Why 95% of People Are Stuck in Survival Mode... Here’s How to Break Free

What's up, everybody? This is Josh Trent, and this is the Wellness and Wisdom podcast. I have a question for you. Do you ever feel like your thoughts are not yours? Like, where the hell are these thoughts coming from? What if I told you that 95% of your thoughts are actually survival patterns, and they're there because you essentially don't know that? You don't know why they're there in the first place? Would you listen? We're talking about this and so much more in this podcast right here, right now. All right, Mars, so check this out. The survival mode thing. Have you ever felt like you're in survival mode?

I've been feeling like that for a few years now, and I'm doing my best to get out of it.

All right, Survival mode is just a part of life. And on the screen right now, in homage to Dr. Hawkins, who I love and honestly, I will spend the rest of my life studying his work, is the Hawkins frequency scale. It's on the screen right now. If you're watching on Spotify or YouTube, you will see at the bottom that this is the survival paradigm. A paradigm is essentially a set of beliefs. A above that is reason and integrity. And of course, above that is love. And love is where we all want to be, Right? But the challenge with saying things like love is all there is, good vibes only is that we bypass a big part of our heart. And if 95% of our thoughts, science shows, are unconscious and they're manifested in conscious actions, how do we take control of our thoughts? Positive thinking is not just a light switch that you flick. Yes, a lot of times in life, the decisions that really matter are essentially boiling down to you taking one action or you doing one thing. But here's the kicker, and I want to flip this on you, Mar. Have you ever felt like the person you get to become in order to do the thing that inherently seems simple, is really the whole journey of getting unstuck?

I feel like I've been feeling it a lot, especially lately, related to work. I feel like work has been really pushing me to step out of that and to. To heal my nervous system to be able to hold more. Because I feel like sometimes all it is is just our capacity to hold the things that we're dealing with is not great enough to be able to do all of the things that we, I don't know, intended to do or taken on or whatever it is or the responsibilities that we have. They might seem like we're in a threat, that our life is in danger, but it's just our nervous system capacity, really. So that's what I've been feeling lately.

I celebrate that. And by the way, y', all, this is a really cool visual. On the screen right now is something that I love to remind myself of. Have you ever been hiking or you go out to the mountains and you see how these trees are growing through the rocks in nature. It's so wild. Even in cities, you see plants that pierce concrete and they grow into these beautiful organisms, living, breathing organisms. We're the same God, spirit, universe, Creator will bring us concrete. It'll bring us these landmines at times. And it's not the landmine, it's not the concrete, it's not the tragedy, it's not the thing that's keeping us stuck. Our victim, vibration, our victim mind wants to tell us the story. It's because of what Johnny did, it's because of what Jim did, It's because of my mom. All these things. I've been there. The voice of survival mode is really just static. It's just static. It's just noise. And this is the first point we're going to go over today. In order to transcend stuckness, you've got to do the work. You get to do the work to put your hand on your heart and know that you're a son or a daughter of God, even in moments where it feels like you're not. And as a son and a daughter of God of that which created you, you are so infinitely blessed with so much capacity for choosing empowerment, for choosing love. But it just boils down to becoming a signal for yourself. The signal that we are as a human being is so vast. I think it was Maya Angelou that said we don't really necessarily fear failure. We fear our greatest success. Because when we step into our greatest success, it means that all the old stories and all the old identities that kept us stuck have to die. And that can be really confronting Mar. Because when I step into a new identity, this is what we do in our tribe. LiberatedLife.com. it's on the screen right now. It's a free community where we empower each other to live and breathe and think and act and feel and do in these ways that empower ourselves by building what I call the wellness Pentagon. It's the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and financial nourishment of self. When we start to nourish ourselves, we will meet all the stories. We will meet all the bullshit that has been running unconsciously. Right? Just like we opened up this interview with 95%. Science shows 95% of the thoughts we think are inherently negative. So how do we get out of that? We commit to being our own signal for our soul, for this young, beautiful child inside of us, for the adult man or adult woman inside of us, and we actually start seeing stress differently. Do you resonate with this marriage?

Well, I would first like you to explain what you mean by saying we become the signal. Because I feel like it's a concept that might not be 100% clear to everybody. And it's not 100% clear to me what you mean by that.

