Two Paths to Safety: Why Hypervigilance Keeps You Stuck in Survival Mode
- Michael Sundell
- Oct 19
- 16 min read
A case study in transforming anxiety when simply knowing better isn't enough
Published with permission. Name and identifying details have been changed.
Why, when everything seems fine, does your body still brace for impact?
My client Adam, a professional musician who struggles with obsessive compulsive tendencies, reported feeling frustrated during the past week.
Despite feeling "really comfortable" in rehearsals—everything going well, genuinely enjoying the music—he'd experienced "panic-level anxiety" that morning while simply walking his dog. His breathing tightened up, his hands started to sweat, his mind started scanning for anything that might go wrong. The concert he'd been preparing for felt overwhelming, even though objectively, he knew he was ready.
"In reality, everything's going fine," he said. "I'm doing the rehearsals, everything's good, feeling great. And then I have these moments by myself, and it feels like everything's going to go to shit somehow."
As a result, he started having strong urges to do compulsive actions, in hope that they would prevent bad things from happening.
Adam knew his compulsive behaviors didn't help. He could recognize the urges in real-time. He understood the pattern. But knowing wasn't enough to stop them, and that made everything worse.
To give in to the urge might bring some brief relief, followed by shame and increased anxiety.
Resisting the urge creates internal conflict, exhaustion, and a negative spiral. Either way, he lost.
To make matters worse, Adam was feeling anxiety about feeling anxiety. He'd been working on managing his anxiety for years. He understood his patterns. He could name what was happening. But this awareness created its own torture: Why am I still dealing with this? What's wrong with me?
This is the meta-shame cycle—the shame about having shame, the frustration about still feeling anxious, the sense of feeling helpless despite knowing better. And it's one of the most insidious aspects of anxiety disorders. You can't simply think your way out, yet you blame yourself for not being able to.
The Cost of Hypervigilance: Why you can't be safe while always on guard
All of Adam's anxiety and urges were fueled by a hypervigilance that insisted on having complete control and needing to anticipate any possible problems or threats that could possibly arise.
Hypervigilance promises safety but is actually costly, keeping you locked in survival mode.
This constant state of high alert blocks access to flow, focus, joy, and creativity. These higher states of consciousness require a baseline sense of safety that hypervigilance actively prevents.
You become perpetually stuck at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy, unable to build positive experiences or achieve self-actualization because you never feel secure enough to relax.
While the hypervigilant part believes it's protecting you, it's actually preventing you from achieving things that bring true fulfillment: meaningful work, genuine relationships, and creative expression.
It also paradoxically makes it harder to respond effectively to real-world problems.
A Universal Experience
Adam's experience reminded me how universal this pattern is, even after decades of performing professionally, I still meet my own version of it.
I shared my own recent experience playing Mahler 9, where despite decades of work on performance anxiety, I spent most of the concert feeling off, noticing my thoughts were all over the place, my heart beating 100 miles a minute.
The difference wasn't that I'd eliminated anxiety, it was that I had tools to work with it, and I'd made peace with the fact that sometimes it shows up anyway.
"Maybe we're always left to deal with ourselves," I told him, "and sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse. I don't think there's a point where we stop being human about it."
This normalization matters. The goal isn't to reach some permanent state of Zen enlightenment where anxiety never arises. It's to address the underlying causes behind it as much as you can and then change your relationship to it when it does show up.
What's Going On Inside of Me?
This is where a crucial reframe becomes possible, one that transforms self-attack into curiosity.
Instead of asking, "What's wrong with me?"
We can ask, "What's going on inside of me?"
This isn't just semantic wordplay. It's a fundamental shift from seeing yourself as broken to recognizing that you have parts that learned certain strategies. These aren't character flaws—they're protective mechanisms that, at some point, your nervous system decided would keep you safe.
The hypervigilance isn't you. It's a part of you. A familiar, habituated process that you can observe rather than identify with completely.
When Adam could step back and see these patterns as "not me, but a part of me," something shifted. He could get curious rather than judgmental. He could ask what this part was trying to accomplish, rather than simply wrestling with it.
Two Strategies, One Goal
By exploring what the anxiety was actually trying to accomplish Adam discovered two distinct parts of himself, each having its own approach to achieving the same fundamental goal—safety.
