Let’s talk about survival mode, trauma and resources we all need
/In the last two months, you (or someone you know) have been flung into “survival mode.”
When we think about survival mode, it’s easy to assume that it only applies to poor villagers in a remote part of third-world countries where food and water are hard to come by. This is the ultimate survival mode—where everyday men, women and children live hour by hour, at the mercy of a miracle to provide for their basic necessities.
With this image in our minds, it’s easy to assume that westerners in a wealthy country like America could never experience something similar.
Survival mode isn’t straightforward
But survival mode is more complex: it is both real and also relative to your individual situation. A more inclusive picture of survival mode is one where we do a few things:
1. We acknowledge that our needs and daily habits are part of what sustain us and create inner security.
2. We are all creatures of habit, and we’re innately designed to seek out what brings us our basic necessities, like food and shelter, but also those necessities that help us find our place in the world.
We’re more in touch with who we are and what we need
As a society, we’re growing in our understanding about how we function at an individual level.
It’d be surprising if you weren’t at least somewhat aware of whether or not you’re introverted or extroverted, what your Myers Briggs personality type is or where you fall inside the Enneagram. The insights these tools provide can’t be understated—they empower us to know ourselves and to relate more compassionately to others.
Everything about your life dictates how much (or how little) you feel at peace in your daily routines and relationships.
What happens when a pandemic shows up
So what happens when all of that is stripped away, seemingly overnight?
What happens when something like a global pandemic shows up and your access to basic necessities, as well as nourishing relationships, is completely upended?
Well, you enter survival mode.
When we’re exposed to prolonged levels of survival mode—like the last few months of responding to COVID-19—this also creates a breeding ground for trauma to lodge itself into the body. When we experience something traumatic, there are unending ways that our human body and mind attempt to keep us safe.
Oftentimes, we start by zeroing in on the baseline of security we need, like shelter, food and access to medical care. If our access to that is impeded, our body naturally kicks into gear to help us find resources. We may even experience heightened anxiety around things completely unrelated to finding those basic necessities.
Essentially, when our basic securities and safety nets are threatened, this causes problems. It is challenging, if not impossible, to re-focus and tap into our inner resiliency.
At an individual level, it’s important that we all look to see how we have experienced survival mode and even come in contact with trauma.
Think about the healthcare professionals who have been functioning day in and day out with heightened levels of survival mode: hot, sticky PPE they have to re-use regularly; wearing gloves that prevent them from having skin-to-skin contact (not even a high-five from a colleague); working with patients who could potentially infect them and their loves ones, no matter how careful they may be or how often they wash their hands.
This is traumatic. There is no natural reprieve from the everyday hardships, such as knowing a patient may not make it. With the high death rates from Coronavirus, our healthcare community is bearing witness to a staggering number of tortured patients who are often losing their lives despite everyone’s best efforts to heal them.
If you are a mother who’s been home with her children, survival mode has shown up to you, too. Caring for young children, especially, is tiring and trying. Without easy access to play dates or a little backup from aunts, uncles or grandparents, the resources you’re used to relying on have been stripped away. And this is traumatic. Parents shifting to work from home, while also caring for their children, making every meal, keeping the house clean—the list goes on and on.
No one has escaped Coronavirus untouched by survival mode.
How do we care for ourselves in survival mode?
Since each person in the world has been flung into some form of survival mode, how we care for ourselves will look different. It’s been so encouraging how survival mode has actually created opportunities to creatively connect. If you’re reading this, it’s likely you’ve now acquainted yourself with Zoom or some other video-streaming service that lets you see people you love. You’ve probably had virtual Happy Hours, listened to celebrities reading books—these are all signs of our inner resiliency and ingenuity when hard times show up.
One of the most basic and powerful things we can do is to engage our senses. Yes, the five senses like tasting, feeling, seeing, hearing and smelling. This may seem like a stretch, but let me explain something about how trauma lodges into the body and shows up (usually unannounced).
Trauma often manifests (shows up) in the form of anxiety or panic. When you’re experiencing anxiety, it’s helpful to think about it as something that is initiated and fueled in your brain. Anxiety is real and it is oftentimes debilitating. It is often fueled by continual thoughts in our mind. And as our thoughts continue one after another, they form a kind of loop that is terribly cruel and pretty difficult to “think” your way out of.
When we’re having an anxious or panic-related response to something that triggers our traumatic memories, there are tools that can help us break out of the loop and slowly bring ourselves back to a calm baseline. A few of the tools I want to share are breath awareness meditation and grounding.
Breath awareness meditation encourages a restful posture where we intentionally sit with our thoughts. When we’re carried away by a thought, we gently return our focus to our breath: how does the breath feel? Is it hot or cold? Does it feel like swaying back and forth in a hammock? By focusing on sensations, we’re giving our mind an opportunity to gently release its grip on that panic or anxiety loop.
Grounding does something similar, too, by helping us engage the senses. Touch five things and name them out loud; find four things that are brown; name three sensations you feel in your body; identity two smells in the room; and name one body part that feels strong. Doing this helps give the anxious or panic-stricken mind a chance to exit the “loop” and rest on something tangible.
Giving essential workers a chance to intentionally engage the senses
It’s really common when you’ve been through a traumatic experience—like a global pandemic—to dismiss how important and helpful self-care is. After all, it’s only logical that when we feel our food supply or shelter is threatened, that we focus on procuring those at any and all costs. What we lose sight of is that turning inward and nurturing our inner resources and resiliency is part of the toolbox for re-establishing our safety.
This is part of the reason why we started sending out Happy Packs to essential workers. Imagine the daily trauma that a nurse is experiencing, multiplied by lack of sleep, probably spotty eating habits and enduring a spike in patient deaths. This is traumatic and that nurse needs to be equipped to turn inward, to engage the senses and feel taken care of—even if it’s only during a hot shower at the end of a long shift.
I created our first Happy Packs by thinking about how to give essential workers a way to engage their senses by sharing some of my favorite travel-sized bath and skincare products. One pack has warm oak body wash and lotion—they’re softly scented and they smell like my home of Colorado. They’re not overwhelming, they’re not giant-sized bottles; they’re small, transportable and they feel luxurious. There’s another pack that has a small jar of bath salts, facial spray and pillow mist. All these items are designed to first demonstrate care but also to engage the senses and offer a reprieve from the stress of living and working through a global pandemic.
You deserve TLC, too
When I first began sending out Happy Packs, I focused on the healthcare community because the trauma in their world is so obvious and undeniable. Then I started thinking about essential workers, like the folks at the grocery store who have to now wear hot, sweaty masks while restocking food. So I opened I encouraged everyone to nominate someone who is helping them maintain their shelter-in-place plan.
Although I realize that we’ve designed “essential workers” in an attempt to efficiently categorize exemptions and keep things organized, in my mind, everyone is essential. My friends who are hunkered down in Detroit and Dallas and Portland: they’re essential to me because I love them and I want the very best for them. And I know they are experiencing (perhaps for the first time) something I’m intimately familiar with (trauma, anxiety, etc.).
It’s really important that this is reiterated: trauma isn’t isolated to only those who have experienced the death toll rising.
It is touching all of us in very particular ways, and it deserves to be tended to.
Which is why in the coming weeks and months, I’m going to keep creating Happy Packs that encourage you to think creatively about how we relate with trauma and also offer resources to help everyone engage with the five senses.