forget what it means, or they maybe they've never known what it means to feel really alive. And I don't mean alive physically, of course, I mean alive emotionally and creatively and spiritually. Alive in the sense where you're connected to your own life. And we talked a little bit about the inner signal on the last podcast, which I believe is so valuable. Uh, but today I want to talk about transitioning from survival to being truly alive. I think a lot of people are just walking around functioning extremely well. They wake up and handle things, they take care of the messages and the people in their life, and then they work, they show up to work and they do their job, they solve the problems, they get things done, and then they go home. And on the outside, nobody would think anything is particularly wrong because they look responsible and capable, and they're maybe even successful, you know. But inside, inside, something feels off, distant, and they feel like they're in their body, but they're not fully there. Have you ever felt that way? Confession, I have felt that way. I was on the outside appearing very successful and having everything that supposedly should make one happy. And everyone saw me that way. And on the outside, I told myself I was that way. I'm had that feeling of I'm missing something. Have you ever the feeling that something is missing, but you just don't know what? And it's because often people are living their life, but they're not really inhabiting their true authentic self. And I think this happens a lot more than people want to admit. And this is why I started this podcast for parents of young adults, because I think it's really important to get these concepts at a young age. You know, getting it at any age is amazing, but getting it at a young age keeps people from going down this path where they're extremely disconnected from their true authentic self. It's always going to happen in life. There are times where you feel a little disconnected. But I I mean, keeping people from going so far off that track that they just don't know where they are. They're just completely lost. And it's not because kids or adults even are weak. It's not because they're failures, it's not because they don't have the potential to do it. It's because sometimes when you're living that way, you go into the survival mode. And the survival mode, it becomes your whole identity. At first, you do it because you're just trying to get through something. You're just trying to tolerate the stress or get through family issues or get through some dynamic of instability. And sometimes you're just trying to get through other people's expectations so you can get to your own. And then it becomes years of having all of that on your shoulders. You get trapped into that survival identity, and you never get to that place of, okay, once this is over, I'm gonna do this. And that's where the disconnection starts to become bigger and bigger. There's a difference between just getting through life and being deeply connected to your life, and that's what I'm talking about today. How people lose connection to themselves after staying in that mode for so long. And then how to get back. Most people don't actually need this huge transformation to become something or someone completely different. I think most people need to reconnect with parts of themselves that the survival, the survival mode, forced them to ignore. Now, it sounds easy when I say it like that, but it can be very hard if you've been in that mode for so long. I think our current culture and society praises functionality so much that sometimes we miss what it can cost a person. We praise the person who handles everything without complaining, right? The one who never falls apart, the one who can be counted on and takes care of everything, who keeps going, who doesn't ask for anything, the person who stays composed and who gets things done. Who does that sound like? Doesn't that sound like our young high achievers? And sometimes those people are really strong, but sometimes they are actually disappearing emotionally, internally, and nobody notices because they're doing everything we think they should be doing, and that we think only strong people can handle. And we think that they are strong because they are that way, and it's hard to accept that, but it's true. Sometimes people become so good at just functioning that nobody realizes the true cost of what's happening inside them, and the functioning becomes really normal. Here's a little statistic for you that there's an estimated 400 physicians who die by suicide every year in the US and the risk of suicide is about 400% higher in women physicians than the male population. And are you surprised by that? Because these are smart people, smart people who have gone through tough circumstances, who have dealt with lots of responsibility, who have needed to be strong, resilient, adaptable, who need to say all the right things to make the grades, so they can get through medical school something that's supposedly really, really tough and that many people can't do. And yet they get to a point where they're not able to exist in their own life. It's a troubling thought. What it shows is that often high-functioning people can get through a lot. High high-functioning people are often in survival mode, even when it seems like they can handle a lot. They're just surviving. Sometimes they don't even realize it themselves that this is happening. They just wake up one day and they are in the knowledge that they're disconnected from themselves. That sense of hopelessness because their life is not what they know it needs to be. That's that inner signal that's saying, hey, what happened here? Sometimes it happens because people stop asking you what you want. You're