About Survival Circuits – 3-Step Cycles

There are day to day cycles you do to break stress circuits, but there is another kind of stress wire, the survival circuit. It is encoded during a time of Brain State 5, and because of that, it is rewiring it take a more elegant and prolonged use of the tools.

We’ll be talking about survival circuits over the next months, but briefly, they appear as the backbone of external solutions. Formed during a full-blown stress response, the unreasonable expectation is: I get my survival (safety, nurturing, protection, reward, love) from ___________ (a thought, a mood, a behavior).

Unconsciously we feel that we need it in order to survive, so requires a Cycle just to identify that expectation, a Grind in to negate that expectation, both of which break the circuit. Finally, another Cycle and Grind In builds a new joy circuit.

They are particularly important because it is hard to rewire them, and they are the most extreme and also persistent, to at the roots of most intractable and refractory health problems. Also, breaking these circuits often requires coaching or group work because to open the circuit requires being in the neighborhood of Brain State 5. In that state, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is not working well, so it is difficult to focus and use the mental tool of the Cycle, and even hard to find the unreasonable expectation. The nurturing and calming effect of doing a Connection or being in a coaching session with an EBT Coach helps us stay in 4 rather than a full-blown stress response Brain State 5.

Please consider something that you “protect”, as in avoid changing, deny, obsess about or is seriously detrimental to mood, relationships, behavior or health, and do a Cycle. Notice if there is a survival circuit at its root, and has a “survival” expectation.

Look for more about this in the new EBT Kits and the new books on the method….and more here!