Living in Survival Mode: Why We Get Dysregulated and Can't Find Our Way Back Home
Living in Survival Mode: Why We Get Dysregulated and Can't Find Our Way Back
When Your Nervous System Gets Stuck in Survival Mode
By Alessandrina Dorer, 11/25/2025
If you've ever felt like your reactions don't match the situation in front of you. Maybe snapping at someone you love over something 'small', feeling paralyzed by a decision that shouldn't be difficult, or experiencing waves of anxiety that seem to come from nowhere, you might be experiencing dysregulation.
And if you've been frustrated with yourself for these responses, wondering why you can't just "get it together" or "calm down," I want to offer you something that might shift how you look at these reactive states: Understanding without the burden of judgment.
Dysregulation is not a character flaw. And becoming dysregulated doesn't mean that something's fundamentally wrong with you. It's your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, i.e. protect you from perceived threats, even when those threats are no longer present.
The challenge with becoming dysregulated is that most of us have never learned to recognize dysregulation for what it is, and that we often don't even realize that it's happened until after it's already created issues for us or in our relationships. We've been taught to judge our responses, to override our body's signals, to push through without understanding what's actually happening beneath the surface. That's kept us in reactive, dysregulated loops instead of addressing the issue at the root.
This post is about helping you to change that. It's about understanding dysregulation from the inside out: what it is, why it happens, how it shows up, and most importantly, why recognizing it is the essential first step toward working with your nervous system instead of against it.
What Is Dysregulation, Really?
Dysregulation occurs when your nervous system becomes locked in a state of defense for self-preservation, unable to return to a baseline of safety and ease on its own.
It's not that your nervous system has malfunctioned. It's that it's working overtime to protect you, often based on patterns that were formed during times when you genuinely needed that level of protection and didn't have a way to resolve the threat(s) facing you.
Think of regulation as your nervous system's ability to move fluidly between states - activation when you need energy or focus, settling when you need rest, engagement when connection is available. It's the capacity and flexibility to match your physiological state to what's actually happening in the present moment unburdened by past difficulties or adaptations.
Dysregulation is when that fluidity gets stuck. Your system locks into hyperarousal (fight or flight), hypoarousal (collapse or shutdown), a blend of both (freeze), or oscillates rapidly between the two without finding its way back to a regulated middle ground. It's your nervous system basically saying, 'I don't know how to be with this and feel safe.'
The Window of Tolerance
Dr. Dan Siegel, a pioneer in interpersonal neurobiology, describes something called the "window of tolerance": the range of arousal in which your nervous system can function optimally. Within this window, you can:
Process information clearly
Make decisions with relative ease
Feel your emotions without being overwhelmed by them
Stay present in your body
Connect with others authentically
Respond to challenges with flexibility
Dysregulation is what happens when you move outside that window. Above it, you're in hyperarousal, i.e. anxious, angry, reactive, overwhelmed. Below it, you're in hypoarousal, i.e. numb, disconnected, collapsed, or even shut down.
And here's why this is important: The range of your window and your ability to return to it when you leave isn't about willpower or emotional strength. It's about what your nervous system learned was necessary for survival, and whether you've had the support and resources to expand that capacity.
The Science: Why Dysregulation Happens
To understand dysregulation, we need to understand how the autonomic nervous system works.
Polyvagal Theory and the Three Main States
Dr. Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory gives us a map for understanding how our nervous system responds to safety and threat.
Your autonomic nervous system has three primary pathways:
Ventral Vagal (Social Engagement System): This is your regulated state. When this pathway is active, you feel safe, connected, and capable. Your face is expressive, your voice has natural prosody (melodic quality), your heart rate is variable and responsive. You can think clearly, feel your emotions, and engage with others authentically.
Sympathetic (Mobilization System): This is your activation state: fight or flight. When this pathway dominates, your body is preparing for action. Your heart rate increases, your muscles tense, your breathing quickens, stress hormones flood your system. You're ready to defend yourself or run from danger.
