The Four Questions of Survival

We spend a lot of time talking about happiness, purpose, achievement, success, finding love, and all of the things that make life rich and exciting. But all of those things are secondary to the primary driver all living things have, the most primary instinct that exists within every living creature: survival.

Let’s frame survival around four foundational questions that begin the moment we are born. In this episode, I will show you how the answers we develop to these questions become responsible for how we show up and respond to situations throughout our entire lives.

Those four questions are:

• How do I stay safe?
• How do I avoid pain?
• How do I build connection?
• How do I earn reward?

All four exist in service of one objective: survival.

Make sure to check out the new FREE mental wellness program, The Optimal Life, available at https://elliotbarnett.com and the newly released mobile app, The Optimal Life, available on the App Store and Play Store, as well as the certifications for Cognitive Response Therapy and the ARAEt framework that can be found on the site. It is time to usher in the new era of mental health and make mental health affordable, accessible, and effective for everyone.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Welcome to the Optimal Life Podcast. My name is Ellie Barnett, and I am excited to have you here today to talk about what I consider an interesting way of conceptualizing the four survival strategies that kind of quietly build your life from birth. So kind of a big statement there, but we're gonna go into detail about that. But before I get started, do have a couple of really exciting announcements. So I have finally finished putting out the Optimal Life program. This is going to be a free program for anybody that wants to pursue living an optimal life, living a life that is full of purposeful meaning, aligned towards success milestones, living a better life is within your reach, but it takes effort and a strategy. I have taken everything that I have learned over the past 25 years that have built cognitive response therapy that came out of those original research studies and that laid the foundation for cognitive response therapy and the array framework. I've put it all into a self-directed online training. There's uh it'll all be on elliottbrannette.com as well as by the time this gets published, it probably should be out on the app store. But I actually have the Optimal Life app now. It'll be on the App Store as well as Google Play very soon if it's not there already. But please search for it and find it. So you'll have access to the program for free. And this is my way of making sure that we can move the mental health industry in the right direction, making mental health affordable, accessible, and effective for everyone that wants to live a better life, their optimal life. Okay, let's get into it. So the four survival strategies that quietly built who you are from birth. So, what are we talking about? I have talked a lot about the purpose and intent of the unconscious mind and your overall nervous system. The role of your unconscious mind is to move you away from threat and towards safety. It's all about survival, not thriving, but survival to keep you alive. So we spent a lot of time thinking about happiness, purpose, achievement, success, finding love, all of the things that make life rich and exciting and worth living. But all of those, of course, are secondary to the primary instinct that drives every living creature, which is survival. Every living organism follows the same basic cycle. The organism is born, it survives long enough to reproduce and eventually dies. That is, every living organism goes through that cycle. And the main intent, of course, is to perpetuate the species through procreation. Arguably, the more, of course, the more complex the organism, the more complex that cycle is from birth to death. And arguably, humans are the most complex organisms on earth, making that journey that we follow particularly complex and of course very intricate. But ultimately, it is just that. It's born, procreate, and die. And uh, most of this is, of course, you know, uh familiar to you, but I'd like to talk a little bit about what survival really means and think about it, conceptualize it a little bit differently. I want to frame survival around sort of four foundational questions that begin the moment that you are born. In many ways, the answers we develop to these questions become responsible for how we show up and respond to life throughout our lives. And we'll talk a little bit about the mental core and how the mental core is a found the foundation for who we are. But those four questions that I'm talking about is how do I stay safe? How do I avoid pain? How do I build connections and relationships? And how do I earn reward? Those four things are all in service to our survival. And the way that we answer these questions along the experiences that we've accumulated and over our lives, they gradually build what we call our mental core. Their mental core is a conceptualization of our psychological structure, what makes us who we are. It's the essence of who we are. Just like your physical core is the center of your physical strength, stability, and balance, your mental core is the center of your mental strength, stability, and balance. All of our experiences are accumulated into, of course, our memories, and the mental core is just a representation of how of the of our memories, of our beliefs, our values, our attributes, positive and negative. So, of those four questions, how do I stay safe? How do I avoid pain? How do I build relationships, a connection, how do I earn reward? Let's talk those, let's talk through those together. So, first, how do I stay safe? That's the very first and most obvious question. How do I stay safe? Safety, of course, comes in different forms. There's physical safety, emotional safety, psychological safety, and social safety. But from the moment that we are born, we begin responding to the world and the world responds back to us. A baby cries, and someone comes to comfort the baby, or they don't. Those, of course, are very different experiences for that baby. And it teaches the baby something very fundamental about the world that they live in. What