Are You Running An Outdated Version of Safety?

Viktor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor, psychotherapist + founder of Logotherapy

Unless you’ve been happily living under a rock, you’ll have noticed that the idea of staying safe has been gaining a lot of traction in the collective consciousness over the last couple of years.

From the perspective of the nervous system, this is interesting.

You probably already know that when under threat, our nervous systems jump to the Flight, Fight, Freeze or Fawn response, depending on the situation we’re in. When our lives are in clear + present danger — as in there’s absolutely no shadow of a doubt that something definitively life threatening is moving towards us right now — these instinctive responses are adaptive and serve an evolutionary purpose. The rush of adrenaline + cortisol mobilizes us to act accordingly in order to get away from the threat and towards safety — we don’t need to stop, think and analyze.

Once safe, our systems have the space to regulate, and eventually go back to a state of balance or homeostasis. This stage of regulation and repair is essential to our health (wholeness) and well-being because if we’re in a perpetual state of feeling under threat and unsafe, of constantly being flooded by the stress hormone of cortisol, and putting excessive, inflammatory pressure on our adrenal glands, we create imbalance + dis-ease in our bodies + systems.