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In this episode, I'll help you figure out if you're just stuck or in total survival mode because honestly, not enough people actually understand the difference. Welcome to Takeout Therapy mini Session, a short episode to help empathic high achievers who are done with overworking, overthinking and overwhelm. I'm Rebecca Hunter, an anxiety expert and therapist here to help you calm your mind, reset your focus and actually feel better. If you're ready to bring more presence and self compassion into your week, you're in the right place. Find more tool anytime@takeouttherapy.com so here's a problem that I've noticed and I had a super compelling conversation with somebody about it the other day that I really, really appreciated and I thought it would be helpful to address in 5 minutes or less in today's podcast. Oftentimes when people are struggling with a matter or a few different things in life, they use the word stuck. And the question that I got was what's the difference between stuck and survival mode? And today I'm going to share with you my answer. It's the same thing. We use the word stuck when we're in survival mode and not enough people actually understand what survival mode actually means. When you're feeling stuck or overwhelmed or like you just have way too much on your plate and your body is kind of kicking up in a way that you understand you're not okay. Likely your body and your brain have been made to think or have been trained over time to think that there's something unsafe about your environment and all they're really doing is performing on your behalf for your survival. You see, the body and the brain don't understand the difference between modern day burnout, running around like chickens with our heads cut off, trying to get to everything we have to do. Our body and our brain don't understand the difference between just our lives and danger because we weren't really built for all this stuff. This is information, this scrolling that we talked about on Friday, this complicated ex connected existence. So when you get depressed, your body shuts down. When you get anxious, your body gets hyped up and ready. When you're living in a fearful emotional zone, your body will be out of sync with you and things will not feel feel well. And when you feel frozen, you're in fight, flight or freeze mode, which is a nervous system elevation. So I'd love to help you begin to solve this problem of survival mode and stuckness, because I hear about it a lot. As you might imagine, somatic work is A great place to begin to solve the problem of chronic overwhelm, overthinking, burnout or survival mode. Start with the body. That's what somatic work means. It means start with the body and forget about the mind for now. Calm and nurture your nervous system. Do you know what your nervous system is? I didn't for a really long time. I had no idea what that meant. If you don't know what it means, go listen to my nervous system 101 episode. It's back there. Just scroll on back. And then the second thing you can do is learn about your brain and how it works and how to calm and nurture your brain when it gets overactive. Yes, I promise this is possible. The way we calm and nurture our brain is is by disciplining it. We have to disallow rumination and obsessing over things and worrying about things that may or may not ever happen. There's a lot of discipline that has to happen with the brain and that is totally possible too. So starting with somatic work, calming the nervous system down, then moving on to some cognitive or brain work, that's the way we begin to teach our body and our mind that we're not in survival mode. We've just got too much stuff going on. And if you continue sort of running on the treadmill in your life, you will continue to have to do this work. And so you may as well just get going. This week, when we begin with our body and do some mind discipline when we're stuck, we solve for the survival mode that's happening and we can often just move forward from there. But remember, slowly, slowly, go as slow as you possibly can through your life and see what changes. If you missed the episode on Friday about the impact of technology on your mental health and your ability to get unstuck or not be in survival mode. Scroll on back, friend. I'm here for you. Showing up every week to try to help you have the best mental health you possibly can. And I'll see you again on Friday. That's your mini session for today. Thanks so much for tuning in. I really appreciate you being here and doing this work. Every Monday and Friday, I try to release new episodes designed to help you thrive. And as always, while takeout therapy is a great educational resource, get the level of support that you need for your situation. Maybe I can help. Just head to takeouttherapy.com to check out my resources. Until next time, take really good care of yourself.