You talked about it earlier where you said my nervous system, and I have zero judgment of that word. It's just a word that I've done my very best and will continue to do my very best to not say, because I really look at our body. If you understand the physiology of epigenetics and afferent efferent nerves in science, the signals that come from our brain to our neural system and the signals that come back, we are inherently an electrical system. So what do I mean when I say we must become the signal above the noise? The noise is everyone else's projections, everyone else's fears. Our phones, our computers, our calendars, our responsibilities, our intergenerational trauma, our intergenerational narrative. I mean, it is vast, the amount of choking noise that we have to say no to, that we get to say no to all day long. So that's what I mean. First, recognize that we're in a soup. We're in a collective soup, number one. And what are the ways that shopping, alcohol, drugs, promiscuous sex, pornography, overworking, complicit. Complicit denial, and complete fabrication of reality. Therefore, when I see it on social, that means it's real. That we've all been unfortunately trained to believe is true. So that's the first piece. And then the second would be. Okay, well, now that we understand that we're in. We're an electrical body. We're an electrical system and a soul that inhabits that system, we have double the amount of nerves that are coming from the brain that are coming back to the brain. So if, let's say we have a trillion nerves that are going to our sensory neurons and our fingers, well, then we would have 2 million coming back to the brain. Well, why is that? Is because science shows us that our somatic intelligence system, the intelligence of that system that allows us to feel in our body, is double the size of the one that receives it in our brain. So why I'm saying this from a scientific lens is if we're first admitting that we're in a soup of distraction, that we are a human battery, and that we have double the amount of afferent efferent neurons that are coming back to the brain, that are teaching us that if we're paying attention to our environment, then we will become a trained version of whatever environment we're in. Then one must ask oneself, how do I train myself to be my own signal? Instead of using everyone else's projections and everyone else's distractions to literally guide the course of my life? How can I put my hand up and say, no, I'm actually going to nourish these five parts of my pentagon. And in the process of me nourishing that, I. I become this incredibly strong, valuable, loving version of myself that's really just committed to nourishing these parts of self. And when I pour all that energy into nourishing that part of self, which I call the capacitor, the human capacitor, then honestly, Mar, there's just not enough time to pay attention to everyone else's static and noise. We become our own signal. And that's honestly what this podcast is about, is if y' all take one lesson from this podcast, it's commitment to nourishing your wellness pentagon, your human capacitor. There's a link that we'll put in the YouTube video right now to a talk I gave at the Day of Asprey Biohacking conference, where I clearly showed scientifically and spiritually that these five sides of ourself is an energetic capacitor, both electronically and spiritually. So that's. I hope that was clear. Mar. Was that clarity on that?

Oh, yeah, so much clarity. But. So there's this thing that I've been searching for. I feel like that's been my life project to find the answer to what is the link, the bridging link between being stuck in, for example, the survival mode and then making the decision to get out of it, to actually push through the discomfort or to remove the negative self talk or whatever. It's stopping us, blocking us from overcoming that. Because I remember when. And I still struggle with that sometimes. For example, my goal has been to meditate, and I did it for two months, but then suddenly the motivation wore off and I'm back to not doing that. And especially a few years ago when I was really deep in the survival mode and everything felt so dark. I knew meditation, breathwork would be the solution, but I just. I couldn't get myself to do it. I just didn't have it in me. Even though I knew that was the answer to getting better, there was this missing piece that just didn't allow me to take the action and make the changes. So that's my question. What is the missing link? Like, why can't we just do it? Because it's so simple, but it's just not easy.

