When You're Always Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop
Sometimes you’re living life in survival mode
There are so many reasons our minds can go into overdrive, always on high alert, living in survival mode. My clients often express this as feeling like constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, hyper aware of what could go wrong.
Sometimes this is because your brain is naturally wired to worry. There may be a bit of a genetic predisposition that goes along with high intuition, analytical thinking, and emotional attunement. When you're a person who notices everything, it can be hard to filter things out and just feel relaxed in the present.
Very often this feeling of always waiting for the other shoe to drop comes in the aftermath of an experience where you felt blindsided. If you survived an event in which you felt intensely overwhelmed or frighteningly out of control, your survival instinct clicks into place to protect you. Sometimes this is a significant single event trauma, and sometimes this is a more subtle experience like growing up in a home with longstanding patterns of unpredictability over time.
Your brain is designed to keep you safe
Whatever the reason that set this way of thinking in motion, ultimately it happened because your brain is just trying to protect you. All of our experiences have a powerful impact on our brain, actually wiring up neural networks that become filters for how we see the world and perceive the things that happen to us day to day. When we've had experiences that felt threatening to us in any way, our brains amp up their natural design to help us survive, leaving us in a continual feeling of fight or flight if those experiences aren't processed and healed.
The good news is that our brains are always capable of rewiring. Creating new experiences that are positive has just as powerful of an impact as the negative experiences that we endure. Certain approaches to therapy, like EMDR, are immensely helpful in allowing this rewiring to happen naturally and efficiently. Our goal is to understand and partner with your brain's innate drive to keep you safe, and activate your brain's innate ability to heal.
Understanding your amazing amygdala
Your amygdala is a very tiny yet very powerful part of your brain that helps protect you by sensing danger and activating your fight or flight response. Ordinarily your amygdala picks up on potential threats in your environment and your prefrontal cortex, the rational, thinking part of your brain, helps filter out what's an actual threat and what's not. There are two situations where this filter shuts down...
First, when there's an actual threat and your hardwired survival response is needed to protect your life and safety...
Second, when you encounter something in the present that your brain associates with a negative experience from the past, even if it's not an actual threat in the here and now.
The first situation happens naturally and doesn't really need our assistance to work as it should. "Waiting for the other shoe to drop" happens when we think, either consciously or unconsciously, that we have to watch what happens vigilantly to make sure we don't get blindsided with something threatening. But the reality is, whether we're watching vigilantly or letting our guard down, the exact same thing will happen when we face a threat... our amygdala will bypass our thinking brain and automatically activate our survival response to protect us.
Sometimes it helps to know this. Even if you relax, even if you let your guard down, your brain and your body know exactly what to do in the face of danger. Your amygdala will react in the moment whether you were on guard or not. If it feels impossible to relax and let your guard down, then you're likely stuck in the second scenario. Something happened in the past that isn't completely resolved, and your brain keeps picking up on things it registers as triggers in the present, bringing the unhealed past to the forefront over and over again. If this is where you're at, it is not where you have to stay. In the aftermath of trauma we can get stuck in a fight or flight state, but therapy can provide a clear path to get un-stuck and reclaim your life.
