Survival Stance
Widen your stance
Plant your feet on the ground
Open your eyes
Look all around
Fill up your lungs
Breath through pursed lips
Tighten your tummy
Clench both your fists
Push your tongue forward
Feel your heart race
Get cottonmouth
Let sweat bead on your face
Trust that your instincts
Know what’s to be done
Then go with the flow
And either fight, freeze, or run
This poem is more than metaphor, it is a stepwise activation of the sympathetic nervous system, the branch of the autonomic nervous system designed for survival. Each line maps onto a coordinated psycho-physiological shift that prepares the organism to deal with threat.
Let’s break it down:
1. “Widen your stance / Plant your feet firm on the ground”
Widening the stance invokes postural priming whereby the body lowers its centre of gravity and increases stability and readiness for movement. This send signals to the brainstem and cerebellum, enhancing proprioception and spatial awareness and creates a sense of grounded alertness that primes the body to respond to external threats.
2. “Open your eyes / Look all around”
This reflects sensory expansion and environmental scanning whereby the pupils dilate to allow more light in, and attention shifts outward. This heightens visual acuity, widens the field of awareness, and allows cognition to be fast, reactive, and pattern-based rather than reflective so that threats can be rapidly detected without thinking.
3. “Fill up your lungs / Breathe through pursed lips”
A deep inhalation increases oxygen availability and activates the sympathetic nervous system, while pursed-lip breathing creates resistance, maintains airway pressure, and improves gas exchange and breath control. This allows breathing to become more rhythmic and forceful, priming the body for explosive output while supporting the metabolic demands of impending action.
4. “Tighten your tummy / Clench both your fists”
Tightening the stomach engages the core, stabilises the spine, and acts as muscular bracing in preparation for quick action and force transmission, while clenched fists activate flexor muscles in readiness for grasping, striking, or holding. This creates a feeling of containment and power, whereby energy is being gathered and directed.
5. “Push your tongue forward
Pushing the tongue forward is part of a broader activation pattern that helps increase alertness, arousal, and mental focus by increasing facial and oral tension, lifting the head, straightening the posture, and subtly activating the airways. Holding the tongue still also curbs unconscious, sub-vocalizations allowing greater focus on the present.
6. Feel your heart race”
Heart rate naturally increases due to sympathetic stimulation and release of adrenaline and noradrenaline. This increases the force of each heartbeat, increases cardiac output, and redirects blood to muscles in preparation for action. Subjectively, this feels like the heart is pounding, which produces the feeling of intensity, urgency, and aliveness.
7. Get cottonmouth
Sympathetic activation causes vasoconstriction of the entire gastrointestinal system and shunting of blood to the muscles. This reduces saliva production, leaving only small amounts of thick sticky, enzyme-rich saliva that produces the feeling of a dry, sticky mouth (cottonmouth), which is exacerbated by mouth-breathing, which occurs more frequently under stress.
8.“Let sweat bead on your face”
Sweat beading on the face indicates full metabolic activation, whereby the body mobilises glucose, increases circulation, and activates sweat glands for thermoregulation. Sweating is more than just cooling, it’s a marker of arousal and indicates you are now a state of readiness where energy expenditure is prioritised over all else.
9. “Trust that your instincts know what’s to be done”
This is the cognitive shift from deliberation to instinct. The prefrontal cortex (responsible for higher-order thinking) downregulates, while the subconscious takes over. Decision-making becomes fast, intuitive, and survival-oriented. There is no time for analysis, only action. This is why, under stress, people often say: “I didn’t think—I just did.”
10. “Then go with the flow / and either fight, freeze or run”
Full sympathetic activation requires a biological surrender to instinct so that you can tap into evolutionary intelligence to select the most adaptive behaviour based on context and prior conditioning. This culminates in the classic fight-flight-freeze response.
Fight: confront the threat
Flight: escape the threat
Freeze: pause to reassess or hide
Sympathetic activation is not “bad”, it’s precision biology. The problem is not activation… It’s getting stuck there.