How to Stop Your 'Survival Brain' from Hijacking Your Life
Don't let the wild animal take over
The following is the fourth entry in my summer series: Escape the Life of Quiet Desperation. In the past three installations, we examined how to find your path, stop the old programming, and dissolve the shame that kept you small or stuck (or both). Now comes the real test: learning to recognize when your survival brain hijacks your thinking before you even realize it's happened (and what to do to stay grounded and prevent an unraveling).
The sky went from light blue to an eerie green. Soon, it was a deep black. Lightning flickered outside the window, illuminating clouds outside. I looked around the cabin, locking eyes with strangers. Their faces were blank with fear. Then, as if it were plucked from the sky, the plane dropped. There was a collective gasp. Then, the aircraft leveled out with a jolt, as if landing on a slab of rock. I looked back at a flight attendant. She looked scared, sending my nervous system into a panic loop.
Then, another jolt. It was harder this time. A few bags fell from overhead compartments, one coming down on a woman’s head. I remember thinking, “I thought this only happened in movies.” A man, rushing back from the bathroom, shot forward, face-planting in the aisle of the turboprop plane. The woman next to me began vomiting, and I handed her the bag from my seat back pocket.
The lights on the plane went out. For some time, there was no light except for the emergency exit lights and the lightning. The plane was barreling up and down and turning from side to side. At one point, it felt as if the plane would do a complete barrel roll. The drops were, on occasion, about five seconds, which is a long time to be free-falling.
After about 40 minutes of heavy turbulence, the sea of darkness faded to gray, and the pilots landed at the closest airport they could find. When we exited, the pilot doors remained closed, and no one spoke.
The trauma got stored in my body like a time bomb, just waiting for the next tremor to set it off.
That's how the “lizard brain” works. The term refers to the brain's more primitive, instinctual functions that are essential for survival. The term is somewhat dated, but it’s useful in summarizing the parts of the brain that manage our survival impulses, particularly the amygdala and the hypothalamus within the brain's limbic system.
The amygdala acts as an alarm, quickly assessing threats and initiating the response. The hypothalamus then sends signals to the autonomic nervous system, which prepares the body for action.
The lizard brain maps every painful experience—every rejection, moment of fear, and every humiliation—and creates a mental model that says the future will be similar.
When something even remotely familiar happens, the entire human experience is reduced to the most ancient of human conditions: survival. Our survival mechanisms hijack the brain’s executive functions before we have a chance to analyze the situation.
Your survival brain makes the decision to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn in about one-third of a second. It takes two-thirds of a second for your thinking brain to come online and decide if that was actually the right response.
Doesn't sound like much of a difference, right? But by then, your nervous system has taken the last train for the coast … and there’s no American Pie served on board.
Your blood is pumping, adrenaline is flowing, your body is ready for battle—all before your rational mind can weigh in.
The Three Blocks That Rule Your Life
There are three main ways your survival brain hijacks your thinking: trauma, attachments, and shame. Until you understand how these work, you'll keep sabotaging every good relationship, opportunity, and experience.
Trauma is any stored energy from when your “lizard brain” felt threatened. It's sitting in your body like a landmine, ready to explode at the first sign of anything similar to a traumatic experience.
I realized this when I first drove on wet pavement a few months after a near-death car accident in high school. My entire body froze. There was a full-on panic response and my brain played an action sequence of the crash. Even after the visuals stopped, I would grip the steering wheel tightly—just like I did when I braced for impact. My shoulders raised towards my ears and I tensed up everywhere. My body still remembered and went on high alert, signaling a bout with danger.
Attachments are the patterns you learned as a kid to navigate other people's emotions. Some of us developed anxious attachment—that frantic feeling like the house is on fire and you have to fix everything immediately. Others developed avoidant attachment. That’s the "screw you, I don't need anybody" response when you're actually hurting.
I know my anxious attachment is triggered when I get an email about a technical problem and my entire system goes into panic mode. "Now they're going to think I’m not organized. Or worse, incompetent! Now they'll never want to work with me again. I'm going to end up on the streets."
As I discussed in a previous piece, Shame is the voice that says "how I am is not okay." It's the engine that drives the other two blocks, making you believe you have to be someone else to be worthy of love, success, money, etc.
The most dangerous moment in relationships is when the survival-driven parts of your brain have hijacked you and you think you’re on the right track. That feeling of “being right” is often the indicator that some part of your brain thinks you have to attack or defend against this person.
Why You Sabotage What You Want
Here's what most people don't understand: you're going through life trying to create an external world that makes you feel safe. You get an education, make money, buy stuff, build relationships—all so you can finally feel okay as a human being.
But your lizard brain might see making more money as a threat. More money might mean more work, more stress, more chances for people to see you're fundamentally flawed. So you sabotage your financial goals.