already on this well-defined path. You know, this the same example of becoming a physician. Like, is there anything else you want? How many times have you asked a physician friend, hey, what are your dreams in life? What are your goals? Not many people ask that. You and the people around you might stop noticing what actually energizes you. You stop expecting to be happy. In fact, you start expecting your days to be stressful and overloaded and overwhelmed, and you stop making room for new experiences and curiosity. You don't expect to be surprised by anything, and you don't follow a pull towards anything that might bring you joy, because that is not normal to feel joy. So everything becomes maintenance, it just becomes routine, keep the house going, keep the kids comfortable, keep the job going, keep your relationship the same. Keep yourself the same, keep your image the same. And after a while, it becomes one long act of maintenance. And that's not the same thing as being alive. And I think this is the important thing to understand that some people just are not living from alignment, they're living from adaptation and survival still. They became who they needed to become. I don't want to blame anyone who's doing that because maybe at one point that was actually necessary. Maybe you had to become responsible. There's a cycle, I talk about this in my programs. There's a cycle of survival and moving from that to intentional learning and knowledge, and then moving from that into choice and purposeful design, and then moving from that to mastery and teaching. And so if you are in the survival stage, at that point in time, it might have been necessary. So you shouldn't blame yourself. And nobody, definitely not me, is going to be someone for being in that mode. But if you're not in the place where you have to do that anymore and you're still acting the same, then maybe it's time to move out of that phase. Maybe you did have to be the one who was emotionally aware and be the peacemaker. Maybe you were the one that had to become the achiever to change your circumstances. Maybe you're the person who didn't cause problems because your environment was so full of people who were problematic. Maybe you had to become the dependable one because that was the only thing that was going to get you and the people you cared about through. And maybe those adaptations have helped you to get to where you are today. But it can't become your whole identity when you're no longer in that same environment. And this you will see over and over again. The easy child who never asks for anything will become the adult who never asks for help. The responsible child becomes an adult who never rests and then burns out. The high achiever becomes the adult who only feels valuable when they can give or produce something, when they can provide value to other people around them. Instead of just feeling valuable existing in this world as who they are, or the child who never expressed himself out of trying to keep the peace or stability in their environment, but then can't express emotion, can't express desire, anger, grief, or even joy when they're adults, and limits their ability to be in a fulfilling relationship. Of course, people feel disconnected from themselves because they've spent years being what that situation required, but it wasn't actually maybe who they were underneath. And that's something that you really have to understand is two different realities. And I want to go into a little bit about why this can happen. When you're in survival mode, curiosity feels like a risk you cannot take. At that point in time, you're looking for sure footing, you're looking for the place where you won't fall. And curiosity, you need to be able to fall, but knowing that you have a soft cushion beneath you, and when you don't have support, sometimes in terms of resources or family or or in terms of your environment, you don't believe you can take that fall without critical damage. So play feels like a luxury that you don't deserve to have. Creativity feels like a luxury you're not allowed to have. Resting feels like a luxury that you shouldn't partake in. Desire feels like a luxury only reserved for other people. And self-exploration feels like a luxury that you don't have time for. Survival says handle what's in front of you and get through today. Don't rock the boat, don't make anything worse. Just keep going with what you know is going to work and get you through today. And that can be necessary many times for a certain point in your life. And those are the seasons where you really just do have to get through. And I've almost never heard a person who's been successful say, Oh, I was always successful through my whole life. There was always a point at which they were struggling, where they were, you know, almost in debt or had a terrible relationship or bad support in their life. There's almost nobody on the planet who has not a single struggle in their life. And so almost all of us experience a season like this where we really do have to just survive. But it's when that season becomes your entire life that you start to slowly disconnect and slowly what I call experience an emotional death. You stop wondering, stop reaching, or feeling excited about life, you stop experimenting, and that takes away all the joy of living. Survival is all about reducing risk. And aliveness requires a little bit of curiosity and risk. And that's why people who are transitioning from that phase of survival feel really strange. Because they may be stable, but they don't know how to handle that stability. They don't know what to do with it. They don't know if they're allowed to have these feelings of curiosity, of joy, of excitement, of taking a little bit of risk and knowing it's okay if they