How Can You Escape Survival Mode to Unlock Sustainable High Performance?

Why Does Relying on External Validation Destroy Your Intrinsic Motivation?

Shift from surviving to thriving with insights from Steve Magness’s Win the Inside Game. Learn to overcome burnout, disconnect self-worth from external achievements, and master the physiological strategies that free you to perform at your peak.

Ready to stop fighting your own nervous system and start winning? Continue reading to discover the specific “recess” techniques that high performers use to maintain excellence without burning out.

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Although people are becoming increasingly digitally connected, many individuals have become severely disconnected from themselves. Combined with a productivity-obsessed work culture, the result is widespread burnout and, for many, a crisis of meaning. Performance coach Steve Magness proposes an antidote: Invest time in developing a healthy sense of self-worth and intrinsic motivation. He offers cognitive and physiological strategies to help you shift out of survival mode, start thriving, and unlock your full potential.

Take-Aways

• Many people live in survival mode, missing out on growth and meaning, due to the pressures of modern life.
• The common belief that hard work is virtuous can obstruct happiness.
• Discover intrinsic motivation — and a career that will provide satisfaction — by making space for playful exploration.
• Grant yourself self-acceptance and compassion, and embrace the messiness of life.
• Learn to recast failures and losses as opportunities for learning and growth.
• Surround yourself with people, objects, and environments that support your growth.
• Find more freedom and authenticity by disrupting the state of fear.

Summary

Many people live in “survival mode,” missing out on growth and meaning, due to the pressures of modern life.

Struggling under the strains of modern life, many people feel trapped in a fight for survival. But living in “survival mode” — that is, a gnawing feeling that threats surround you — hampers growth and can undermine a sense that life has meaning. When danger seems to lurk everywhere, the human fight, flight, flee, and freeze responses activate. In pursuit of self-preservation, people react in one of four ways:

1. “Avoid or shut down” — Many people eschew challenging situations rather than seek ways to make them better.
2. “Fight and defend” — Others might become defensive, reacting to challenges or disagreement by fighting and defending their position at all costs rather than attempting to find common ground.
3. “Narrow and cling” — For many, the world can start to shrink as they engage only with the narratives, ideas, people, and things that reinforce their existing worldview.
4. “Accept, explore, and update” — Alternatively, people can approach perceived threats with curiosity and a learning mindset, incorporating the new information into their mental models.

“We now occupy a world that is too big for our minds to handle. We live in a time where every single day we have reminders that we aren’t good enough.”

Survival mode takes hold when important needs go unmet, and the key to shifting out of it — and thriving instead — is to recognize those needs and ensure they’re met. According to existential psychologist Tatjana Schnell, the following four qualities are essential to enjoying a meaningful life:

1. Coherence — Your life narrative makes sense to you, and you feel that your life “adds up.”
2. Significance — You feel your life matters. This includes feeling both personally empowered and valued by others.
3. Purpose — You have set goals that seem attainable and that will lead to some greater purpose.
4. Belonging — You feel your narrative intersects with those of others and that you belong to a larger group.

Unfortunately, coherence, significance, purpose, and belonging can feel elusive in the modern world. Social media platforms encourage people to present curated, inauthentic versions of themselves, which can trigger unhealthy self-comparisons. Today’s productivity-obsessed work culture doesn’t leave much room for a sense of higher purpose. And superficial online interactions — which have replaced in-person interactions for many people — fail to foster a deep sense of belonging.

The common belief that hard work is virtuous can obstruct happiness.

A chief factor contributing to unhappiness in the modern world stems from the Protestant notion that hard work is a virtue. In 1905, German sociologist Max Weber attributed the growth of capitalism in the United States to American Protestants’ work ethic. Today, American society continues to venerate hard work, and this belief burdens people with the notion that they must drive themselves hard to be good people. Americans grow up hearing that the key to happiness lies in external achievement and accolades, but for many, the American Dream — that is, the belief in success through hard work — is a delusion.