kind of world do I live in? And having these basic responses to the world and responses back teach them about their world. Am I physically safe? Can I depend on others? Will my needs be met? My basic needs for safety. Are they able to be met? If you have a parent who is physically abusive, physical safety, of course, is therefore threatened. So you're learning about the world through uh through your experiences, and it's teaching you, if the parent is abusive, that the world is not a safe place and your survival is ultimately threatened. If a child's basic needs aren't consistently met, food, comfort, sleep, protection, all the basic things that that make that baby feel safe, those experiences become part of that child's understanding of the world and ultimately, again, part of what builds their psychological structure, which drives the rest of their life. So the child isn't simply sort of experiencing events in their life. They're the child is building this foundation for what will end up being what predicts what the predictions the nervous system generates about the world. And and we'll talk a little bit about predictions a little bit later, but your nervous system is built based on predictions. It's trying to guess what's going to happen next. Because, of course, again, all of it comes back to survival. So that's the first step on our journey is understanding that safety comes first, and the teaching the baby and the child about the world around through the experiences, the world that they live around them, teaches them how safe they are and how likely they are if they're if they're going to survive, and what strategies they need to employ in order to stay safe. The next one is to avoid pain. Of course, pain to me is very fascinating because we often think of only physical pain, but of course, pain is also emotional pain. But they really activate the same brain system. So physical and emotional pain, those sensations that we feel when we're distressed. So those are those emotional pain signals. Remember, in if you've listened to my previous podcast, when we talked a little bit about emotions and sensations, sensations of the body, feelings uh are something that we label as an emotion. So those feelings just we label those with emotional words like anxiety, stress, uh, anger, fear, these are these are emotional words that we assign to the sensations of the body. So we but ultimately the pain is just a signal something's wrong. It's a it's a way of it's information, it's a way for our brain to communicate to us to say, hey, I need you to move away from something. If if you put your hand near a hot stove, you're unconscious, your nervous system immediately kicks in. You don't consciously think to move your hand away. It's just it's an avoidance of pain, and it says, No, I need you to move immediately move away from that hot stove. So pain is is an immediate signal that something is wrong, and I need and the nervous system saying, I need you to make some changes, I need you to do something right away. So just pain is information. Pain creates avoidance. This is very important. So if pain creates avoidance, avoidance, of course, is adaptive. This is it's it's adaptive. If you're if you if you don't avoid pain, then you're putting your safety at risk. That's the first one, which puts ultimately your survival at risk. So if you're not learning from the this the information that you've received from experiencing pain, both emotional and physical pain, then you put your safety at risk, which puts your survival at risk. If you think about it from a child's standpoint, it's really interesting because children, you see a child cry when they get hurt. Now, when's the last time as an adult you cried from getting hurt? Uh probably I can't remember the last time I did. Uh adults don't normally cry. Why? Well, because you experience, you know, you stub your toe and hurts, but you know that five or ten seconds later it's gonna subside, and in a couple minutes, it's probably gonna be gone. You're not gonna experience it anymore. As a child, they and they experience it intensely, but they don't understand the transient nature of pain, that it comes and goes. So it they feel like it's gonna persist and insist. It's gonna persist moving forward. So they don't understand that it's that it's gonna come and go and subside and go away ultimately. So that uh so so as a child, there's even more of a deployed strategy to avoid pain at all costs in a lot of ways. Of course, you know, children don't have the the understanding of consequences as as anybody of a toddler understands, that they don't understand uh consequences, but once they experience something, they are very quick to avoid that in the in the future. So that that sort of that feeling of permanency is really something that that uh that starts to teach the child that these adaptive strategies of avoiding pain uh need to be deployed. But that uh and the you know this the these traumatic experiences, of course, this is the root of trauma. When you have traumatic experiences, it teaches the nervous system that certain situations are extremely dangerous and that need to be avoided at all costs. So as you've experienced, if people experience these painful traumatic experiences, the nervous system becomes dysregulated and overreacts to anything that signals that it could potentially be similar to that traumatic event. So there, again, these adaptive responses can become over time maladaptive. This is really where things like social anxiety come from. You're you're avoiding going into a social situation because there's a maladaptive fear response to to this uh what is perceived as a painful sensation of the body, which is this stress response. And you're avoiding going to a social situation, but of course, there's no actual physical threat to your survival. But because over time these adaptive responses have become maladaptive, then this is the root of anxiety challenges with people that that they have that get overwhelmed by anxiety and stress, and they get pulled away from even opportunities because of the of the uh dysregulated nervous system uh that has been sort of conditioned in from those early childhood experiences. So that so that's really that's a pain. Uh these strategies have of course helped the person survive, but can