Dorsal Vagal (Immobilization System): This is your shutdown state: freeze (blend of sympathetic and dorsal vagal), collapse, dissociation, shutdown. When this ancient pathway takes over, your body is conserving energy and protecting you through disconnection. You might feel numb, foggy, exhausted, or emotionally flat. It's as if your system has decided that if you can't fight or flee, the safest option is to disappear.
Neuroception: The Unconscious Detection of Safety and Threat
Here's what makes dysregulation so confusing: Your nervous system is constantly scanning for cues of safety and danger through a process called "neuroception", and this happens entirely outside your conscious awareness.
Your nervous system isn't waiting for your brain to logically assess whether something is actually dangerous. It's responding to sensory cues before you've even had a conscious thought about them.
This means you can be sitting in a completely safe environment and still experience dysregulation if your nervous system detects something that reminds it of past danger, as in a tone of voice, a facial expression, a sensation in your body, even a smell, sound, shape or color.
Your nervous system is operating on old data, applying protective responses that were adaptive in your past to situations in your present where they may no longer be necessary or helpful.
How Dysregulation Gets Encoded
Dysregulation doesn't appear out of nowhere. It develops through lived experience, particularly during critical developmental periods.
Early Attachment and Development
In the first few years of life, infants and young children cannot regulate their own nervous systems. They depend entirely on caregivers to help them move from distress to calm, from activation to rest.
When a baby cries and a caregiver responds with soothing presence, either holding them, speaking gently, or helping them settle, the child's nervous system learns: Distress is temporary. Help is available. I can return to calm.
Through thousands of these co-regulating experiences, children gradually develop the neural pathways for self-regulation. They internalize the caregiver's regulating presence and build the capacity to soothe themselves.
But when those co-regulating experiences are inconsistent, absent, or paired with threat, something different gets encoded.
If crying brought punishment, withdrawal, or more distress rather than comfort, the nervous system learns: Expressing my needs isn't safe. I'm alone in this. I need to find another way to survive.
The nervous system adapts by developing protective strategies: hypervigilance to prevent danger, emotional shutdown to avoid pain, constant activation to stay ready for threat, people-pleasing and even fawning to maintain connection and avoid danger.
These aren't conscious choices. They're survival adaptations that get wired into the nervous system at a deeply embodied level.
Trauma and Overwhelming Experience
Dysregulation also develops through experiences that overwhelm the nervous system's capacity to process and integrate what's happening.
This includes:
Single-incident trauma (accidents, assault, natural disasters)
Chronic stress or threat (ongoing abuse, neglect, unsafe environments)
Developmental trauma (attachment disruption, emotional neglect, parentification, lack of support)
Medical trauma (invasive procedures, chronic illness, hospitalization)
Systemic trauma (discrimination, oppression, marginalization)
When an experience is too much, too fast, or too intense for your nervous system to process, the survival response that was activated during that event can get stuck in your system.
Your body remains in a state of high alert or shutdown, as if the threat is still present, even years or decades after the event has passed.
Dr. Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, describes this as "incomplete survival responses", your nervous system began a protective response (fight, flight, freeze) but never had the opportunity to complete it, to discharge that activation, to receive the support needed to integrate what happened.
That unfinished business keeps your system dysregulated, constantly preparing for a threat that's no longer actually there.
The Cycle That Keeps Dysregulation Alive
Once dysregulation is established, it tends to perpetuate itself through a reinforcing cycle:
Trigger: Something in your present environment activates an old nervous system pattern
Dysregulated Response: You react from survival mode of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn
Misattribution: You (and others) interpret your response as a problem with your character or emotional control rather than recognizing it as a learned nervous system state
Shame and Judgment: You feel shame about your response, which creates more activation and dysregulation
Isolation: You withdraw from needed connection or support because you feel "too much", "bad", or "wrong"
Reinforcement: Your nervous system gets more evidence that it's alone and unsafe, which increases baseline dysregulation
This cycle is why understanding dysregulation matters so much. When you can recognize what's happening as a nervous system state rather than a personal failing or a problem, you interrupt the shame and judgment that keep the cycle going.