If you could put that question in perfect form and share it with every human being, I believe not from my ego, but from my heart, what I'm about to share could truly change the world. Now, just because I'm able to answer your question with confidence does not mean that I've 100% embodied my answer. So I'm going to be totally clear about that. But it was interesting because in the question is actually the answer. You said, what is the missing link? And the link is that there is no link. There is no link because like I said before, there's double the afferent neurons coming and there's half as many efferent. So if we are receiving electrical signals from our environment, then really we are a byproduct, or we are a product of our environment. If we're unconscious, but if we're conscious, I guess you could call it a link, right? But the link, or the hidden link, is that there's no actual hidden link. It's literally just whatever we focus on that is what grows. And just because I focus on it doesn't mean it'll grow overnight either. Because I feel, in your question, like such deep sincerity. You know, And I think we all have this question in life. God, why do I know exactly what to do, but I can't fucking do it. I can't do it. I have all the PDFs, and I've listened to 100 episodes. And, you know, I've practiced nonviolent communication. And then I get to that moment where I know exactly what to do from my mind, and then my body tells me something different. My body tells me it's not safe. My stomach starts to hurt, my palms get sweaty. I feel so much fear in my neural system that I just don't trust myself enough to move forward and do the thing that I know I want to do. It took how many years for us to become human beings? If we look at the trajectory of an amoeba, I mean, we came from the ocean to crawling on the shore, to then having eyes. And then, if you believe in the ape theory, I mean, look at how many millions of years it took us to get here. Mar. We have not changed that much from a somatic intelligence system. Yes, we have sentience. We have cognition. We have the ability to see things and project them to the back of our skull through our ocular reflex. But we don't really, really, really know the full story of how we got here. It's just a big guess. So what I'm saying is the missing link is that there isn't actually a link. The link, really, instead of using the word link, I would say it's just pressure and time and curiousness and love. If we can put in pressure and time, which is what inherently learning is, that's what gathering wisdom is. You feel pressure when you're about to do something that's scary, but you know you want to do it. Time. It takes repetition for these things to become real. And then curiosity. Hey, what would my life be like if I did transform? If I did choose to be this new person? If I did, what will my life feel like? What will my friends look like? What will my environment be? Curiosity. And then the last one is love. If I can bring love to the whole thing, then I'm not judging myself. I'm not being so hard on myself as I go through the maturity process of the other three. And if I could do those three or those four in order or at least altogether, you know, then really the end product is that I become a experience, a living embodiment of my life, and I don't have to worry about whoever's around me or, you know, whatever happens to me or if I go broke or. Because inherently, the thing that blocks us from doing the thing that we want to do when we know exactly how to do it is fear. On the screen right now, there's a split. On the left side there's love, and on the right side, there's fear. Now, they're interchangeable because depending on our level of maturity and our somatic intelligence, our ability to give and receive information from our environment, that's going to dictate our behavior. I can't tell you how many times when I was trying to quit porn. Mar. Like, so many times, I'd be like, okay, I've met with my therapist. I learned from ayahuasca. I did all these things, and I would still go use the porn. Well, why was that? It's because I wasn't willing to be honest with myself about what the porn was really about. The porn was really about the fact that I didn't feel worthy of love sexually. I didn't feel worthy of A woman's touch. I didn't feel worthy because I had so much anger in my system from a bipolar mother and even being fat, which gave me no attention from women when I was growing up. So I had a lot of emotional clean out to do. Right? A lot. And women have it the same. I mean, you've been through breakups, you've been through hardship, we all have. There's a cleaning process that must occur in order for us to be a signal above the noise. There's a loving process that has to have pressure and time and curiosity. All these things really get to be baked into us and that just takes time. There's really no one experience transformation that's going to happen. There's really no one ceremony that's going to heal your life. Can they put you on trajectory? For sure they can. But I don't, I don't consider it to be a link anymore because, Gosh, it's been 10 years of podcasting and I don't think I need any more hows. I don't need any more how to dos personally. What I and we need the most is community where we can practice it. It's through the repetition of practicing that the mother becomes the skill. Right? Like that's really at the core of this. I wish it was a missing link. I wish it was just like, boop, you know, something, we could click and then everything we know would be embodied. But it just takes time. Not a sexy answer.

It's not. But I also feel if we get into all of the self help growth work, it can perpetuate the survival mode. Do you believe that to be true as well?

It's a yes. And if the environment that you're in that we know is a product of our own choosing because everything we take responsibility for, some people call it radical responsibility. We can honestly just leave out the radical. And we could just say the results of my life, my mental health, my emotional health, my physical health, my financial bank account and my connection with God, those are all things that I've committed to nourishing right through my Pentagon. Boom, full stop. So we commit to that process. Now you're going, now you're on the journey, now that you're on the journey of nourishing. As we start to nourish these five sides of ourselves, immediately stories are going to come up about why we can't do that. I can't work out, I can't save, I can't stop yelling at my husband, I can't stop womanizing women. There is no such thing as God. Why is God doing this? I'm here to tell you all that it's going to just continue for your whole life and it's never going to get easier. Some people just left the podcast. What do you mean, Josh? What I'm saying is it's never going to get easier. You become more. You have a greater capacity to deal with it. Your capacity increases the more that you fill your human capacitor, which is on the screen right now. The wall is Pentagon. And so if you're ever looking for a direction to move in as to feeling lost or feeling stuck in life, gosh, if 95% of the people mar are stuck, can you imagine if just 5% more. If we could get 5% of the population, let's just say in America, right? I don't know what that is. Like 10 million people or 15 million people. If we can get 10 to 15 million people that are fully committed to nourishing all five sides of their Pentagon and doing it in community with curiosity and love and time. Oh, my gosh. I mean, this is like, this can truly change the world. Now, I will say personally, I still have my things come up about all five sections and it doesn't go away is what I'm saying. We just as long as your commitment to nourishing is there and you make that one of the values in your life, that inherently becomes a virtue, right? Because a value is a list of beliefs, but a virtue is something that you actually act out. A virtue is a behavior. Then we're always moving in the right direction, even if it feels like we're not. And then we're never actually stuck when we have that mindset. This is the golden ticket. We're never, ever stuck when we have the mindset of, well, all I do with my life is I nourish these five sides of me. And I'm committed to overcoming all the stories that arise as I commit to loving and nourishing myself.

