From Surviving to Thriving: Shutdown/Collapse, Freeze & Depression
Our nervous systems are brilliantly designed, refined over millennia to guide us through life’s challenges by keeping us safe, balanced, and resilient. They automatically shift between different states in response to our circumstances, using adaptive survival strategies to protect us when necessary. However, in our modern world, getting stuck in survival mode can hold us back from fully thriving. Instead of adapting fluidly to each moment, we may find ourselves locked in patterns that prevent us from truly flourishing.
This second part of our Surviving to Thriving series delves into the survival responses of shutdown, collapse, freeze, and depression. These states represent one end of the nervous system spectrum, where the body conserves energy and minimizes outward engagement to protect itself. If you haven’t yet read it, we recommend beginning with From Surviving to Thriving: Anxiety & Panic Attacks, which introduces Dr. Stephen Porges’ concept of neuroception.
Neuroception helps us understand our body’s innate ability to detect safety or danger, explaining why we may instinctively respond with heightened alertness, relaxation, or, as we’ll explore here, with withdrawal and stillness. We’ll examine how these responses serve us, why they sometimes persist beyond their usefulness, and ways to gently move toward a balanced state that supports overall well-being.
Understanding Shutdown/Collapse
When we encounter stress, threat, or danger—whether real or perceived—our nervous system instinctively shifts from a state of safety to various survival modes. Some defensive responses, like the high-energy fight-or-flight reaction, mobilize us to confront or escape a threat. Others are more subtle, involving less visible states of immobilization and energy conservation.
One such response is the shutdown or collapse state, which is part of the parasympathetic nervous system. This state is a “last-ditch” survival strategy that conserves energy by essentially “playing dead,” helping us endure trauma or threat by numbing sensations and emotions. The body becomes limp, the heart rate and breath slow, body temperature drops, and digestion is stalled.
In this state, sensory awareness is limited; we become less aware of our inner and outer worlds, often feeling numb or disconnected from ourselves, others, and our surroundings. This is a protective response that serves us well in dire circumstances by muting sensations to help us endure. Yet, if shutdown becomes a default pattern, it can lead to persistent disconnection, chronic fatigue, depression, and isolation, holding us back from engaging fully in life.
Understanding Freeze: When the Gas Pedal and Brake Are Simultaneously Engaged
While shutdown and collapse are typically associated with complete immobilization, freeze represents a different kind of survival response that can look similar on the outside but feels very different on the inside. Unlike shutdown/collapse, which is purely parasympathetic, freeze combines both sympathetic and parasympathetic activation—similar to pressing the gas pedal and brake at the same time. The body may appear still, but internally it is hyper-alert, scanning for a way to respond if escape or confrontation becomes possible.
This “deer in headlights” response arises when we feel that the threat is overwhelming or inescapable, putting the body “on hold” until we can take action safely. Freeze protects us from taking impulsive actions that could worsen the threat, but if it becomes habitual, it can create a state of prolonged hypervigilance and exhaustion.
Why We Shutdown/Collapse
Shutdown/collapse often emerges when other responses are not an option or have been exhausted, shifting the body into a state of hypo-arousal as a form of energy conservation. This takes place unconsciously and is an automatic response that has been practiced over time until it becomes our programming. Until we bring our awareness and consciousness towards ourselves lovingly, our practiced patterns remain unconscious and in control.
The origins for this programming vary person to person and may even begin before we’re born. Shutdown/collapse patterns can stem from traumatic events (read more to learn about trauma’s impact on our nervous system here) as well as chronic modern-day pressures and stressors.
Our sense of safety is shaped by our environment and caregivers. As dependents, we rely entirely on others for survival, and if our caregivers are misattuned, neglectful, or punitive, we may learn to “disconnect” from distressing feelings as a survival strategy.
This disconnection can become ingrained over time, especially if our emotions or needs were repeatedly unwelcome or met with punishment. Shutdown/collapse, then, serves as a protective mechanism, helping us endure situations that feel intolerable.
What Happens When We Shutdown
In the body, shutdown/collapse arises when we’re feeling hopeless, over-stimulated, or completely overwhelmed, resulting in sensations of numbness, detachment, or a deep urge to withdraw. In extreme cases, this response can manifest as memory loss, dizziness, chronic fatigue, and even fainting or blacking out.
When shutdown or freeze becomes our default survival pattern, we risk developing nervous system dysregulation and ineffective nervous system functioning. Our nervous system becomes overburdened, using precious resources to keep suppressed parts of ourselves buried, as a misguided means of “protection.”
