AND PARTS OF THEIR BRAIN ASSOCIATED WITH FEAR ARE OVERACTIVE
This time trying to concentrate on the survival mode we might encounter
AND PARTS OF THEIR BRAIN ASSOCIATED WITH FEAR ARE OVERACTIVE
As we are all stressed out with Trump in power I wished to present,
Now of what I assume are many who may be in survival mode,
Doing what I can for the community of democracy in these times.
Psychs that have to endure and be strong in the coming insanity,
As I’m not really qualified, but sense the need, I’ll try today,
Reality, to the best of our ability, is where we must now dwell,
Truisms should be our target in these times of blistering lunacy,
Something tells me others more qualified might assist us now.
Of trying to always wear the tough guy persona, I see the fallacy in that,
For we must outthink our peril rather than attack or stew.
To us recognize that with clearness of mind we can survive,
Hitler bumbled his way along the way, Trump can only do the same,
Every day we wake up with the dread of possible lethal dysfunction,
Individually we may do little, collectively we can do more,
Reason is something mightily lacking in their camp, we have tons of it.
Because the survival mode can lead us to endorphin addicts,
Realize we must look after ourselves in these worrisome times,
Although we might feel like losers a little, the truth is we’re far from this,
I we might wish it to be different we realize that damage awaits,
Now we may fall out of homeostasis (balance) at times, but stay put.
Appraising our state along the way will prove beneficial,
So stress hormones will be released in the coming time,
So long-term stress hormones will lead to endocrine disorders,
Oh you may develop diabetes, thyroid disease, sexual disorders, and more,
Can we understand that the coming insanity will test us mightily,
Indeed it take it out of us, difficulties having downtime, we must,
And feeling moody, short of temper, we must not abuse substances,
The mainstream media will only fail us once again, be forewarned,
Each have our talents for the struggle ahead, we realize damage awaits,
Death of democracy to a lunatic, it seems only absurd.
While one trigger I read are stressful, unpredictable situations,
I can’t think of more unpredictability then from the orange baboon,
To think in terms of Nazi Germany bring anxiety, but we must,
Having this as our analogy keeps us grounded in needed reality.
Fearing the road ahead populated by people lacking sanity,
Each MAGA may assume liberals are only weak should we falter,
And I for one am too stubborn to give them any satisfaction,
Really I don’t think we fully realize the true danger we are facing.
And I think many MAGA lean toward authoritarianism out of ignorance,
Regardless their stupidity can result in our undoing,
Every alarm is going off in our heads and we are not only imagining it.
Of the coming, dare I say apocalypse; perhaps my fear is in control,
Victimhood is really the last thing we want to reach, it’s paralyzing,
Each of us have our own demons apart from this craziness to tend to,
Realize that we must stand solid in our group of the saner ones,
Actually we have some time to become an even more cohesive force,
Certainly I’ve spent much of my capital looking at the other guys,
That no change happened on their side is no longer my problem,
Indeed I probably wasted my time and effort in such a journey,
Viewing that I’m certainly not the only one I commit to proceed,
Ending on catastrophe or not is not something I can really control.
"Survival mode" is brought on by "prolonged stress to the degree that a person feels that they cannot relax and parts of their brain associated with fear are overactive".
—-— Meghan Jensen, LPC.
Meghan Jensen is currently a Primary Therapist at Charlie Health, where she works with high-acuity clients in their adolescent and young adult years.