Okay, one more question before we end the podcast. So if we know all of this, if this information is available to almost everybody right now with Internet, Google, YouTube, all these podcasts but books, why are so many people still in survival mode?

Because their biology is still arguing with their reality. They can't relax because they're still cleaning and processing. That is wanting to be done. That is inherently keeping them stuck unconsciously. And you could study Bruce Lipton, you could study anyone in that field about epigenetic trauma. You could also look at the talk I gave, which we'll Link again on the screen. For those of y' all watching on YouTube at the biohacking conference, Dr. Jill Taylor, who is a renowned neuroscientist, her brother unfortunately had schizophrenia, and that's what brought her into the work. She actually mapped neurologically what happens when we feel an emotion. And by the way, the emotions, the five major emotions, right? Fear, joy, anger, sadness, and disgust. Those are the five major. There's other ones, too. Joy, by the way, could be inherently exchanged with love, right? So out of those five. And there is more, but those are the five main ones, she noticed that they would only last 90 seconds when there wasn't a inherited belief that was enforcing them, when there wasn't something that was keeping that emotion stuck. So it begs the curiosity, if we only feel on a neurological basis in emotion for 90 seconds, why do we stay stuck? It's because, and we talk about this in our tribe, there is a very, very big part of our belief system that happens before the thought, that happens before the feeling, and that happens before the action. It's on the screen right now. Btfa belief, thought, feeling, action. We have a belief that is most of the time unconscious, which then pings a thought, I'm not lovable. I'm not worthy. The key human ones that we've gone over with a really great podcast that we did was actually the Vision Quest mentor that I had, Mark, and we'll link that in our show notes today. And he said that there are core human universal wounds, and it's the fear of not being accepted, it's the fear of not being lovable, and it's the fear of not being worthy. And those beliefs, if they are not cleared, and they can be cleared at 5 years old, they could be cleared at 95 years old. I'm not saying I'm here to say it has to happen for you right in this moment. But the reason we stay stuck is because everybody's got a phone, everybody's got podcasts. You're listening to one, you're watching one now. Absorbing content is different than embodying it. You can speak your truth, but go and try to live your truth. It's a different thing. It's really easy to consume content and even to speak. But where the rubber meets the road of authenticity and honesty is how do my actions match with my internal and external dialogue? Does the thoughts and the stories I tell to myself and I tell to my friends and even myself speaking to us right now, is that in alignment with my life? And I am here to say that no, of course it's not, because I'm still learning. I'm not in nirvana yet. I don't have it all mastered. But I am way better. Like so much to the point better that I truly feel I can share this with other people and feel integrity and truth within myself for doing it. That's not everyone's path. Not everybody's here to ascend the spiritual ladder. But back to your question. I really believe why people are stuck is because there is a energetic and emotional clean out that must happen. And that's what we do in the life method in our community. There is a inherited traumatic expression that must be cleared. In other words, things that happened seven generations back in our lineage that we don't even know that are there on a genetic, epigenetic, expressive level. And there was also societal conditioning that we are brought into as babies, right? This is what it means to be a woman. This is what it means to be a man. This is your value as a woman. If you're not beautiful, then you're nothing. If you don't make enough money, then you're not a good man. These are all just fallacies. But that's another layer of purification that has to happen. And then once we've purified intergenerational, societal, collective, parental. Once we've done all that work, then we can finally ask ourselves, what is it that I desire? What is it that I really want in my life? And then now can I nourish myself and do all the work to actually embody the thing that is my dream? It's not easy. Nobody said that this human existence and this school for souls was ever going to be easy. But damn, it's worth it. Mar. Would you want to do anything else? Like now that you know what you know, would you really want to do anything else?

No. I would never go back to where I was before. Even though it's been painful and it's taken years to get where I am. I would not go back. I would not want to be 20 something again. It's just, it's not the same when you know what you know.