This prolonged dysregulation can impair our neuroception, affecting our ability to accurately perceive safety or danger. We may overreact or underreact in everyday situations, experiencing an ongoing sense of unease or unworthiness, and feeling disconnected from ourselves and others. In this state, we are surviving—but not truly thriving.
Finding Gratitude for Our Survival Strategies
It can be easy to feel frustrated or even resentful of these patterns, but finding gratitude for our nervous systems and these survival strategies is an essential step toward healing. Shutdown, freeze, anxiety (more about anxiety here), and other survival states each serve a vital purpose, helping us navigate life’s difficulties and keeping us safe in ways we may not fully understand. Recognizing the intelligence of these responses and understanding the complexities of your nervous system (how it develops and adapts), helps us release self-judgment and appreciate the resilience of our nervous systems. These states have allowed us to survive and are now key to our growth as we learn to move beyond them and work with them.
Have you felt one or more of these survival states in your life? For most of us, the answer is likely yes—it’s part of being human. This two-part series aims to highlight the toll of staying in survival mode, the cost of letting it take over, the purpose it serves, and the potential for healing beyond it. Recognizing these patterns empowers us to interrupt them and invite new experiences, opening the door to greater presence, resilience, and ease.
Returning to Regulation & Wholeness
You have everything you need to return to a balanced, whole, healthy nervous system if you’re someone who often experiences shutdown/collapse in non-threatening moments. Healing your nervous system starts with awareness first and foremost, includes practices and inputs that work to disrupt and redirect the nervous system towards regulation and safety, as well as building capacity for safety over time. It’s never too late to deeply understand your survival habits and nurture the needs that have been unmet until now. You have the power to influence and heal your nervous system and if you’d like support, our private sessions and small group program, The Process, are here for you!
Practices for Gentle Upregulation
There are many ways to gently coax ourselves back into a balanced state, out of acute survival patterns like shutdown and freeze. Remember that these practices aren’t one-size-fits-all, so choose the ones that feel right for you:
Tap into Your Awareness
The first step is to understand your own experience:What does shutdown/collapse, freeze, disconnection or depression feel like in your body?
What does connected, calm, relaxed, present, and open feel like in your body?
What are the thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations you notice that pertain to these different states of being?
Build Your List of Resources
Nervous system-regulating practices, like deep breathing, connecting to safety anchors, movement, and connecting with others, can help shift the body out of survival modes. Write down a list of things (big or small) that you can do to nourish yourself and feel supported. This can become a useful reminder of what to call upon or try when you feel you are in a survival state and don’t have the capacity to think of what you might do in the moment.Physical Grounding Tools: Try holding an ice pack, going for a quick-paced walk, taking a cold shower, or splashing cold water on your face.
Somatic Awareness Tools: Move your body intuitively with gentle stretching, rhythmic tapping, brushing, shaking, or soothing self-massage.
Awakening Senses: Listen to energizing music, hold a textured object, or step outside to engage with nature’s sights, sounds, and scents.
Environmental Adjustments: Adjust your surroundings to meet your needs like turning on/off lights, dim outside noise or turning up the volume on music, decrease clutter and/or incorporate brightly colored, stimulating objects that encourage you to return to a balanced state.
Guided Processing with Support
Working with a guide who specializes in body-centered healing can help you get to the root of your suffering. Together, you can explore the deeper causes, whether they may be related to trauma including developmental, emotional, generational, or collective, etc., that may be at play and prevent you from embodying your wholeness.
Engaging in these small actions, even briefly, helps to “wake up” the nervous system, bringing us back into the present moment and inviting us to re-engage with ourselves and the world around us.
How The Messina Movement Can Offer More Support
Book a complimentary 30-minute consultation for a chance to connect with Lisa and to learn more about private sessions and our small group program, The Process. All of our offerings are tailored to your needs and designed to help you find freedom from the habitual stickiness of survival responses. Together we will pave the best pathway forward for you!
We aim to make this work as accessible as possible to anyone that’s suffering and ready to turn toward the barriers that may be holding them back from a whole and embodied life. In order to help make this work more feasible, we now offer payment plans for both our private sessions and The Process. Breaking down payments into smaller, more manageable amounts allows you to get started right away with your healing.
We recognize that healing is a nonlinear process that unfolds in its own time, requiring patience, presence, and trust, and though the journey can be challenging, it leads to profound connection and transformation. We are grateful you are here with us and trust us to support you along your journey, we hope to connect with you soon!
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