Survival mode is supposed to be a phase that helps save your life. It is not meant to be how you live. - Mindset Made Better
I am not exactly positive on where I am going with today’s topic. We who might be more inclined to agree with a more liberal viewpoint undoubtedly are feeling stress right now. I wished to address this as well as possible in a more scientific manner. The following article from Psychology Today from 2012 seemed pertinent in my exploration. I found some interesting information in the article on what millions might be experiencing at this time. It all is science based on what chemicals in our brains might become predominant from continuous survival mode. I always contend that such knowledge is power to help overcome our situation. And as a possible historical analogy from our times I found information on suicides in Nazi Germany before the start of warfare in what might possibly happen here. As this might be future tripping a little, I apologize if this in itself might trigger some of us undesirably. And information on mass suicides after Germany had lost the war may indicate what might eventually face the diehard MAGA people once it falls apart. In my optimistic opinion I see the fallacy of their beliefs crumbling, perhaps much sooner than later. The comparison of the losing Nazi movement might be extrapolated into what may happen here to many people caught up in the MAGA mindset. I realize that I’m assuming many things at this time when there is so much uncertainty in many minds. I am obviously future tripping, something I’ve learned is not necessarily good. My primary goal was to present the best information I could find to address it all. As non-MAGA it is essential that we stay together, seek out our communities of common purpose. Our hunter gatherer genetics still are in play. Hopefully the obvious stimulus to our survival mode will end without great suffering for us. That is my hope.
Psychology Today
Posted December 6, 2012
John Montgomery Ph.D.
The Embodied Mind
John Montgomery, Ph.D., is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Caltech and has written for publications such as The Economist and The Washington Post.
Survival Mode and Evolutionary Mismatch
Environments ill-suited to our biology often trigger stress and pain.
Many people seem to believe that we human beings never arose from nature the way every other living thing did, that we are somehow “beyond,” removed from, nature. But this is a very unfortunate – even a tragic – misconception. Like all other living things, our ancestors were sculpted by Darwinian evolution to survive, reproduce, and thrive within a certain kind of environment. And when we live in environments, such as modern cities, that are drastically different from the environments that we’re biologically adapted for, we become subject to various “evolutionary mismatch” effects that can be extremely detrimental to our physical and emotional health. Perhaps the most important consequence of this mismatch is that we become highly prone to being triggered repeatedly and unnecessarily into various states of “survival mode” by our surroundings and circumstances. As we’ll see later, another even more destructive dynamic, which also seems to operate only when our lifestyle is mismatched with our biology, can further reinforce these survival-mode states in us.
Human beings are designed biologically almost exclusively for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Before twelve thousand years ago, when agricultural methods were invented and began to spread, every person on this planet lived as a hunter-gatherer, and humans or pre-humans had done so for hundreds of thousands of years. We know about hunter-gatherer life mainly from studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers, who live in isolated pockets of the world, and whose lifestyles appear to still be broadly similar to those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Hunter-gatherers generally travel in small bands of roughly twenty-five to forty people, and survive by hunting wild animals, and gathering wild fruits, vegetables, nuts, and other occasional delicacies, such as eggs or honey. Before the development of agriculture and animal husbandry, there was simply no other way to make a living.
And while there have been some genetic changes in human beings in the last twelve thousand years, those changes appear to have been relatively superficial – affecting skin color and hair color, for example, or the ability to digest milk as an adult. These genetic changes certainly don’t appear to have altered the basic hunter-gatherer design principles of our brains and bodies in any significant way during this relatively short evolutionary period.
One of our key design principles is that we’re built to be triggered into survival mode whenever our survival is perceived to be at significant risk. Survival mode, however, isn’t only an overt state of fear, or the primal terror of being torn apart by a jaguar or grizzly bear. Whenever we feel any kind of pain or emotional distress – whether it’s self-pity, for example, or guilt, or shame — we’re thrown, operationally, into a state of survival mode. Indeed, the biological reason that unpleasant emotions become triggered within us in the first place is to alert us that our survival may be at risk, and to motivate appropriate action to address that risk. When we have intense feelings of emotional pain during a breakup, for example, the feeling is telling us that a relationship that’s very important to us may soon be lost, and the pain is biologically designed, in a broad sense, to motivate behavior that may help us to preserve the relationship if we possibly can.
A human being, especially one without sophisticated tools or weaponry, is very unlikely to survive alone in the wilderness for long, and so our hunter-gatherer ancestors absolutely and categorically relied on their relationships for their survival. Because of this evolutionary heritage, we are all designed to treat our close relationships as if they were of potentially life-or-death significance.