Your survival brain might see someone who actually loves you as a threat because the shame underneath says "if you really knew me, you couldn't love me." So you push away authentic connection.
You might have fitness goals, but being more fit could bring unwanted attention, so your lizard brain sabotages that too.
The challenge is that your survival brain doesn't speak English; it speaks sensation.
You experience sensations in your body and suddenly you don't follow through at work.
You experience sensations and you push people away without understanding why.
You experience sensations and you talk yourself out of going to the gym.
And then, in case the sh*t cake needs icing, shame comes in: "Why do I sabotage myself? What's wrong with me?"
Nothing's wrong with you. You just learned to operate your nervous system based on the people around you growing up. It’s as natural as learning a language. If the people around you didn't have good tools for moving energy through their bodies and regulating negative emotions, you learned dysfunctional patterns. There’s no shame in that. It's just how it works.
Living in Creation Instead of Survival
Everything is vibration. You emit an energetic frequency based on your emotional state. We’re constantly playing a song that reflects our human experience. And when we are out of tune with ourselves, we struggle to attract good things into our lives.
And when we are living on-purpose and in alignment, we trigger those who are not playing a “true to heart” tone, and are reminded (perhaps only physically) that they are led by fear and controlled by hijacks. You simply cannot connect deeply with those who are not tuned into themselves.
When you have trauma in your system and your lizard brain is constantly scanning for threats, you're emitting a frequency of "I’m not safe" to the world. Life keeps reflecting that back to you through repeated experiences of chaos and struggle.
When you grew up around abuse or poverty, you emit frequencies around people and money that say "I’m not enough" or “I must change this situation” or "I don't deserve it." So you keep attracting financial struggle and abusive people. Of course, many people have massive hurdles to overcome, while others are quite fortunate. But when you’re stuck living and thinking in survival mode, it’s even harder to escape.
But here's the beautiful part: as you learn to dissolve these trauma loops, settle your attachment wounds, and heal your shame, you start emitting frequencies of calm, safety, and joy. Life begins reflecting that back to you instead.
You attract people who are also calm and safe. Opportunities flow more easily. You stop fighting upstream and start moving with the current of who you actually are.
The Key to the Kingdom
Learning to speak the language of your survival brain is the key to everything you want. It leads to greater abundance, deeper connections, and the ability to feel safe in your skin, no matter where you show up.
The language is presence, breath, movement, and sound. Like training a wild animal (or maybe more like training a cat—extraordinarily difficult but possible), you can retrain your nervous system through repetition and patience.
When you understand the technology of moving energy through your body, life becomes much more fluid and joyful. You become a different creature on this planet, and as a different creature, you create different things and attract different beings. You can create a life that is wholly aligned with what you truly desire.
This Week's Challenges
Days 1-2: Track Your Hijacks - Notice which of the three blocks (trauma, attachments, shame) shows up most often. What triggers them? What do they feel like in your body? Can you locate them?
Days 3-4: The Trigger Check - Before any important conversation, pause and ask: "Am I feeling the impulse to attack or defend?" If yes, wait until you're calm before engaging.
Days 5-6: Spot the Sabotage - Notice when you talk yourself out of something you actually want. What sensation happens in your body right before you self-sabotage?
Day 7: Practice the Language - When you catch a hijack happening, try presence (pausing and noticing your body), breath (deep inhales, focusing on tense areas), movement (gentle motions throughout your body), and sound (sigh, hum, or vocal toning with sounds such as om, ah, and eh) to speak directly to your nervous system.
The Real Work Begins
You've done the excavation. You've cleared the space. Now you're learning that the space can be hijacked by old survival patterns before you even know it's happening.
Sometimes you can simply say, “Pause, what a pleasure” to reorient yourself with the safety of the moment.
Here’s a message I shared with a friend the other day. It was a mix of messages ingrained in me by two very special people, Tony Litster and Sarah Blondin. It may resonate with you:
You should be proud of yourself for how you are navigating life. When you are feeling unsafe, allow your eyes to close and just notice your body, breathing into the tense parts of you. Feel how easy it is to be you in this moment. Feel how good it feels to be in your body, present to the life living within you. Turn your palms to the sky, feet firmly planted, and feel the peace that longs to lovingly hold you. And then open your eyes to look around the room, reminding yourself that you are safe in this moment. And this moment, with all its promises and perceived threats, is actually on your side and on time. And you, too, are right on time, as you fully arrive in your body in the present moment.
This week is the foundation for everything that follows. When you can recognize these hijacks in real-time and know how to speak the language that calms the wild animal, you're ready for the deeper work ahead.
Next week you'll push your body. You'll test what becomes possible when you push beyond your perceived physical limits.