The Hypervigilant Path
The first part believed that safety required constant scanning for potential threats. Its strategy was simple: be aware of everything that could go wrong, prepare for every possible scenario, never be caught off guard.
When I asked Adam to visualize this part, he saw himself "from the back, frantically searching on a laptop." The image was telling—someone hunched over, isolated, desperately trying to gather information, scanning, scanning, always scanning.
This part operated on several unshakeable beliefs:
The Binary Trap: "it's not possible to be both vigilant and relaxed at the same time, so I must be vigilant." It saw only two options—complete vigilance or complete vulnerability. No middle ground existed.
The Control Imperative: If I can anticipate everything, I can control everything. If I control everything, I'm safe.
The Surprise Intolerance: "Even if unable to prevent a bad situation, at least anticipating it makes it more tolerable than being caught off guard." Better to live in constant dread than risk being surprised.
The Mindreading Trap: This extended beyond physical threats to social ones. What does the conductor think? What did that colleague's comment mean? The mind becomes a constant interpretation machine, trying to read others' thoughts—an impossible task that only generates more anxiety.
When I asked this part what it ultimately wanted, it traced a path through control, through never being bothered, through having "complete peace" in isolation. But there was something off about this peace. Adam described it as "fabricated," "icky," "fear-driven."
"It's like buying material possessions hoping they will bring peace and happiness and knowing it won't work but not knowing what else to do... This whole thing was built out of fear and insecurity."
The "peace" this part sought came with devastating costs:
Exhausting constant vigilance
Isolation from others
Living small, "failing in advance" to avoid risk
Lashing out when bothered
Loss of spontaneity and joy
Constant anxiety despite (or because of) all the effort
The Peaceful Path
But there was another part, one we discovered through process of questioning designed to help Adam connect to a higher state.
This state identified as "Peaceful." When Adam connected with this state, he felt it as a warm, gray mist that rose from his stomach and collected in his head and shoulders. Not cold like dry ice, but "warm and comforting somehow."
He visualized this part as a character—a peaceful figure in robes, sitting on a flat plane with clouds floating overhead. The feeling was expansive, grounded, genuinely safe.
The contrast was striking. Same goal (safety, peace, comfort) but radically different approaches with vastly different results.
One path leads to exhausting hypervigilance and isolation. The other leads to genuine peace and the ability to actually enjoy life.
Once both parts had fully revealed their logic, the real transformation could begin — not by choosing one, but by letting them meet.
The Integration: Calm Comfort
The breakthrough came when we brought these two parts together—literally. I had Adam hold his hands out, palms up, visualizing each part in a different hand. Then I invited his unconscious mind to allow his hands to come together, only as quickly as these parts could recognize they might have something to offer each other.
As his hands slowly moved together, something new emerged.
The peaceful character was still there, still grounded in that calm, comfortable place. But now, instead of the frantic laptop, it had something different: an iPad Mini.
"Once in a while, it might want to check something, pulls it out of its pocket and checks, but it's not frantically on the thing all the time."
This wasn’t just clever imagery—it showed that vigilance itself wasn’t the problem; the frantic, all-consuming state was.”
The new integrated state, which Adam named "Calm Comfort" included:
The genuine peace and groundedness of the Peaceful part
The ability to be aware and check when needed
Without the frantic, exhausting quality of constant vigilance
"There's not an intense feeling of any kind. It's not anxious or anything, it's just like, maybe I should check that out. But it feels calm and appropriate."
The goal wasn't to eliminate all awareness—it was to transform frantic hypervigilance into calm, appropriate awareness.
Not Oblivious, Just Calm
This integrated third part doesn't ignore real threats. It just doesn't go looking for imaginary ones. It can distinguish between practical preparation that feels good to do and anxious rituals that feel compulsive but don't actually help
As Adam put it: "From this perspective, I'm not reading so much into other people's thoughts and emotions, I'm not worrying about things unless a problem is obvious."
When problems are obvious, you respond. When they're not, you don't waste energy imagining them into existence.