The extraordinarily high levels of social isolation found today provide perhaps the most important current example of evolutionary mismatch. When people feel that they lack supportive, loving relationships, when they feel lonely for extended periods, the consequences can be devastating. Social isolation has been shown to have effects on physical health that are comparable to not exercising or even to smoking cigarettes, and loneliness is also a major risk factor for most psychological syndromes, including severe depression.For hunter-gatherers, lacking close relationships or being socially isolated within the group is truly life-threatening. Food shortages due to a drought, for example, may force the band – not out of callousness, but simply out of survival necessity – to shed one or more band members so that the rest of the band has enough food to survive. The fewer strong attachments any specific hunter-gatherer has to the other people in the band, the greater the chance he or she will be abandoned by the band, and consequently, in all likelihood, left alone to die in the wilderness. The intense feelings of emotional pain lonely people often experience are a consequence of this evolutionary heritage – those feelings are a signal that complete abandonment may be imminent, and that survival is very much at issue.
Because of our hunter-gatherer past, however, being alone too much often triggers a survival-mode state in us that, like all survival-mode states, creates and releases stress hormones throughout our bodies and brains. And chronically high stress levels seem to be largely responsible for the physical and psychological health issues that lonely people are at higher risk for. So the cruel irony is that, although being socially isolated is rarely an actual survival threat in modern, industrialized cultures, the state of being lonely does trigger stress and survival-mode states because of our hunter-gatherer past, and so being socially isolated does often end up creating a survival risk – but mainly because of chronically elevated stress levels driven by unnecessary and inappropriate survival-mode states. The brain is, in effect, tricked – typically unconsciously – into unnecessary states of survival mode, such as fear of abandonment, not because of actual survival-threatening circumstances, but because our brains confuse our evolutionary past with our modern circumstances. Every modern life is lived in the teeth of massive evolutionary mismatch, and the typical result is that we have far, far more survival mode in our lives than is healthy for us.
My colleague Todd Ritchey and I have suggested that an additional dynamic operating in nearly all of us can also profoundly reinforce unnecessary survival-mode states. A great deal of evidence from neuroscience studies suggests that the stress hormones released by survival-mode states like fear or anxiety have many of the same effects in the brain as addictive drugs like cocaine or methamphetamine. It’s been known for decades, for example, that an integral part of the stress response is the release of endorphin, which many studies have shown is the primary “pleasure” chemical in the brain – that is, whenever we feel pleasure or euphoria, the pleasurable feeling appears to be due largely to the release of endorphin within our brains. But because endorphin release is also involved in the stress response, any sort of stress or pain will also release endorphin into our brains. What Todd Ritchey and I have suggested is that while stress and pain are typically not consciously perceived as being pleasant, nearly all of us receive unconscious biochemical rewards from our pain and emotional distress, and nearly all of us consequently develop literal biochemical addictions to at least some of our painful, distressing, out-of-balance, survival-mode states.
When people with clinical depression, for example, are told to think of sad or painful thoughts, such as the memory of a painful breakup, brain-imaging studies have shown that endorphin is instantly released into their brains. One of the hallmark features of as depression is being stuck on a treadmill of painful thoughts and emotions: feelings of regret and shame about the past, for example, or hopelessness about the future. Each of these painful thoughts that arise from the depressed state, we have suggested, provides an unconscious biochemical reward in the brain, and thus the state of depression can become reinforced by a biochemical addiction to the distressing emotions that accompany those painful thoughts.
Although some people are more genetically susceptible to depression than others, hunter-gatherer studies support the idea that clinical depression is largely due to evolutionary mismatch and what may follow from that mismatch. A careful and extensive study of the Kaluli hunter-gatherers of the New Guinea highlands, for example, found that of two thousand people who were exhaustively interviewed, only one even came close to meeting the criteria for clinical depression. But in modern, industrialized cultures – such as the present-day United States – about three hundred or so people out of every two thousand suffer from clinical depression.