“We now occupy a world that is too big for our minds to handle. We live in a time [when] every single day we have reminders that we aren’t good enough.”

“Virtue-izing” external achievement has hampered people’s ability to experience happiness, engendered an outsized focus on outcomes, and caused many people to adopt a stance of strategic self-interest. Some degree of striving is important to foster growth and development, but an unhealthy fixation on external indicators of success can lead to poorer performance, feelings of stress and anxiety, and ultimately burnout. Research shows that allowing extrinsic motivations to direct your drive can have highly detrimental effects on a person’s overall well-being.

To thrive, prioritize your intrinsic motivations and do what matters to you rather than simply pushing yourself to compete with others. Stop connecting your self-worth to external indicators of success, such as your job title or your salary, and seek a life path that aligns with your authentic values.

Discover intrinsic motivation — and a career that will provide satisfaction — by making space for playful exploration.

High performance emanates from intense work and commitment, which can grow only from an internal drive that manifests at the intersection of interest, motivation, and talent. Through play, children naturally explore various interests, often becoming obsessed for periods of time. They allow themselves to dabble in various areas, discovering what brings them joy and probing their identity. As people grow older, they often feel a need to choose a particular path. Commitment is a healthy step, as it allows a person to explore an interest more deeply and translate knowledge into action. However, many people become rigidly attached to a narrow identity, which can provide stability and rewards but eventually lead to feelings of missing out. If not addressed, this can result in a full-blown crisis of meaning.

“Adulthood might be great, but the key to mastering the balance between breadth and depth is not to leave our inner child behind.”

This existential crisis, triggered by the individual’s sense of unmet potential, is often accompanied by depression, anxiety, and an increased likelihood of developing health issues such as immune-related illnesses. Individuals who hold themselves to a standard of excellence are particularly vulnerable to a crisis of meaning, because they often experience early success in their career, leading them to chase external rewards more than internal ones.

Achieve sustainable excellence by bringing some childlike exploration back into your life. Seek a balance between exploration and commitment, alternate between narrowing and broadening your focus, and be wary of success that might lead you to cement a commitment for the wrong reasons. When joy in an activity that you’ve embraced begins to fade, return to exploring. Even when you’re working in a field you love, block out daily times for “recess” — moments when you can go off task and explore new ideas and activities unrelated to your current projects.

Grant yourself self-acceptance and compassion, and embrace the messiness of life.

Life rarely progresses the way you imagined it would when you were young. The journey turns out to be full of unexpected detours and disappointments. Three practices can help you embrace the messiness and complexity of your journey:

1. “Accept with self-compassion” — Rather than let your inner critic dominate your thoughts, work to cultivate self-compassion. According to clinical psychologists Neil Clapton and Syd Hiskey, self-compassion is built on a foundation of wisdom and courage. Wisdom is the capacity to take discerning actions to alleviate suffering, and courage is a willingness to meet distress head-on, tolerate it, and engage with it.
2. “Be someone” — The motto “be someone” encourages you to hold onto a core sense of yourself that will endure even when you’re confronted with a failure or setback. Your sense of self-worth derives from the belief that you’re competent and that your life has meaning. Seek meaning from diverse sources, such as hobbies or volunteering — not just your professional role.
3. “Integrate the messiness” — When you craft an empowering narrative of your journey, you’ll have more resilience to face adversity. Writing your life narrative can help you explore, understand, confront, and integrate your experiences. Research from social psychologist James Pennebaker shows a correlation between writing about traumatic experiences and increased resilience and stress management. Writing about difficult life experiences can also boost feelings of overall well-being, while reducing depressive symptoms and activating the region in the brain associated with the processing of negative emotions.

Learn to recast failures and losses as opportunities for learning and growth.

If you fear failure, you’re in good company: It’s natural for humans to compete with one another, and status-seeking behaviors are present in all human societies. As Will Storr, author of The Status Game, explains, people tend to achieve status in three ways: through competence, virtue, or dominance. A loss can threaten all three, and the ensuing reduction in status can feel devastating. This is especially the case if a failure or loss occurs in public, causing humiliation. Humiliated individuals can experience extremely low self-worth and question whether they belong in competitive social arenas at all. Professor James Gilligan refers to humiliation as “an annihilation of the self.”

