Survival Instincts in the Modern World

Learnings from Biology and Observations from the Animal Kingdom

Introduction

This begins a series of articles co-written with my friend, colleague, and therapist Lilian Sjøberg, who is the lead author on them. Lilian is a Danish coach and trouble shooter good at seeing patterns, with a masters in biology, who has studied how to help people with chronic symptoms from a practical perspective for five years. These articles result from extensive conversations and Q+A’s I have had with Lilian. In July 2022, Lilian visited me in the UK to talk more in depth about these issues and to develop online programmes. Ever since that visit, I have been having weekly remote therapy sessions with Lilian, which has resulted in significant symptom reduction, and me being a much calmer person.

Survival Instincts

For hundreds of thousands of years, we lived in small tribes, and, like herd animals, survived due to our instincts. Our brain and body process information in a heartbeat and often decides to put us in a survival state. We may react with these survival instincts to sensory input, shadows, sounds, and tactile stimulation. Dopamine and adrenaline are essential in this process. After an alert, orienting state for seconds or minutes, our brains may make the subconscious decision to fight, flight or freeze. Eventually, after seconds, minutes or hours we return to a calm state again where normal body functions take over (digestion, cell division, reproduction, memory). Better safe than sorry.

We can observe the animal world to understand more. Meerkats in the dessert, for example, where alarms are constantly shouted over the herd, induce flights to the safety of the burrows, and then recovery, re-emerging for play or hunting food. This process is repeated many times a day. Better to alarm one time too many than risk death.

Humans are similar, wired for moving back and forth between our survival instincts and calm states. We are just not very aware of this, and being in a modern society and disconnected from a tribe is masking this awareness even further, yet it remains the case that a healthy person will still go in and out of the instinctual survival state many times a day.

The problem is that today, when our survival instincts are triggered, we often cannot complete the process, because running away or fighting is not an option. So the adrenaline lingers in the body for hours, days, and even weeks, preventing us from returning to 100% healthy normal body function. This, combined, with the lack of many hours of hard physical daily work to work off the adrenaline, with recreation in front of the television or screens definitely not helping, is slowly trapping us in bodies that gives us all kinds of symptoms. The nature of the stressors has also changed. Instead of the tiger, it is things like the terrible divorce, the lousy task at work, or the angry teenagers, which are the root course for our body going into its survival instincts.

In combination with most people's sitting still for too long daily, stress can now load our bodies with permanent chemical cocktails of adrenaline and cortisol. Then “symptoms” emerge and become a new normal. Each person gets their unique cocktail of symptoms.

Being in a half-working body too long can lead to all sorts of symptoms. An analogy is driving a car with more semi-flat tires on the left side all the time. We can drive, but side effects in the shock absorber and steering mechanism will slowly emerge. We can maybe change some spare parts, but the flat tires are the natural root cause, and if we don’t address this, more problems will occur.

“Constellations are for stars what diagnoses are to symptoms. It is a grouping made by humans. The stars and symptoms do not care.”

Right now, we divide the symptoms into diagnoses of chronic diseases, but the root cause is the same. Some sets of symptoms lead to the medical diagnoses such as Parkinson's Disease, but we can connect the dots between these signature symptoms and the survival instincts. So, we can also call it the long-term effects of staying in survival instincts for far too long time a day.

To help shake off the gloom about this, I [Lilian] call our survival instincts our superpowers, because it is a more resourceful way to look at the body and the problems we might be experiencing. Try saying

“thank you, body, for keeping me safe, but now it is time to bring me out of the safe survival state and back to the normal range of health and grow.”

This ought to give us a little more faith in the dispositions of our body.

Fight, flight and freeze are the most potent superpowers (but not all) to help us survive. Our instincts can lock the body down 100% to avoid a dangerous situation, known as “death feigning” or “playing possum” for the animal kingdom. Things in modern life, from which we cannot escape, cause us to go into this type of survival instinct, but we seldom finish the cycle to recovery. We become trapped in intermediate stages that can lead to the permanent symptoms after a long term.

So, the signature of symptoms due to freeze correspond closely to what happens when someone is frozen stiff by their survival instincts. If we are prepared to contemplate this, it is straightforward to see that these have the same biological roots and physical manifestations. Old idioms tell us about this shut down of the body, e.g., "to be frozen in fear“, “my blood froze”, “my blood ran cold”.

A second common chronic symptom is movement disorders where tremors are apparent. Movement disorders can be due to the body tensing up to prepare for the fight or flight, or the releasing of tension when the danger has passed. So, this symptom too is also found in survival instincts, especially in going in and out of survival mode. Old idioms tell us about this also, e.g., “shaking like a leaf”, “knees are knocking”, “ shaking in my boots”.

A third common symptom, called stiffness, that people can experience is also a superpower, which we will discuss in a future article.

The fluctuation in degree of symptoms is then related to calmness or a semi-instinctual states. With a lack of nuanced vocabulary, we say the increase in the symptoms is stress-related, but it is more complex. We often hear how people display increased symptoms in person-specific situations, such as going to the bathroom, crossing a road, being in a crowd, or queuing at a cashier, where a tiny signal triggers the survival instinct and puts the person’s body on pause to ensure survival. It can become a pattern as the triggers are enforced several times, so it gets easier and easier to get caught in this instinct pattern.

Again, we can look to the animal kingdom for evidence of this theory. Dog trainers know that a dog shivering or trembling occurs when the creature is experiencing too many stressors in a short time, and needing to relax in between tense situations. Farmers also know this problem arises in domesticated animals which cannot complete the cycle of survival instincts, because they have nowhere to run or hide.

The same goes for humans, e.g. when we cannot escape from a bully, nor fight with an unfair manager. We too can get stuck in a stressful situation and start showing symptoms. In tense situations like eating at a restaurant, talking to strangers, trying out new activities, more symptoms can occur as nervousness or excitement builds up.

A situation like a soccer game on television can bring symptoms forward. Although there is no real threat in sight, the excitement of wanting to join the game and "fight" alongside a favorite team, also releases adrenaline. I helped a man with Parkinson’s to evaluate when to shut off the TV to prioritize a good night's sleep. He got into an excited tremor state due to his favorite team's soccer games. After a good match, adrenaline lingered for hours in his system and made sleep impossible. He got punished with many symptoms the next day, which was not in line with his job. He ended up quitting his job as he found it was also a root cause in giving him tremors in stressful situation.