In my last post, we talked about how the healthy, homeostatic drive generates specific emotions in us that are designed to drive behaviors that bring us into homeostasis, or equilibrium, at all levels. But with evolutionary mismatch and biochemical addiction to unnecessary survival-mode states, another, opposing drive begins to develop that acts to consistently throw us out of homeostasis, or out of balance. We have called this drive the “addictive drive,” and have suggested that it is responsible for nearly all of people’s chronic emotional pain, and also for the majority of chronic physical pain.
Fortunately, we have also found that the addictive drive can be greatly weakened, and even, with sufficient work, overcome, while the healthy, homeostatic drive can be greatly strengthened. We’ll talk about this more in upcoming posts.
Suicide under the Swastika, 1933–1939
Christian Goeschel
Abstract
Under the Weimar Republic, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had conflated cases of suicide with Germany's defeat in 1918, the Versailles Treaty, and the Weimar ‘system’. Between 1918 and 1933, 214,409 suicides had been officially recorded in Germany. Hitler thought that most suicides were due to social and political despair caused by the Versailles Treaty and implicitly by the lack of living space. The economic misery caused by reparations allegedly increased suicide rates, while the Nazis' ostensible ending of unemployment reduced them. The problem of suicide concerned many other Nazi leaders, including Heinrich Himmler who saw it as a threat to the survival of the Germanic race. Many racial scientists and medical doctors constructed the argument that Jews, as a particularly ‘inferior’ race characterized by ‘excesses and degeneration’, were more prone to suicide than others. Unsurprisingly perhaps, suicide methods in the Third Reich were generally the same as they had been in the Weimar Republic. Nazi politics had a direct impact on many suicides. Political opponents of the regime committed suicide in the wake of the Nazi seizure of power. Especially in 1933 and 1934, the Nazis 'suicided' political opponents, denying responsibility for killing or torturing them to their deaths.
Periods of suicides have been identified between January and May 1945 when thousands of German people took their own lives. Life Magazine reported that: "In the last days of the war the overwhelming realization of utter defeat was too much for many Germans. Stripped of the bayonets and bombast which had given them power, they could not face a reckoning with either their conquerors or their consciences." German psychiatrist Eric Menninger-Lerchenthal noted the existence of "organised mass suicide on a large scale which had previously not occurred in the history of Europe [...] there are suicides which do not have anything to do with mental illness or some moral and intellectual deviance, but predominantly with the continuity of a heavy political defeat and the fear of being held responsible".
Now I’ve mentioned the problem of survival mode in people but have not really related much for solutions in coping with it. I found on X something from a psychiatrist in Cambridge, England on the topic. He was explicitly referencing the survival mode that so many felt during the Covid 19 pandemic in October of 2021. I think we are near that degree of uncertainty with Trump and MAGA and I think it might prove useful.
I hope I have led the reader where I thought they should go. Perhaps I’m thinking of the worst that could happen to our nation and its citizens? I honestly don’t know for sure but it seems that the ducks are lining up as has been witnessed before in other countries. If I’m dead wrong I will only be happy. But I think we are going to have stressful times ahead, and hopefully this effort might help out to address some of it.
I end on a pseudo-sonnet which hopefully is worth your time reading it.
And Not Lose My Spunk
Malaise has overcome my thinking lately - I’m in a funk,
The probability of shared persecution is foremost on my mind,
Hopefully I’m not becoming addicted to endorphins to the grind,
Over the real possibility that American democracy is finally sunk.
I have the thought of going to a cold mountain stream and with my head dunk,
For we all know that a Trump fascist state can only be unkind,
And in the back of my mind the thought that we’re already behind,
I suppose I’ll only try to endure and not lose my spunk.
I can only think of the foolish MAGA cheering on this crap,
Let’s just say that when the shit hits the fan they’ll only run,
And in their ignorant ways they will not admit they’re stunned,
And they’ll wait for others to deal with it all - in the way of a MAGA sap,
I guess I’m trying to lend some advice in this little work,
But I’m only venting right now like a common jerk.
That ends my exportation into perhaps leading people to knowledge and with the possible state in which our minds might migrate in the coming months. Certainly never hesitate to seek council through all this. This band of hunter gatherers must stick together in the future.
213th Posting, November 24, 2024