fail. Because their nervous system is so tuned into surviving. Oftentimes these people don't know how to receive. Remember, life isn't just about giving, it's about receiving as well. They don't know how to expand. They learn to contract and make themselves small so they can brace for impact and not get hurt or avoid getting hurt because they're a smaller target. They don't know how to expand themselves and be resilient enough to take a hit from outside. Because before the hits would have killed them. Now a hit should be something that just bounces off of them. But they learned that and they just don't know how it feels to be truly alive. So I believe that survival mode has this emotional cost that a lot of people underestimate. And only that person who's going through it will feel once it's gone. They may not even realize the cost at the time that they're in it. But once it's gone, they realize what a big cost they were paying all that time. Sometimes it makes them numb. Sometimes it makes them irritable. Sometimes it makes them feel bored. Sometimes it doesn't allow them to relax. Sometimes it's the constant addictions or stimulation that they're they're going through. Sometimes it's achieving things and not being satisfied with any of those achievements. And often what I think happens with a lot of pie achievers is they do build their lives. It's not this dramatic breakdown that they have. They build their lives, they meet their goals, and they become externally successful. But when they get there, they just don't feel the way they know they should. And then they judge themselves or they feel badly or they feel depressed and they try to numb that feeling with other things. They think, why am I not happy? Why isn't this enough? Why am I empty? Why can't I be grateful? Why can't I just enjoy my life? Maybe the whole issue is they're just disconnected and they've spent so long surviving that they've lost the ability to feel deeply connected to what they were actually supposed to be building. And it's not their fault. It's not a failure. This is just information to understand. I know all about people who look fine on the outside. I've seen so many of them. Because when you're good at just functioning survival, you can hide a lot. People can smile at you when you ask them, hey, how are you? And you say, I'm fine. And how many times underneath that fine is, I don't know, I'm gonna pay my bills next month? Or I don't know if I'm gonna get divorced, or I'm worried that my child's gonna fail this grade, or I think something's wrong in my body and I just don't know what. Or I have a parent who's sick, or a brother or a sister who's not well, but all the while they're answering an email or taking a call and saying they're fine because they don't ask for anything, they don't ask for help. They believe that their own needs are sometimes inconvenient and frivolous, and the world doesn't reward them when they talk about their own needs, only when they address the needs of other people or when they satisfy the approval of other people. So I want to stress that if you're out there and you're listening to this and you feel really disconnected from yourself, remember you're not broken. You maybe you've adapted to survive, and you became really practical. Being truly alive, dreaming, taking risks felt unsafe. And you became productive because resting or taking time for yourself made you feel guilty. Being agreeable and not standing up for what you really believe in felt safer than creating tension in your environment. You became strong because no one else around you was strong for you or gave you the permission to be anything less than strong. Maybe you became a high achiever because that was the only place where you felt you had any control. And now maybe you're listening and it's years later, and you're realizing that that version of you that helped you to survive is not all of you. Or maybe you are a high achiever right now and you're not listening to your own inner signal, and you're listening to the voices of everyone around you. Maybe you're realizing you're not on the path. It's amazing how even a person who's very young can sometimes register that something is off, even if they can't articulate what it is exactly. And that realization can be scary, but it's also the beginning of going back toward the path that your inner single wants you to be on. Just because you've lost connection to yourself doesn't mean that it is permanent. I think parts of us can go quiet, parts of us can feel the gap between where we are and where we need to be or should be, but that doesn't mean that it has to remain that way. And some people think, okay, it's like in the movies when you make the realization it's going to be this huge, dramatic transformation. Like now, suddenly you're gonna jump back on the right path. You're gonna know exactly who you are and what you're supposed to do, but it doesn't always work like that either. Sometimes it's quiet moments, reconnecting with yourself, listening to your inner signal, and making small steps towards your path. Sometimes it's admitting to yourself, I really just don't like doing this anymore. Or I don't want to do this anymore. This is not aligned with who I am anymore. It's saying I'm exhausted and I need to rest. It's saying I miss doing this activity or creating or dancing or connecting with this friend, and you need time to do that. Sometimes it's saying, I'm not going to care so much what other people think. I'm going to care what my own inner signal is telling me. Those are not big dramatic things, but they are the things that will influence your day-to-day decisions. And it's a series of those day-to-day decisions which will take you back to the path that your inner signal wants you to go down, is