Overview
- Your survival reactions are meant to be deeply unpleasant, since they are protective danger signals.
- You have absolutely no control over them. Resisting strengthens them and fires up unwanted thoughts.
- As you train your brain to be less reactive to these unpleasant sensations, they will lessen.
- Creating “space” allows you to redirect your nervous system wherever you wish.
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
—Carl Jung
Connecting to every aspect of your existence is critical to healing. This is particularly true with your intentionally unpleasant survival reactions, which are meant to protect you.
The need to feel and be safe is a deep, driving force of all life. However, it is not, by any means, a given that you’ll be safe. Life is competitive, and living creatures are always on alert. For example, dolphins and whales sleep with one eye open. Many animals live in caves or burrows. Horses and giraffes can sleep standing up. Countless creatures communicate warning signals and form groups to defend themselves against predators. We humans share the same basic needs of sheltering and defending ourselves from external threats. One trait that sets us dramatically apart from other species is language. While language extends our communication skills far beyond those of other species, it also creates an extra level of complexity and vulnerability.
Your body’s alert system is like a personal brain scanner, and it cannot be turned off. Don’t think that solving a given problem is going to decrease your anxiety for any length of time. Your mind will quickly find another target. When you don’t feel safe, you’ll experience the survival quartet, always beginning with anxiety. These core survival responses dominate human emotional experiences, all serving the same fundamental purpose of keeping you alive in a threatening world.
- Anxiety = “Threat might be coming” (hypervigilance for danger)
- Envy: “Need more resources to survive” (pain of having less than others)
- Anger = “Threat is here now” (fight response to eliminate danger)
- Schadenfreude = “Threat has been neutralized” (reward for competitor’s downfall)
Each of these sensations is created by your physiological state. We have no cognitive control over these powerful reactions—none at all. They are not psychological constructs, nor moral categories; they are biological functions. Your powerful physiology drives behaviors more than conscious interpretation. Much of human cruelty and harmful behavior does not emerge from inherent evil but rather from individuals caught in cascading cycles of personalized survival responses.
Anxiety evolved to be deeply unpleasant. Words fail to convey the depth of discomfort, which you’ll do nearly anything to avoid or escape. Anger is even more powerful and addictive, and it masks the feelings of fear. It has also evolved to be destructive, since it is a last-ditch survival reaction. Schadenfreude feels good.1 Often, when you watch someone else fail or suffer, your brain’s pleasure circuits light up. It is a more intense reaction if the person is a competitor or someone you dislike. This is your body’s reaction to winning; it indicates that you have increased your odds of survival. All these sensations are disruptive to your peace of mind and create a sense of uneasiness about your identity and values. But your body is simply doing its job of protecting you.
Most bad behavior and RUTs (repetitive unpleasant thoughts) stem from taking survival responses personally. Without awareness of alternative paths, we often suppress or repress these sensations quickly. However, suppressing disconcerting thoughts and emotions intensifies threat physiology, shrinks the memory center of the brain, increases opioid craving, and creates generalized chaos in both the body and the brain.2 Suppression refers to a conscious action, whereas repression is automatic and below the level of your consciousness. Suppression is a maladaptive control tactic. We don’t like to feel bad, so we don’t.
A vital step, one of four, in calming your nervous system is to separate your identity from these survival reactions. Anxiety, envy, anger, and schadenfreude are sensations that you have, not who you are. However, it is essential to allow yourself to feel them deeply, even to allow yourself to react. But when you’re in a reaction, train yourself to take no verbal or physical action, except in proper self-defense. Use your skills to calm down as quickly as you can to avoid acting out in destructive ways. Not feeling them means that you are suppressing them. You must feel where you are before you can change direction. There are many words to describe these physiological sensations, but they can be broadly grouped into these four main categories: anxiety, anger, schadenfreude, and envy. Learn to live with them and really live. Joy will emerge.
References
1. Hidehiko Takahashi et al., “When Your Gain Is My Pain and Your Pain Is My Gain: Neural Correlates of Envy and Schadenfreude,” Science 323, no. 5916 (2009): 937–39. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1165604.
2. Eric L. Garland et al., “Thought Suppression as a Mediator of the Association between Depressed Mood and Prescription Opioid Craving among Chronic Pain Patients,” Journal of Behavioral Medicine 39, no. 1 (2016): 128–38, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-015-9675-9.