How Dysregulation Shows Up: The Many Faces of a Dysregulated Nervous System
Dysregulation doesn't look the same for everyone. It depends on which survival strategies your nervous system developed, what feels most familiar, and what worked to keep you safe in the past.
Here are the common patterns:
Physical Signs
Your body is always communicating its state. Dysregulation often appears first in physical symptoms:
Chronic tension: Jaw clenching, shoulder tightness, stomach knots that don't release even with stretching or massage
Sleep disruption: Difficulty falling asleep (hyperarousal), waking frequently, or sleeping too much without feeling rested (hypoarousal)
Digestive issues: IBS, nausea, constipation, diarrhea: your gut is intimately connected to your nervous system state with 80% of your vagus residing in your gut!
Chronic pain: Headaches, back pain, muscle aches without clear or direct physical cause
Fatigue: Exhaustion that rest doesn't resolve because your system is using enormous energy to maintain its defensive state
Immune dysregulation: Frequent illness, inflammation, autoimmune symptoms
Temperature dysregulation: Always cold or always hot, difficulty thermoregulating
These aren't separate issues to solve independently. They're all part of the same pattern: your nervous system stuck in survival mode, unable to allow your body to 'rest, digest, and restore.'
Emotional Patterns
Dysregulation shapes your emotional landscape in specific ways:
Emotional intensity that feels disproportionate: Small frustrations trigger rage, minor disappointments bring waves of grief
Emotional flatness: Feeling numb, disconnected, unable to access joy or sadness
Rapid emotional shifts: Moving from calm to anxious to angry to shut down within minutes
Persistent unease: A baseline feeling that something is wrong, even when nothing objectively is
Difficulty identifying feelings: Not being able to name what you're feeling beyond "good" or "bad"
Reactivity you don't recognize: Responses that surprise you, that don't feel like "you"
What's important to understand is that these aren't emotional problems to be fixed through positive thinking or cognitive reframing. They're nervous system states. Your emotions are reflecting what your autonomic nervous system is experiencing.
Cognitive and Mental Patterns
Dysregulation affects how your brain processes information:
Brain fog: Difficulty concentrating, remembering, or thinking clearly
Decision paralysis: Even small choices feel overwhelming or impossible
Rumination: Thoughts spinning in loops, unable to settle
Black-and-white thinking: Difficulty seeing nuance or holding complexity
Catastrophizing: Always expecting the worst possible outcome
Dissociation: Feeling detached from your thoughts, as if you're observing yourself from outside
Intrusive thoughts: Unwanted thoughts that appear without your intention
When your nervous system is in survival mode, your prefrontal cortex, i.e. the part of your brain responsible for executive function, planning, and complex thinking, goes partially offline. Blood flow is redirected to the more primitive parts of your brain focused on survival like your amygdala.
This is why you can't "think your way out of" dysregulation. Your thinking brain literally doesn't have full access when your nervous system perceives threat.
Relational and Behavioral Patterns
Dysregulation profoundly shapes how you relate to others and move through the world:
Hypervigilance in relationships: Constantly scanning for signs of rejection, judgment, or abandonment
Social withdrawal: Isolating because connection feels too risky, scary, or overwhelming
People-pleasing: Automatically accommodating others' needs while ignoring your own
Difficulty setting boundaries: Saying yes when you mean no, not knowing where you end and others begin
Explosive reactions: Snapping at people you care about, then feeling shame afterward
Pushing people away: Creating distance when you actually want closeness because vulnerability feels terrifying
Seeking constant reassurance: Needing repeated confirmation that you're okay, that the relationship is okay
Self-soothing through numbing: Using food, substances, screens, work, or other behaviors to escape uncomfortable internal states
These patterns aren't personality traits or relationship skills deficits. They're adaptations your nervous system developed to manage the overwhelm of dysregulation in connection with others.
The Fawn Response: A Lesser-Known Face of Dysregulation
Many people don't realize that people-pleasing, over-functioning, and difficulty saying no are actually trauma responses, what Pete Walker calls the "fawn" response.