Given that today’s world barrages people with a constant stream of losses, assaults on their status, and even humiliation — often on the public stage of social media — learning to lose well is imperative. Losing well means accepting a loss and learning from it rather than throwing a tantrum or shutting down. Losing well doesn’t mean you don’t care; rather, it means you care enough about yourself to move through the experience with grace and derive the benefits that failure has to offer.

“If we let it, failure brings clarity. It peels back the layers of pretense, cutting through our protective self-deceptions, so that we can see our self and pursuits as they are.”

Learning to lose well also helps you to win better. Research shows that losers who have emotional outbursts or avoid challenges after a loss are also likely to retreat and become self-protective after a win, avoiding future challenges that could lead to growth opportunities. Moreover, losers who behave aggressively after losing are also likely to attempt to dominate other players after winning. Tactics such as reframing can help you view losing as part of your learning and growth journey. Try evaluating your performance on a continuum rather than viewing success and failure as binary opposites.

Surround yourself with people, objects, and environments that support your growth.

To exit survival mode, you need to downregulate your nervous system, and creating an environment that gives you a sense of home and safety will help you do that. Research shows the profound effects of a person’s physical environment on performance. For example, Peter Barrett and his team at the University of Salford demonstrated a correlation between academic performance and the quality of students’ school environment.

Similarly, organizational behavior professor Markus Baer found that in workplaces, when study participants spent just 20 minutes making their offices feel more like home before engaging in negotiations, their performance improved by as much as 160%. Making your workplace feel like home creates what psychologists call psychological ownership, which, in turn, supports emotional needs for identity, belonging, and safety. In other words, when your environment makes it easy for you to be who you are, you’ll feel better and perform better.

“The environment we live and work in, the objects we hold on to, and the people around us signal whether we are safe, belong, or have a future path available.”

Leverage these insights by taking steps to make the environments you live, learn, and work in feel more inviting. This might look like placing objects in your environment that remind you of what you value most — for example, photos of your family or a notebook to nudge you to take time to write. Surround yourself with people you admire, too; these individuals can serve as role models, reminding you of your values and aspirations. Spend time with people with whom you feel a meaningful connection, seeking out those who genuinely align with your values. Cultivate relationships that feel “expansive,” promoting your learning and growth.

Find more freedom and authenticity by disrupting the state of fear.

Not all strategies for getting unstuck are cognitive. In situations where your fight, flight, or freeze response gets triggered, you’ll need to regain a sense of calm before you can choose the best path forward. To reset your nervous system, use a physiological technique to disrupt the triggered state. This could be as simple as taking a deep breath. For a more intense experience, plunging your head into a tub of cold water will activate the brain’s diving reflex, reducing your heart rate.

If you find yourself stuck in a state of fear, and your fears aren’t actually life-threatening, consider deliberately confronting them. For example, if you’re afraid of embarrassment, dress in a ridiculous outfit and go out in public wearing it. After surviving temporary feelings of embarrassment, you’ll naturally start reframing this form of social rejection as less of a threat.

“When you stop acting like you are a middle schooler trying to fit in, you get the freedom to fulfill your potential.”

People expend a great deal of time and energy anticipating danger when no significant threats are present, often because they give too much weight to specific external outcomes. By reducing your attachment to specific outcomes and approaching life with more openness, you can stop living in a fearful, protective, and defensive state and start thriving. When you give yourself permission to let go and embrace change, you’ll begin to grow and adapt, form more genuine relationships, and free yourself to achieve goals that align with your authentic self.

About the Author

Performance coach Steve Magness has coached Olympic runners, major-league professional athletic teams, and Fortune 500 executives. His books include Do Hard Things and The Science of Running. He is co-host of the Growth Equation and On Coaching podcasts.