Thread by @HZiauddeen

🧵Living in survival mode:

Survival mode can be thought of as a state of living in which managing each day takes pretty much all the capacity you have. And by the time you are in survival mode, you're already working with a significantly depleted capacity.
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You can end up in survival mode because:
1. The demands on you have been heavy and unrelenting and have exhausted your spare capacity.
2. Your capacity has been diminished by illness/stress* (mental or physical).
3. A combination of both of the above over time.
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In reality often things may start with either 1 or 2 but then over time the other one will get involved so you end up with 3 anyway.

* Re: stress, it's important to consider environmental stresses including poverty, precarity and discrimination (ableism, racism, etc).
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When you're in survival mode, it feels like your day is constantly full, either with things you have to do or with thinking about things you have to do. There is little wiggle room to do anything that feels non-essential (rest and pleasure often fall into this category)
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It feels like you are just about able to hold things together or that it is taking all your effort to just stay in the same place and not slip back or fall.

I think about survival mode as a state where the cost of functioning is very high.
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You could also think of it a bit like being burnt out, not just by your job, but by your life.

There are some fairly typical indicators of living in a state of high cost of functioning and many of them relate to there being no spare capacity to allow any flexibility.
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A usually inevitable consequence of being in survival mode is that life becomes increasingly restricted and regimented. Anything deemed non-essential gets dropped as all available capacity is carefully marshalled to manage what is essential.
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Unexpected events and demands can cause intense anxiety, panic and even collapse. Often one is borrowing time from one's own future 'I'll just push through this now and skip X tomorrow or catch up on sleep on the weekend.'
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Tragically many of the 'non-essential' activities given up are the ones that would help replenish one e.g. rest, pleasurable activities, socialisation.

As time goes on, it becomes harder to change the situation because change requires spare capacity and spare time.
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One can live in survival mode for a long time and many people do because they have no choice (poverty, mental illness, survivors of severe trauma). But years of living in survival mode reshapes (& impoverishes) life to make it as survivable as possible.
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Through COVID-19 many of us have been living in survival mode and feel the near constant weariness from it.

What can you do about it? I am not the kind of psychiatrist to offer simple tips to solve complex problems but some suggestions that may ease things...
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...all prefaced with 'if you can':
1. Try and do something that gives you respite/pleasure.
2. Try not to feel guilty about doing 1.
3. Find an opportunity to take a break.
4. Let something(s) fail or fall by the wayside.
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