actually cause a lot of issues uh uh when you when you become an adult. So we've gone. So that that is uh that is staying safe and avoiding pain. The next one, of course, is is building relationships, building connections. Of course, humans are incredibly social animals, we're social creatures throughout our history. That sense of belonging and connection meant everything. Our ancestors, the greatest punishment to our ancestors was not imprisonment, it was banishment. It was being sent out from the tribe, the safety of the tribe. The connections that uh a person had in these early tribes were absolutely crucial. It was the way that everybody survived in what in during a time that was very, very challenging. You can imagine thousands of years ago, you know, we have all these luxuries now that didn't exist then. So you could imagine how challenging it would be to do that on your own. So when you're a child, you're thrown into this world and you respond into the world, the world responding back, and you're starting to say, Am I safe here? How do I avoid pain? But really, what it comes down to is how do who's on my side, who protects me, who who helps me feel safe and keeps me safe, who helps me avoid pain. And so it's this, it's this exploration that a child goes through to understand who is my tribe, who do I belong to? Our brains are wired to recognize the people that we can depend on, that we can we can turn to in times of struggle and challenge, and who will be on our side and have our back. So we naturally build strong attachments with caregivers, of course, with close family members. There's of course a very strong biological uh connection here. There's been a lot of studies with genetic connections of you know, of closer, the closer uh the um the genetics are, the more likely you are to feel the connections with people. So obviously, full blood relatives versus partial blood relatives versus no familiar connections. So those are all related here. So so we are wired to not only look to our tribe, but look to, of course, who is genetically connected, biologically connected to us, and who we can rely on to cover our survival, uh, who is helping us keep us safe, who do we turn to to avoid pain and help us to deal with painful experiences. The last one is how do I earn reward? So how do I earn approval? This again strengthens connection. If I if I go into this world and I say, well, who who recognizes that I've done something good? Uh who do I turn to when I when when something goes well, who receives what I've done, an action of of some kind and accepts that action in some positive way? And and who gives me approval when I when I seek approval, who gives me that approval? That is a signal to a child of who is in my tribe? Who do can I depend on? So uh, you know, ultimately, chill childhood is a giant experiment of again safety, pain, avoidance of pain, building connection, but earning rewards. So when I cry, what what happened? When I smiled, what happened? When I obeyed somebody, did something that somebody asked of me, what happened? When I pushed back on something, what happened? If I spoke up, what happened? I mean, these are the experiments that children are running when they're uh all the way from birth. Well, maybe not from birth, but as they start to become more aware, uh, of course, as a baby, they're just sort of reacting and responding to the world and trying to figure it out from a very primitive standpoint. But once you hit toddlerhood and on, they're really running an experience to understand how do I interact with this world? How do I build these connections? Who's there for me? Who's and and how do I, what kind of responses do I get back from this world based on certain behaviors that I put out into the world? So every one of those responses that I that that I get back teaches the child something. Wer certain behaviors receive approval, our brain concludes, well, I need to keep doing that. That seemed to work. So the this behavior seems to keep me safe and it reinforces those survival strategies. And we have to, of course, be very careful with this because ultimately, when we are building our mental core, all these countless experiments have built that foundation. Because as I respond to the world and the world responds back to me, I've started to build expectations of the world. I start to understand what do I expect of this world and what does the world expect of me? And as I experience, as the baby experiences more and the child experiences more over time, they start to build beliefs and values. What do I believe about this world and what do I value in this world? And this builds our mental core. Our mental core is, again, the seat of our beliefs, our values, our attributes, our strengths, our weaknesses, our struggles. Everything is within your mental core. It's a it's a way to conceptualize the accumulated psychological structure that drives how you respond to life. It represents all of the essence of who you are, what motivates you and what drives you in this world. So again, if you think about, you know, we're we're everything's about survival. We've figured out how to stay safe, how to avoid pain, how to build connection with people, how to understand how to seek reward and gain that reward to strengthen those connections. So then we say to ourselves, okay, well, what when when do these go awry? When do these not go well? Well, when survival becomes a problem, well, these strategies become a problem, it's because, again, these are an accumulation over time. You have to remember everything that I just said happens in your early childhood. So you're accumulating a mental core that drives how you show up and respond to life. Your beliefs, your values, your attributes, good and bad and indifferent. But none of that you designed. You all I mean, think about how many experiences you had in your early childhood. I mean, a lot. I mean, how many do you remember? Not very many. So that means that your mental core, the essence of who you are, what drives how you show up and respond to life, is just an accumulation of your experiences. Remember, it's just your memories, right? Mental core is just a way to conceptualize those memories. But it's just an accumulation. You didn't design it. So when we look at these different categories like avoiding