The Diagnostic Question
One of the most important insights that emerged was a simple way to distinguish helpful actions from compulsive ones:
Helpful precautions feel like: "I'm glad I'm doing this. This feels calm and appropriate"
Anxious compulsions feel like: "I have to do this or else" + significant anxiety while doing it.
This became Adam's internal compass. When he felt an urge to do something, he could pause and ask: Does this feel good to do, or does it feel compelling and necessary but not good?
The first comes from Calm Comfort—from a place of genuine care and appropriate preparation that actually makes sense and feels good to do.
The second comes from hypervigilance, fear and the illusion that performing the ritual will create safety.
This isn't about never checking anything. It's about checking from a different state of mind.
The Surprise Question
One of the most interesting moments came when we examined the hypervigilant part's need to "never be surprised."
From the perspective of Calm Comfort, Adam's response was unexpected:
"Life is boring if you don't have some surprises, right? Certain ones you wouldn't want, but... if nothing else, a surprise can often be a good story."
Then he added something crucial: "It's certainly not something that's going to get better by worrying about it."
Not all surprises are threats. And the ones that are genuine threats? They're usually obvious when they arrive. They don't require constant scanning to identify.
The hypervigilant mind lives in a fantasy where if it just scans hard enough, long enough, nothing bad will ever happen. But this absolute certainty is impossible. And the cost of trying to achieve it is enormous: exhaustion, isolation, inability to access joy or flow, living small to avoid risk.
Better to live fully and deal with surprises when they come—which you'll be able to do just as well (or better) from a calm state anyway.
The Physical Shift
What struck me most powerfully about this transformation though was how quickly this shifted from a cognitive understanding to an embodied experience.
When I asked Adam to think about a trigger from the past week, he said: "At the time, I knew intellectually that doing a compulsive action wouldn't help but it felt absolutely necessary. It was like, I have to do this. There's no other way around it. Because if I don't do it, for sure something will go wrong. And it felt like that was real."
"And thinking about it now?"
"I know in my body that worrying about it or doing a compulsive behavior is not going to help. It feels much calmer, just thinking about it. Like taking a step back and recognizing what it is."
When we looked at future situations that might trigger anxiety:
"Right now, thinking about them, the emotion's not there. It's much easier to just ignore the urge, or recognize it and feel like it's nothing. It totally doesn't matter what I do in terms of that action. I know that it's irrelevant to the outcome."
The shift was embodied, immediate, and visible. His nervous system had reorganized around a new possibility.
The Experience of Integration
When I asked Adam what the integration felt like, he described it as "strange, unfamiliar, like getting a lot of life experience all at once."
It wasn't just cognitive insight. It was as if he'd suddenly downloaded years of wisdom from this Calm Comfort state—the feelings, the knowledge, the automatic responses that would come from habitually relating to life this way.
This is what genuine transformation feels like—not just understanding something intellectually, but having your whole nervous system reorganize around a new way of being.
The Before and After
Before the Integration:
Compulsive behaviors after triggering situations that increased baseline anxiety
Panic-level anxiety before performances despite strong preparation
Constant internal monitoring and scanning for problems
Belief that vigilance equals safety, that you can't be both relaxed and aware
Physical manifestations: hand clenching, excessive sweating
Feeling controlled by anxiety, helpless despite knowing better
Meta-shame about still struggling
Stuck in survival mode, unable to access higher states
Constant mindreading and social threat scanning
Living small to avoid risk, "failing in advance"
After the Integration:
Ability to recognize compulsive urges and "walk away"
Thinking about triggers doesn't bring the emotional charge
Awareness without the frantic quality
Understanding that safety comes from calm, not control
A clear feeling-based distinction between helpful and compulsive actions
Ability to check when needed, but calmly and appropriately
Not reading so much into others' thoughts and emotions
Freedom to live more fully, take appropriate risks
The View from the Airplane
Throughout the session, Adam returned to a powerful metaphor: viewing life from an airplane window, high enough that you can see the ground but not be caught in the details.
"You're just flying over everything. You don't have to worry about whatever's happening on the road, the details of the car, if the car's working, if you ran over a nail. You're just seeing it from a distance, from above."
