Understanding the Survival Levels of Consciousness -Fear Based Living

There was a long period of my life where nothing seemed to work — not because I wasn’t trying, but because I was operating from survival.

From being adopted at 3 years old, then aged 11 to 18, my life moved between children’s homes, foster placements, hospitals, and detention centres, across two different countries. At the time, I didn’t have language for what was happening inside me. I just knew I felt afraid, sad, overwhelmed, and desperate to escape my reality. I was a child carrying far more than a child should, filled with unprocessed trauma, simply trying to make it through each day.

In survival mode, just getting through the next moment feels like enough. There’s no space to relax, dream, or enjoy life. Everything feels like effort. Everything drains you. You’re constantly “doing,” but never truly living. There’s no room to explore who you are — only to keep going.

And this isn’t just a personal story. Society often keeps us here. From a young age, we’re moulded to function, to work, to cope. Many people live most of their lives working constantly, resting briefly, and barely catching their breath. Survival and fear become normalised.

Motherhood can push us back into this state too. After my fifth baby, I felt like my dreams had been put in a bin again. Life became school runs, bills, groceries, errands, and endless responsibilities. There was no space to sit, to breathe, or to imagine anything beyond the immediate demands of the day. I was constantly rushing, reacting to time — or what felt like the lack of it — worrying about deadlines, carrying the weight of everything that needed doing.

In that state, clarity disappears. Exhaustion takes over. You start comparing yourself to others and feeling like you’re falling behind. Eventually, many people shrink their dreams, convincing themselves that a mediocre life is safer than hoping for something more — because they can’t imagine how to build anything better from where they stand.

But survival isn’t a personal failure.

Life has many ways of pushing us into this lowest level: trauma, loss, birth, death, job loss, major changes, starting over, having your world turned upside down. When the nervous system has been overwhelmed for too long, and there’s been no space to pause or reflect, we can get stuck in fight-or-flight without even realising it.

And that’s where awareness matters.

What helped me make sense of this state was understanding that consciousness — or awareness — moves in levels. There are stages we pass through, not because we’re weak, but because we’re human. At the lowest levels of the scale, we find emotions like shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, and desire. These aren’t moral failings or flaws in character; they’re survival responses. They show up when life has been overwhelming, when safety has been uncertain, or when we’ve been carrying more than we’ve had the capacity to process. Most people don’t live in just one of these states — they move between them, often without realising there’s a way to move upward.

Sometimes, knowledge alone is the beginning of change. Simply recognising why you’re reacting the way you are, why everything feels heavy, why nothing seems to flow — that understanding can be everything. The shift doesn’t come from forcing motivation or fixing your whole life. It comes from perspective.

The first step isn’t transformation. It’s awareness.

Demanding rest. Asking for help. Slowing your reactions by a fraction. Letting yourself look inward. Allowing yourself to dream again, even quietly. These may seem small, but when you’ve been surviving, they are monumental.

If this is where you are right now, you’re not broken. You’re surviving — and survival is not where the story ends. We can move beyond fear-based living.

This state is not permanent. And from here, one step is enough.

The lower levels of consciousness are not flaws to overcome, but stages to understand. Shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, and desire all have something to teach us about where we are and what we need next. In future posts, I’ll explore each of these states individually, offering clarity around how they show up — and how we begin to move upward from them, one small step at a time.