pain, so avoiding pain becomes I avoid conflict. When we seek approval, you're becoming a people pleaser. When you stay safe, you don't take risks. When you're focused on building connections, you fear rejection. If you're seeking reward all the time, then you are then you're dependent on external validation. So these adaptive responses that have that have driven you in your life can become maladaptive to your success. Now remember, this has been adaptive for your survival because you're you're alive. This is why change, by the way, is so is so uh challenging. Because you're so far, whatever you've been doing, no matter how depressed, upset, how much you've struggled, how how unsuccessful you feel, no matter what your life is like now, the fact is you are alive. So as far as your nervous system goes, as far as your unconscious goes, it's working. So whatever strategies you're deploying right now, it will hold on to because it's working right now, which means that so far you've been surviving. Remember, all these instincts, everything that's been driving you and the accumulation of your mental core, and ultimately what I'll get into in a moment is predictions. The this is all in service of your surviving, not thriving in your life, not becoming massively successful, but just surviving. So to change, to say, to come along and saying, Well, now I'm gonna I want to live a different life, so I'm gonna make some changes. This is why a structured program like the Optimal Life program, that's why I was so passionate about it, because it gives you structure and a strategy to push through and overcome the challenge of change, which I talk about in the program, and how to recognize maladaptive. Patterns of behavior and address the essence of who you are, which is your mental core. Because your nervous system, like I mentioned before, and I'll touch on a little bit more now, is is based on predictions. It's trying to guess what you need to do next and what's going to happen next. And the predictions are something your nervous system is constantly generating, and it's based on the state of your body, what I call in my research, the response state of your body. It collects all the information from the outside world and then pulls from your memories, which pulls from your mental core. It's parts of your mental core that reinforce these predictions and drive these predictions that ultimately drive how you show up and respond to life's situation. So now you're trying to make changes and you're disrupting these predictions, which causes a stress response in the body. Anytime a prediction is wrong, the nervous system says, Oh, I got it wrong. That's a stress response. It's actually positive because that means you're learning something, but again, your nervous system isn't interested in necessarily learning something or thriving. It's it's first and foremost interested in your survival. Seeking uh opportunity and growing and learning always is secondary to survival. So, and this is of course uh part of our evolutionary past. So we always want to come back to the your nervous system, always wants to come back to the familiar. It's not necessarily the comfort zone, it's the familiar zone. Comfort, it will be okay with a little bit of discomfort if that keeps you safe as far as your survival goes, because typically a little bit of discomfort is okay versus taking some risk and and disrupting these patterns that have been so far demonstrated to be effective in keeping you alive. So we have to move from just surviving to actually thriving. And the way, of course, we do that is through something like the mental uh the uh the optimal life program and cognitive response therapy and the rate framework and all these great strategies that that we have at labarnette.com and and now the mobile app, the optimal life mobile app, is we have to restructure our mental core. Of course, we have to overcome the introspection illusion, which basically just says you just you don't really know yourself as well as you need to in order to make these changes. Because remember, you accumulated this over time, right? So you you you're not even really aware of what's within your mental core, what's driving you in your life. So first we have to deploy a strategy to help you understand yourself better. Then you start to restructure your mental core to understand how to disrupt these negative patterns in your life and start to take those, what has been adaptive for your survival, but not adaptive for your success, start to replace those with more positive uh patterns and more positive, well, more positive aspects of your mental core, which drives more positive patterns in your life and more positive responses. So that's the whole structure of the program. But that's really the what I wanted to cover today is the idea of everything is wired into survival and the conceptualization of understanding that it's really about staying safe, avoiding pain, building those connections and getting rewarded from early childhood have has all those strategies that you've accumulated from birth carry over into your adulthood and they persist unless you deploy a strategy to directly address first off identify those strategies, then address those strategies by examining your mental core, restructuring your mental core, learning more about yourself, disrupting those patterns and influencing your unconscious and reconditioning your nervous system. Remember, all this has just been conditioned into your nervous system through those experiences. But what I tell everybody is whatever has been conditioned in can be conditioned out. It just takes effort and a strategy. So that's what I offer, of course, at LABrineNet.com. All for free, of course. This Optimalife program is for free. And of course, there's certifications there now for the professionals or coaches out there that want to learn how to teach others about cognitive response therapy or the arate framework. There are uh certification programs now. So I really hope that you'll go check that out and let me know if there's anything that I can do to help. I'm excited about the upcoming uh podcast that we'll have in the future. I'll be rolling out a few more in the coming weeks. And uh please reach out anytime. You can reach out to me through ellebrandet.com, and I will see you next time.