When fight, flight, and freeze don't feel safe or available, some nervous systems adapt by trying to appease, please, or merge with others to avoid conflict or rejection.
This shows up as:
Automatically attending to others' needs before your own
Difficulty knowing what you actually want or need
Feeling responsible for others' emotions
Inability to say no even when you're overwhelmed
Merging with others' opinions or preferences
Losing yourself in relationships
The fawn response is the brain's translation of your nervous system's way of trying to maintain connection and safety by minimizing yourself and finding a way of relating to others that feel unsafe to you in a way that makes you appear safe to them. It's just as much a survival strategy as fight or flight, and just as exhausting to maintain.
Why We Don't Recognize Dysregulation
If dysregulation is so common and affects so many aspects of life, why don't we recognize it?
Several reasons:
We've Been Taught to Override Our Bodies
From childhood, many of us received messages that taught us to disconnect from our body's signals:
"Stop crying"
"You're fine"
"Don't be so sensitive"
"Toughen up"
"Just push through"
"I'll give you something to cry about"
"Go to your room."
We learned that our body's communication, in the form of distress, needs, limits, or boundaries, wasn't acceptable or couldn't be trusted. So we developed the ability to override those signals and keep functioning regardless of our internal state.
This disconnection from our body is so normalized in our culture that we don't even recognize it as disconnection. We think we're supposed to be able to override our body's needs indefinitely.
But when you've spent years or decades overriding your body's signals, you lose the ability to recognize what dysregulation feels like. It becomes your normal baseline.
Dysregulation Can Feel Like "Just Who I Am"
When you've been dysregulated for years or decades, it doesn't feel like a state you're in, it feels like who you are.
"I'm just an anxious person." "I'm naturally high-strung." "I've always been sensitive." "I'm not emotional." "I'm bad at relationships." "That's just the way I am."
These identity statements are often descriptions of long-term learned nervous system states that have become so familiar they feel like personality traits.
The possibility that you could feel different, that this isn't just "how you're wired," often doesn't even occur because you have no recent memory of what regulation feels like and how much better you could feel if you were self-regulated.
We Misattribute Our Responses
When we don't understand nervous system states, we attribute our responses to character flaws, emotional problems, or situational causes:
"I'm overreacting" (instead of: my nervous system is in hyperarousal)
"I'm being lazy" (instead of: my nervous system is in shutdown)
"I'm too sensitive" (instead of: my window of tolerance is narrow)
"I just need to try harder" (instead of: I need nervous system support or co-regulation)
This misattribution keeps us stuck in shame, self-judgment, and even self-punishment instead of understanding and addressing what's actually happening.
The Medical Model Misses It
Traditional medical and psychological approaches often pathologize dysregulation as separate disorders, like anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD, chronic pain, IBS, etc., without recognizing the underlying nervous system state connecting them all.
You might receive multiple diagnoses and treatments for symptoms that are all expressions of the same root issue: a nervous system stuck in survival mode.
This fragmented approach can lead to feeling like you're "broken or unfit in multiple ways" when really, your nervous system is doing exactly what it was trained to do.
The Non-Judgmental Lens: Understanding Your Survival Strategies
Everything we've talked about: the hypervigilance, the shutdown, the emotional intensity, the difficulty with connection, the physical symptoms; these are not problems to be ashamed of or to fix.
They are evidence that your nervous system learned to survive in conditions that required these adaptations. And when harnessed positively, they can become your superpowers.
Every pattern of dysregulation you experience was once, and maybe still is, a survival strategy that served a purpose.
If you scan constantly for danger, it's because there was a time when missing a threat had real consequences.
If you shut down easily, it's because there was a time when disappearing was safer than being seen.
If you react intensely to seemingly small things, it's because your nervous system learned that "small things" can escalate quickly and staying alert to early signs kept you safer.
If you can't say no, it's because there was a time when saying no risked connection, safety, or survival.
Your nervous system isn't broken or faulty. It's brilliant at the job it was given: Keep you alive.
