I have been in survival hijack mode for the past two weeks.
I say this as someone who teaches self-regulation for a living.
My brain did exactly what it was designed to do. Some unexpected news derailed my predictions about the future. And when that happens, the prediction organ does not pause to check whether it has the credentials to respond. It just responds.
For me, survival hijack mode looks like this: I freeze. I find it difficult to make decisions. My energy goes into rebuilding predictions, trying to re-map what the future might look like. The result is exhaustion and, if I am honest, a fair amount of shame.
I should be able to handle this. I know the neuroscience.
But here is what I have been sitting with this week: self-regulation capacity is not unlimited. When the brain is in a state of genuine overwhelm, the self-regulation muscle fatigues. That is not a failure of knowledge or skill. It is a biological constraint.
I want to clarify a term. I am not using “amygdala hijack.” That phrase is not accurate, and it oversimplifies how the brain functions. “Survival hijack” is a term coined by one of my students, and it captures something more honest: the whole brain doing what it is designed to do under significant uncertainty or stress, not just one region taking over.
And we are all operating under significant uncertainty right now.
We tend to underestimate how much the broader social context lands in individual nervous systems. Geopolitical uncertainty, rising inflation, and interest rate pressure are not abstract headlines. They are prediction errors running continuously in the background, draining the body budget before we even open our laptops.
I wrote recently about the return to command and control in organisations. I think this is the survival hijack at scale. It takes real energy to work collaboratively, to build more human-centred ways of leading. That neural wiring is newer and requires more metabolic investment.
When uncertainty rises, ironic process theory predicts we go back to the familiar. Not because the familiar is better, but because those neural pathways are already there. The brain is an energy-conserving organ. Under load, it reaches for what costs least.
The question worth sitting with is not “why can’t I just regulate through this?”
It is: what does my brain actually need right now to rebuild its predictive capacity?
What helped: I applied the Circle of Certainty to stop spending energy on what I cannot predict. I talked things through with the people I trust most. And I lowered my expectations of myself considerably.
What I did not do was try to regulate my way out of it.
What helps you when survival hijack mode sets in?