From this perspective:
Individual concerns look smaller
You can see patterns without being consumed by them
There's a natural sense of calm and safety
You're not caught up in the frantic energy of "the little people" running around below
This connects to something crucial in performance: When we're anxious, we focus internally—monitoring our heartbeat, our sweating hands, our racing thoughts. When we're in flow, we focus externally—on the music, the conductor, what we're hearing and seeing.
The hypervigilant mind is always looking inward, checking: "Am I okay? Am I okay? What's wrong?" The calm mind is looking outward: "What's actually happening? What do I need to respond to right now?"
The mind in flow is just focused externally on what matters.
Two Critical Technical Points
Near the end of our session, I shared two technical principles that can make all the difference in applying this work:
1. The Two-Step Process: Neutral First
Don't try to go directly from anxiety to your resourceful state.
It's too big a leap. Your nervous system can't make that jump when it's flooded with stress hormones and locked into a threat response.
Instead:
Step 1: Anxious state → Neutral (through some kind of pattern interrupt)
Step 2: Neutral → Resource state (like Calm Comfort)
For Adam, pattern interrupts that had worked included taking deep breaths, going into peripheral vision, observing the feeling of the anxiety within his body, or doing some sort of physical action like taking a walk or even a few pushups. The key is finding what breaks the anxious pattern enough to get to neutral first.
Why does this matter? If you try to go from an anxious state to a resource state, the anxious state will block you from accessing the resource state. You have to create neutral space for it first. Once you can get some distance from the anxiety, then it will be much easier to connect with your resource state.
2. Define What You Want, Not What You Don't Want
This is subtler but equally crucial. Most anxious people, when asked what they want, will say "I don't want to feel anxious." But this creates a problem.
It's like getting in a cab in New York City and telling the driver, "I don't want to go to Times Square." Okay... but where DO you want to go?
When your goal is negatively defined (not anxious, not panicked, not worried), the best you can ever hope for is neutral. As soon as you arrive at "not anxious," there's nowhere else to go. You have no destination. And because there's no positive state pulling you forward, you eventually drift back toward anxiety.
But when you define your goal in positive terms—"I want to feel calm comfort" or "I want to feel grounded presence"—you have an actual destination. You can move beyond merely "not feeling bad" into genuinely feeling good.
This isn't just semantics. It changes how your nervous system orients toward the future.
What This Means for You
If you recognize yourself in Adam's experience—whether in performance contexts, everyday anxiety, or OCD-like patterns—here are the key takeaways:
1. The Meta-Shame Cycle Can Be Broken
If you're caught in shame about still having anxiety ("I should be past this by now"), know that this is part of the pattern of hypervigilance, not evidence that you're failing. The question isn't "What's wrong with me?" but "What's going on inside of me?"
You're not broken. You have parts with different strategies, and they're in conflict. That's workable.
2. Hypervigilance Doesn't Equal Preparedness
The anxious part of your mind genuinely believes that constant scanning will allow you to feel you safe. It doesn't. In most situations, your ability to respond appropriately is improved when you're calm. The difference is that anxiety exhausts you, keeps you in survival mode, and prevents you from accessing the very states (creativity, flow, joy) that make life worth living.
3. You Can't Be Both Hypervigilant and Safe
This is the core paradox: the hypervigilant mind believes it must constantly scan for threats to be safe. But this very process prevents you from ever feeling safe. You can't achieve the goal using this strategy—it's like trying to fall asleep by monitoring whether you're asleep yet.
4. There Are Two Kinds of Checking—Learn to Tell Them Apart
Ask yourself: "Am I glad I'm doing this, or do I feel compelled and anxious while doing it?"
The first is appropriate awareness coming from Calm Comfort. The second is a compulsion that will increase your baseline anxiety and make everything worse.
5. The Giving In/Not Giving In Trap
If you're caught between "give in to the compulsion and feel shame" or "resist and feel awful," you're in an impossible bind. The solution isn't more willpower—it's addressing the underlying state that's generating the compulsive urges in the first place.
6. You Need Neutrality First
Don't try to go directly from anxious to resourceful. Find your pattern interrupt—whatever breaks the cycle enough to get you to neutral. Only then reach for your resourceful state. This is a two-step process, not one leap.
7. Define Your Destination Positively
If you only know what you don't want (not anxious), neutral is the best you can hope for, and you'll keep drifting back to anxiety.