The challenge is that the strategies that helped you survive in one context can become limiting or painful when your circumstances change. What once protected you might now be preventing you from experiencing the safety, connection, and ease that are actually available in your present life.
And that's okay. That makes complete sense.
Healing isn't about judging these strategies or forcing them away. It's about:
Recognizing them for what they are
Appreciating the role they played and thanking them for keeping you safe
Gradually helping your nervous system gather new data about what's actually safe now
Expanding your capacity to choose different responses when you're ready
This is why recognition comes before regulation. You can't work with your nervous system until you understand what it's doing and why.
What Recognition Makes Possible
When you begin to recognize dysregulation as a nervous system state rather than a personal failing, things begin to gradually shift.
Instead of thinking, "What's wrong with me?" you can ask, "What's my nervous system responding to?"
Instead of, "Why can't I just calm down?" you can wonder, "What does my nervous system need to feel safe enough to settle?"
Instead of, "I'm broken, I'm bad." you can recognize, "My nervous system is doing exactly what it learned to do. And I can help it learn something new."
This shift from judgment to curiosity, from shame to understanding, is the foundation of healing and transforming.
It doesn't make the dysregulation disappear immediately. But it changes your relationship to it. And that change in relationship is what creates space for nervous system transformation.
When you can recognize that you're in hyperarousal, you can first discharge the energy, complete the stress cycle, and then offer yourself grounding practices instead of pushing through.
When you notice you're moving into shutdown, you can reach for gentle movement or connection instead of disappearing completely.
When you catch yourself in a familiar survival pattern, you can pause and ask, "What does my nervous system need right now?" instead of spiraling into self-criticism.
Recognition is the essential first step. And it's a practice, not a one-time achievement.
Your nervous system spent years or decades learning these patterns. It will take time, patience, and consistent support and practice to help it update its programming.
But it's possible. Your nervous system remains neuroplastic, i.e. capable of creating new pathways and dissolving old ones, throughout your entire life.
The patterns that feel so fixed right now can shift. The window of tolerance that feels so narrow can expand. The baseline of dysregulation you've been carrying can gradually soften into regulation.
Not through willpower, trying harder, or attempting to 'fix' yourself, but through understanding what your nervous system needs and learning to work with it, not against it.
What Comes Next: From Recognition to Regulation
This post has been about understanding dysregulation: what it is, why it happens, how it shows up, and why recognizing it matters.
But understanding is just the beginning.
In our next post, we'll be diving into self-regulation: the practices, tools, and approaches that help your nervous system move from dysregulation back into your window of tolerance and gradually expand that window over time.
We'll explore:
What your nervous system actually needs to feel safe
Specific practices for different types of dysregulation
How to work with your body's signals instead of overriding them
Ways to expand your capacity gradually and sustainably
How to navigate the inevitable moments when you move outside your window
Because the goal isn't to never experience dysregulation again. That's not realistic for humans living in complex, often challenging circumstances.
The goal is to:
Recognize when you're dysregulated sooner
Have tools to support yourself back into regulation
Understand what situations or relationships push you outside your window
Gradually expand your capacity to handle stress and challenge
Develop the internal and external resources your nervous system needs
You deserve to feel regulated more often than not. You deserve to experience your body as a place of safety rather than constant alert. You deserve relationships where connection feels possible instead of threatening.
And you deserve to understand that none of this is your fault, and all of it can change for the better.
If what you've read here resonates, if you're recognizing patterns in yourself that you've struggled with for years without understanding why, I want you to know that this is part of the human experience and to be gentle with yourself as you begin to repattern your dysregulation. Your nervous system's responses all make sense and have a reason for being. And there is a path forward.
Join us starting December 1st, 2025 as we move from understanding dysregulation to practicing regulation together.
Because just like dysregulation often develops in relationship, regulation is most powerful when we do it in connection with others who understand the journey.
Learn more about the upcoming self-regulation campaign and join our community at restplaylove.com
BEAUTIFUL HUMAN www.restplaylove.com
