Is This It? COVID’s Creation Called Survival Maintenance
We’ve all heard the term survival mode. That fight or flight reaction that keeps us alive when we find ourselves in danger. It understandably arises when experiencing war, violence, natural disasters, and abuse that can lead to injury or threaten life. For some of us, it’s how we originally described our COVID-19 reactions, back at the beginning.
Survival Mode
Survival mode is a rapid heart rate, on edge, muscle tension, with high anxiety place. An activation experience of the gazelle running for its life. The white knuckling sensation of driving on an icy overpass in pitch black with a several hundred foot drop to our left. What about this drawn out state we are in now? Five months into COVID-19, we are experiencing the pendulum swinging between anxiety activation and depression numbness. A rapid-cycling feeling of moving between anxiety, anger, sluggishness, hopelessness, numbness, and burnout. The I’m-at-capacity-and-can’t-take-anymore feeling. The feeling of holding on, holding hope, and holding out for a new normal.
Survival Maintenance
Survival mode doesn’t fit what we are feeling right now. Allow me to frame it from a place of maintaining. That feeling of holding, holding, holding our breath. An inhale with no exhale. On a survival spectrum, some would call it stagnation. Others would call it maintenance. I will call it Survival Maintenance.
Can we not relate to the feeling of waiting to define our new normal? The shared experience of being unable to make plans or big decisions because we are unsure what the future holds? The pattern of long-lasting holding, waiting, breathing, wishing. Asking ourselves, is this it? Is this how life will look from now on?
Why is this different from past significant and stressful events? A 9/11 ground zero first responder described it to me as the absence of unity. We don’t have a common goal right now. 9/11 brought Americans together in a shared experience. A desire for change and solutions. A unified front. In the COVID experience, people are feeling isolated and on edge, six feet apart and cautious. It feels more and more like we are fighting one another, noticing and reacting. Each day there’s new data to digest and new information to implement, never giving us respite to move out of our stress activation response.
Are we at risk of collapsing into hopelessness? Like Seligman’s psychology experiment with dogs on the electric grate? Invited to come out of the crate only to collapse, each dog thinking it was a lost cause because he had been zapped dozens of times before. Why would this time be different? The experiment defined the concept of Learned helplessness. We don’t want to collapse. We don’t want to give up. So what can we do?
I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I have worked with clients weekly to ride the rollercoaster of emotion in an effort to maintain both sanity and wellness as we hold on month after month. Here are some ideas that might make Survival Maintenance a tad more tolerable.
· Embrace Structure
In a time of uncertainty, having a healthy routine of getting up, eating regularly, getting dressed, and going to bed at a decent hour can help us keep from feeling like we are land sliding into a depressive state.
· Engage in Restoration
One client described it as wanting to find something that feeds her soul. It’s not enough to hold to a routine. What happens when we get restless or dissatisfied with the monotony of it all? Find something that offers even the briefest moments of feeling joyful or energized, like being in nature, working out, or dancing to your favorite music.
· Move Around
I know the ability to travel safely is limited but we can still switch things up and get some movement in. Consider a walk to a park, visit another part of your state, or take a drive to change the scenery. It may help reduce the restlessness we are all feeling.
However you experience Survival Maintenance, just know that you aren’t alone. We don’t have a clear end in sight and we don’t have all the answers yet. Maybe we are supposed to engage in this mental inventory of our strengths and challenges a little longer. Maybe we are supposed to sit with the discomfort that we would normally push away in being too busy. Either way, just know that you are not alone. We are all feeling the strain of survival maintenance in our own ways. To quote a social media post I saw recently, we may be in different boats but we are still in the same rough sea.