Did you ever see that movie the Matrix? Have you seen it? Do you remember that scene where Cypher is eating the steak that Agent Smith gave him and he's like, ignorance is bliss. There are, there are NPCs out there. Y' all non player characters. Not for anyone that's still with us. If you've listened this long, I think it's been 15 minutes or 20 minutes or so. If you're with us still, then you know somewhere that I'm talking to in your heart, your incredible, wonderful, learning how to love myself another's heart, that you would never eat the steak. You would never go back to that bullshit. Because once you know that, the path ahead is hard, but it still is layered with truth. Why would you ever want to go back and live a lie? And I think that's why we're in 2025 now experiencing this just vast interstitial uncomfortableness. I know you feel it, Mar. I feel it every day. I'm like, kids are dying. There's sex trafficking. There's people starving. Like, what the fuck is going on in this world? What the fuck is happening on our planet? Everyone needs to wake the fuck up. There's people that are having $100 billion mansions and yachts and net worth when they could literally just kick down a billion and feed all the people in the world. Or 2 billion. I think that's what the number is. It's some realistic number. It is no measure of great health to be profoundly adjusted to a sick society. That is from Krishnamurti. And he said it best. Then I paraphrased it. Now, the only way we're going to heal this sick society is if we do the work to commit to healing ourselves and to nourishing ourselves. And it honestly makes me so sad. I'm just like, oh. In full clarity. Like, the part of my Pentagon that I've had the most challenge with is spiritual. When my mom came and her illness is getting worse. When I see all the pain in our world, Part of my astrology that I've learned about myself through Debra Silverman. And also part of my human design and also just being a soul who's been growing now for so long is I have to be careful and mindful about how deeply I go into my grief and sadness. I can go there. Like, I even got emotional feeling it right now. Feeling it and bathing in it are two separate things. This is another reason why people get stuck. And it's something that I'm very mindful of myself. What disconnects me from God is when I choose to get lost in my emotion, when I get lost in my emotion and I experience a lot of grief and pain, then I can actually be angry at God and say, well, what's the point? What's the point of us being here? What is this all about? So one thing that a mature man or a mature woman can do is explore an emotion with the question, what are you here to teach me? Don't just go pour yourself into an emotion and do an ayahuasca ceremony and go into breathwork and you could be re traumatizing yourself. We don't have. All I'm saying is if we know the science that 90 seconds processes it, and then our inherited beliefs in our emotional cloudedness from trauma and other things can make us stay there. Yes, explore emotions. I'm here for that, for sure. But if we're going to get 5% of the population to get out of stuckness, one of the key things in Hawkins Scale is that grief is a much lower vibration than acceptance. So if I can have the maturity to accept that my mom is sick and to accept that these children are suffering and being sexually trafficked, I just can't even imagine the inherent cruelty and insanity that's going on on our planet. But if I can take it for all that it is, and if I can come back to God and say, God, I don't know why this is happening. I have no idea your grand mystery at all. I have no understanding, nor will I ever as to why so much tragedy happens in our world. God, what is the lesson here? What is the lesson for me to learn in myself? And if we can have that approach and if we can have that humility, that's how we change ourselves. That's how we change the world. So thanks for letting me go on that big tie red right there. That was, that was so necessary. This is why I podcast for my own therapy. So thank you for my therapy session today, Mark.

No, this was great. Yeah, we can, I think, end it right here. I would just leave space in the comments for people who have follow up questions because there was so much said. I think it definitely had people raising questions in their minds like, how do I do this, what should I do? And all of these details. So I would say comment below if you have any questions and join us in the Liberated Life tribe.

Thank you for being here, Mar. It's always fun. You always bring out the best in me, which I so appreciate. And y', all, if you're wondering, where do I start? Where's the map? It's so funny. We have a map on our phone, you know. Do you use your phone in Azores? On the car. You put it on there?

Yeah, all the time.

Most of us have a phone. It's so. We live in such an abundant world, which is side note why I'm just so perplexed as to why the world hunger can't be fixed, but we have a map on our phone. Why do we have no map for emotions? Oh, wait, we do. It's the Hawkins scale. Well, why do we have no map for self inquiry? Oh, wait, we do. There's actually a map that I've created in the Liberated Life tribe so you can identify where you are on the scale, process the learning from your higher self with acknowledging your lower self and your current self, and then get to a place of clarity where you can get the lesson from processing your own emotion. Can you imagine this? It doesn't have to be so hard, y'. All. We're making this more simple. Head over to liberatedlife.com until we see you again. I'm wishing you love wellness, but overall, more important than that is peace and power, because you cannot have power unless it comes from peace. We'll talk with you soon.