The Hidden State That Keeps You Scrolling and Procrastinating, Silently Blocking the Life You Know You’re Meant to Live

Have you ever noticed how most of us live double lives?

There is the life that exists inside your mind. The intimate one that nobody else fully sees.

The one where you imagine yourself calmer and freer, more at home in your own skin. The life where you stop overthinking every decision and wake up with energy instead of that familiar heaviness in your chest.

In that inner life, you know exactly who you are. You’re bold, authentic, unafraid to say what’s on your mind and do the thing you say you would do, without abandoning yourself halfway through. 

You are truly you.

And then there’s the life you're actually living.

The one where you hesitate. Where you stay longer than your body wants to. Where you reach for your phone without even thinking, scrolling past other people’s lives, while something inside you whispers that you’re meant for more.

Yet, you don’t move.

Most women don’t realize this, but that space between the life you dream about and the life you’re living is not created by laziness and lack of discipline. 

It’s created by survival.

And survival is quiet. It disguises itself as your personality and your habits, blending so seamlessly into who you think you are that you stop questioning it. In other words, it’s your way of being.

It feels like constantly thinking about the future, but rarely feeling fully present inside your own life, as if you’re always slightly ahead of yourself, but never fully here. It feels like your nervous system is always braced, even when everything looks fine on the surface and there is no immediate danger to explain why you feel this way.

You may notice it in the way you struggle to fully relax when you have time to rest. Or how you feel tired in a way that sleep doesn’t seem to repair. 

Survival narrows your world without you realizing it. It makes safety more important than truth, and over time, you slowly start living a life that feels smaller than the one inside you, the one you know, deep down, you were meant for.

So, what’s the catch?

The simplest way to recognize survival is by listening to your body. That’s right. All it takes is for you to be present long enough to feel into what’s burdening you and what your body has been holding for you all this time without your conscious awareness.

You start by noticing that your breath is shallow, and you can’t breathe in fully no matter how hard you try. Your shoulders might carry tension you’ve stopped paying attention to. Or it could be your jaw that constantly tightens or your stomach that feels contracted, as if guarding emotions that never felt safe to be felt.

Just think about it for a moment. You wake up tired. Your energy comes in waves, unpredictable and fragile. You may find yourself getting sick more often or dealing with hormonal imbalances that don’t seem to have a clear explanation, leaving you confused and disconnected from your own body.

But before I go any further I want you to know that it is not normal for you to feel this way. You shouldn’t feel demotivated and fatigued, desperately searching for outside solutions just because your doctor said this is typical for your age and prescribed you pills that only harm your precious system even more.

It all boils down to this: your nervous system has been prioritizing protection over restoration, allocating energy toward keeping you safe. And the moment it tries to keep you safe, it’s not helping you thrive because it was never designed for expansion.

Because from the perspective of survival, thriving is optional. Safety is not.

Let’s dig a little deeper here.

Survival state is not something you notice straight away. What this means is that it shows up in the quietest of moments. It’s like an insidious whisper that convinces you that you’re fine when you know something isn’t right. When you feel the urge to change something, but you simply delay it because ‘you don’t have time for this now’. And especially, when you abandon your own needs to avoid conflict and discomfort. You start trusting yourself less and become more disconnected from the core of who you are, slowly losing touch with your own inner authority. You adapt because this seems necessary in order for you to survive.

So yes, many women blame themselves for their distractions. They think it’s a discipline problem or lack of willpower. But this couldn’t be farther from the truth. When your body carries emotions that haven’t been fully processed—and I’m talking about grief and fear and loneliness—the moment you start noticing the silence and stillness where you have to confront yourself, your mind yearns for a distraction. For anything that will take you away from yourself. 

I’ve always said this and I will keep saying it because it is the truth I’ve learned in my life and work: the moment you sit down with yourself, your own thoughts and your body, away from external noise, things will start to shift. And no matter how easy this may seem, it is the most difficult thing any one of us has to do in order to truly come back into alignment with ourselves. Because if you don’t give yourself this time, and if you don’t allow yourself to sit in this discomfort—and let me tell you, this is the most uncomfortable you will ever be—your life will keep spinning in the same cycle of survival.

And what’s worse, scrolling will fill that space, giving your mind a place to go so your body doesn’t have to feel the emotions that are stuck inside you. Yes, it will soothe the discomfort and make you feel better for a split second, but the moment you finally put your phone down, that same heaviness will return.

Only this time, stronger than before.

So, let me say this in the most loving way possible . . . you cannot create a new life from a nervous system that is trying to survive. I’ve tried it and it didn’t work. You can push yourself and force discipline, even override your exhaustion by continuously performing but it will always feel like constant internal resistance.

Because survival and creation come from two different states of being. Survival contracts but creation opens. Survival protects and prepares for scarcity, but creation trusts and allows for possibility.

Remember the version of you that exists in your dreams?

The one who feels calm and alive, fully expressed?

Yes, her.

She doesn’t emerge through force. She emerges when your body finally feels safe enough to stop protecting and start living.

And here’s the best part: the life inside you isn’t asking you to become someone new. Not at all!

This is the part most of the world misunderstands. It’s asking you to come home to who you were before survival became necessary. And that beautiful version of you still exists. She never disappeared. She was just waiting for you to feel safe enough to let her lead again. And the moment your nervous system begins to believe that safety is possible again, your life will begin to change in ways you’ve only imagined as the version of you that knows anything is possible.

The version of you that was always there.