trying to guide you towards. I love when people decide. I've heard on multiple occasions that every time someone became truly successful or changed their life entirely, it's because it started with a decision. And I love the phrase of re entering yourself as the decision that people make when they want to change from survival mode into living a Life where they're truly alive because that's what it feels like to me. Not that you have to become this brand new person or change your whole identity. The problem is that we've always been trying to be someone different than who we are. So it's not about changing your identity. It's not forcing yourself into some kind of self-improvement overhaul, but more about re-entering yourself, coming back into connection with what feels true, coming back into contact with what makes you feel alive, coming back into parts of yourself that have gotten buried during your times of survival. That can be something that starts very simply. You start to notice the things that drain you. It's just being honest with yourself. I don't know why, but I don't like that. You don't have to know why. You just have to say, I don't like that. You notice the things that energize you. And again, you don't have to know why they energize you. Being around horses energizes me. There doesn't have to be a reason. It just has to be a statement aligned with the truth. You can notice the things that keep coming to your attention that you keep doing without anyone forcing you to do. You can notice sometimes the things that you might be envying, even because sometimes envy is pointing to a desire that you have not allowed yourself to have or admit that is important to you. You don't have to justify why you want something. In fact, it's just again a statement of what is aligned to your truth. Notice the qualities that make you the most honest version of yourself and stop just dismissing them because it's not that it's nothing. Those might be the very things, the breadcrumbs that you need to follow to go down the path that your inner signal is trying to guide you towards. Now there's something that I call the dead energy test, and it's pretty simple. Pay attention to the things that make you feel really dead inside. And then pay attention to the things that give you life. Not everything that drains you is necessarily wrong, because responsibilities definitely drain people sometimes. And hard work even drains people sometimes, even when sometimes they're doing something they love doing. Important things can be very difficult. So not every uncomfortable thing is misalignment. But chronic deadness matters. When something repeatedly leaves you feeling less alive, pay attention. If an environment is constantly making you shrink, pay attention. And if certain people constantly make you feel like you have to perform or be someone you're not, or disappear, or hide, then pay attention to those things. And especially for you high achievers, if a path looks good on the outside, but leaves you feeling drained every day on the inside, pay attention to that. Because that energy is not meaningless. That energy is part of your inner signal. It contains information for you that will help guide you. And survival mode often teaches people to ignore that kind of information. But reconnecting with yourself teaches you to listen to it. Now, there's something else I want to talk about, and that is starting over. Reconnecting with yourself often means you have to become a beginner again. And that can feel really humiliating for people who are used to being called brilliant, smart, or competent. And that includes most of you high achievers out there. So if you've spent years being responsible, being successful, being capable, being the person who handles everything, trying something new and going back to the beginning can feel very threatening because now you might actually have to be bad at something. You might have to acknowledge that maybe you weren't doing things the right way from the beginning. You might not know what you're actually doing, and you might feel foolish for trying something that you don't know how to do. And you might not get an immediate reward like you might be used to at this point in your life. That can be very hard for people who are safe and competent. But to be truly alive, you need beginner energy. That energy of, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm willing to learn. I'm willing to take a risk. I don't know where this is leading, but I'm willing to take the next step. Curiosity requires that you don't know something. And being creative requires not being perfect all the time. And reconnecting requires carrying out an experiment. And you can't experiment if you're only after sure success. Now, a lot of people think that perfection comes with planning. And a lot of you have heard that quote from Abraham Lincoln that says, if you give me six hours to chop down a tree, I will spend the first four hours sharpening the axe, which a lot of people take as planning. You know, plan well before you actually carry out an action, right? But notice that sharpening the ax is also an action. And so what I want to emphasize is that a lot of times high achievers spend a lot of time planning, and planning is important. Planning itself can be an action, but planning endlessly is not going to get you the results and take you further down your path. So, yes, plan and incorporate planning as part of the action that you're going to take. But if you want to mastery and perfection, that comes from a constant stream of action. You don't always know what you love or what you should be doing by just thinking about it. Sometimes you will realize that by doing. So you take the next step. You try the class, you write the one page, you