Define what you actually want: Calm Comfort, Confident Presence, Grounded Ease—whatever words resonate for you.
8. Both Parts Have Positive Intention
The hypervigilant part isn't your enemy. It's trying to keep you safe. It just has a flawed strategy based on the false binary of "scan constantly or be completely vulnerable." When you can recognize this, you can integrate its positive intention (appropriate awareness) without its exhausting method (constant scanning).
9. Real Threats Are Usually Obvious
You don't need to constantly scan to identify genuine threats. When something truly dangerous is happening, it's usually clear. The hypervigilant mind is mostly finding imaginary threats or trying to read others' minds—tasks that are impossible and exhausting.
10. Surprise Isn't the Enemy
Life without surprises is boring. More importantly, worrying about being surprised doesn't prevent surprise—it just makes you more anxious and causes you to live smaller. You'll handle surprises just fine when they come, probably better from a calm state than an anxious one.
The Deeper Truth
What made this session particularly transformative was Adam's ability to move from intellectual understanding to embodied transformation. He already knew his compulsive behaviors weren't helpful. He already understood he was more anxious than situations warranted. He could name the patterns as they happened.
But knowing isn't the same as feeling differently.
The integration of these two parts, the hypervigilant scanner and the genuinely peaceful presence, created something new. Not choosing one over the other, but allowing them to inform each other.
The result was Calm Comfort: grounded peace with appropriate awareness.
This is what real safety feels like. Not the exhausting vigilance of scanning for every possible threat. Not the naive obliviousness that ignores real dangers. But a calm, confident presence that can check when needed and rest when there's nothing to do.
As Adam discovered, you don't need to anticipate every possible problem to be prepared. You just need to trust that you can respond appropriately when real situations arise. And your ability to respond is usually improved when you're calm and not anxiously fighting with yourself.
That's where genuine safety lives. Not in the frantic laptop searching, but in the peaceful figure with the iPad Mini in their pocket—available when truly needed, but not compulsively consulted.
The goal isn’t to reach some permanent state of Zen enlightenment where anxiety never arises. It’s to change our relationship to it when it does.
Moving Beyond Survival Mode
Perhaps the most important realization is this: hypervigilance doesn't just create anxiety in the moment. It keeps you trapped in survival mode, unable to access the very states that would make your life meaningful.
Joy, creativity, flow, deep connection, artistic expression, risk-taking that leads to growth—all of these require a foundation of safety that hypervigilance prevents by definition.
The work we did in this session wasn't about eliminating Adam's ability to be aware of real problems. It was about freeing him from the exhausting, isolating, joyless pattern of constant threat-scanning so he could actually live.
So he could play music with presence and flow, not just technical accuracy born of white-knuckled preparation.
So he could walk his dog without panic.
So he could show up to his life instead of constantly preparing for it.
From Shame to Curiosity
If you recognize yourself in this story, please hear this:
Still feeling anxious, even after all your insight and effort, isn't a failure. It doesn't mean something's wrong with you.
It means you have parts of yourself still trying to keep you safe in ways that once worked but no longer serve you. Those parts don't change through force or shame—they change through being understood and welcomed back into balance.
The shift from “What’s wrong with me?” to “What’s going on inside of me?” is where transformation begins. It moves you from self-attack to curiosity, from being the problem to becoming the compassionate observer who can work with what’s happening.
Your hypervigilant part learned its strategy for good reasons. Once, scanning for danger helped you stay safe. The question now is simpler, kinder: Is this strategy still serving me, or is it time for something new?
If you find yourself caught in anxiety, compulsions, or endless “what-ifs,” know this: the scanning for safety isn't keeping you safe, it's keeping you stuck.
There is another path. By making the pivot from shame to curiosity, you honor the care behind your vigilance and transform anxious alertness into calm, appropriate attention.
This shift frees your energy for the life that's waiting and, in the stillness that follows, that guarded part of you receives what it was working so hard to find all along: the safety to finally rest in peace.
If you would like to explore your own shift from anxious scanning to calm awareness, I help musicians and high performers reconnect with safety, clarity, and ease, both on stage and off.
Stay connected.
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