Why stress makes you survive instead of living.

Have you ever seen a baby mad at their friends, saying that 3 days ago one of them took he toys? No! Because even if that happened, he already forgot it, and now he just continues coexisting with his friends without being bitter or sad, trying to think that next time maybe they will do it again and maybe take his toys or even worse.

So, what happens when we grow up and then we are stressed about the past, or we can’t get rid of feelings about experiences that happened 5 or 10 years ago? It is frustrating when during a moment of introspection you realize that those feelings in the past are affecting your present. So let me explain to you a little bit about how you can manage your stress and learn what is going on inside of you.

For better or for worse, the human being is the only one who knows how to stay in a state of continuous stress. Let me tell you why we are different from other mammals;

Imagine there is a deer in the middle of the forest, happily eating the grass and suddenly a pack of coyotes is chasing it. The deer’s sympathetic nervous system activates and starts to produce different chemistry and now its body is in surviving/emergency mode. Its sympathetic nervous system stops different processes in the body just to focus on surviving. A lot of things changed in the deer in less than 5 seconds. Its evolution prepared it to be safe and defend itself from the predator.

We as human beings are developed with the same system, being ready to survive if we detect danger or something that can damage us. The big difference is that, after being safe, the deer is going to regulate its body and it’s not going to be thinking about: oh my god, what if this coyote pack gets me when I’m sleeping. And human beings can’t get rid of all the chemistry and thoughts even after days or weeks. The biggest problem is that this danger sometimes isn’t even real, and then we feel anxious and stressed all the time.

Because the coyote isnt thinking about the past or future, its body isn’t generating all these new chemistry levels and then keeping it on surviving mode. Our brain doesn’t know when something is real or it’s just something we are creating in our mind, and we usually feel stressed about imaginary things that aren’t even real. So our stress can be triggered just by our thoughts.

How does it feel living in the surviving mode?

This is how your body feels: “I have to protect myself, go to a safe place as soon as possible.”

This is how your mind feels: fear, worried, emotional, no appetite/ too much appetite, insomnia, worried all the time.

To stop living with the survival mode activated all the time, we have to regulate our brain and learn about it. Recognizing that the stress appears to keep you safe and sound from the danger. There are multiple factors that affected us in the past and built connections in our brain.

Living with the survival mode makes us only focus on 0.000001% of reality — Breaking the habit of being yourself, Joe Dispenza.

Like i told you at the beginning of the article, the little kid isn’t going to be mad about the toys, but if years later his parents tell him that that taking others person things is something bad, his brain is gonna recognize it as something bad then, and now he has a new connection in his brain. The dangerous point is that not all of those connections are to keep us alive/safe, and then we misunderstand the reality of identifying a lot of things as a danger.

Being conscientious about our mental and physical state requires strength, willpower and a personal purpose. If you start to pay attention to the survival mode, telling yourself that the danger isn’t something real(not all the time), you’ll be on the next level to fight the invisible danger to live and not only survive.

Creating a new mind to think in a different way involves checking your old brain connections and changing them into something useful for your happiness. When you start creating a new mind, you start to build new connections in your brain, connections that will decrease the fear and stress response that holds us back from living without undue anxiety.