take a walk, you have a conversation with someone, you go to a place, you try to make the thing, and you see what happens inside you. And each of those little decisions, each of those little actions, like sharpening the X a thousand times, is what takes you to the place where you're well defined, where you know where you should be, where you're sharp enough to make the real decisions, the big decisions. And you learn not from just theory, but from actual contact, from actual movement. It's important because survival mode keeps people oftentimes in paralysis. They don't want anything to change, and so they're less inclined to take any sort of action which will change their current circumstances. They will overthink, they will plan, they will research, they will wait till things feel extremely certain. And I am guilty of this as well. Remember, all of these things are things that I faced in my own life, so I know where you are. I have been guilty of over planning, overthinking, sometimes thinking about consequences that have not happened to me. And I had one of my mentors tell me one time, she's like, Why are you thinking about that now? Has that happened to you? I said, no. She's like, well, let's worry about that when you get there. When you have that problem facing you, we'll face that consequence, we'll face that decision. But you need to get to that place first. Instead of worrying about consequences that are years away, worry about the next decision that's in front of you. Think about the consequences that you have to face now. Don't overthink, don't overplan. Do your research, do your planning, but don't let it stop you from the true action. You don't always have to be certain in order to take the next step. Because life is not going to always hand you certainty. And sometimes, in order to get those big goals, you have to be willing to participate enough to discover what's truth for you. In fact, it's the people who are willing to move in spite of not knowing, that are the ones that usually go down the path of success. They're willing to learn what is right from what is wrong. They are willing to learn where the mistakes lie, where the failures lie, willing to move forward in spite of those fears. I think taking the first step into that aliveness becomes its own form of guidance. It's not the only form, but it's an important one. Because as you are taking those steps, you become more attentive to what makes you feel present, to what makes you feel alive, to what makes you kind, what makes you angry, what makes you creative, what dulls your senses, what makes you more open, what makes you more honest, and what tends to turn you into the version of yourself that you don't want to be. So pay attention to the things that make you return to who you are, to what puts you back on that path of your inner signal. Sometimes the path is not found by asking what is my purpose in life? Because sometimes that's too big. Sometimes the question is, what just makes me feel alive right now? Smaller questions, smaller steps, but more accessible to you, easier to answer. And if you follow that step by step, it's going to take you back to that path. So if you're a person out there listening and you've spent years in survival mode, know this, you're not the only one. And don't be embarrassed if you're a high-functioning person who has spent years in survival and you're not able to grasp how you can be so high-functioning, how you can be intelligent and still be in a survival mode. Believe me, I've been there. If you've been functioning, adapting, performing, and maintaining for everyone except yourself. I want you to hear this. You're not broken, you're just disconnected. You've been surviving for so long that your survival became louder than your inner signal. And that doesn't mean that your inner signal is gone. It doesn't mean that your curiosity is dead. Doesn't mean your creativity is has vanished. It doesn't mean that your deeper self is lost. It means those parts of you are waiting for you. Waiting for you to say it's safe, for you to give enough quiet and enough acceptance of the truth and enough room for the voice to speak again. Your work now is not to overhaul yourself and become someone completely different. What you need to do is return to yourself, to notice, to listen intently, to experiment with true curiosity, to protect the places where you do feel joy and aliveness, and to stop dismissing all these signals as just random or frivolous. You were not made just to survive. That is the adaptation that you undertook to get to where you are. But now you need to welcome back the version of yourself that doesn't need to be pressured or forced just to exist. If you are resonating with this and you feel like this message might help someone you know, someone who's been staying strong, but feels like something is missing, then share it with them. Let them know that you're supporting them on their path back to who they are authentically, on their path to find their inner signal again. I'm so excited for those of you who will make the decision today to return to yourself and to try to listen to your inner signal. I hope you're enjoying this podcast. I'd love to hear what else you need to know about. So please comment or send us messages about topics that you want to know, about the questions that are burning inside you that you're afraid to ask. Please send us those. Please send us the questions about becoming your irresistible self and living your irresistible life. I love doing this because it was the thing that was missing from my life. And so creating this content for you helps me feel connected with my inner self. We'll see you back next week. Until then, stay irresistible, friends. Have a wonderful week of reconnecting with yourself.