Don’t Ask a Survival Brain to Make Life-Changing Decisions
Iesha Taraboulsi is an author, Certified Neuroscience Coach, and founder of Graceful Discoveries. Her work explores the neuroscience of betrayal and trauma, helping women understand survival responses, interrupt destructive patterns, and rebuild clarity, identity, and self-trust when life changes without their permission.
Some of the biggest decisions of our lives can arrive at precisely the moment we feel least equipped to make them. After betrayal, trauma, or sudden life disruption, there can be enormous pressure to decide what happens next. But what if the first task is not deciding? Drawing on lived experience, more than 25 years in investigations, governance and risk, and my study of neuroscience, I explore why creating the conditions for clarity can sometimes matter as much as the decision itself.
When life suddenly changes
On 18 June 2023, my husband told me, “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.” I couldn’t breathe. I left the house and went to see a friend who, like anyone who cared about me, would want to understand what this meant. What was I going to do?
It was a reasonable question. I just wasn’t in a reasonable state to answer it.
My thoughts were chaotic and contradictory. I was frightened, angry, confused, and desperate to understand what was happening. Somewhere underneath all of that chaos, I already knew there was someone else.
Later that night, my husband confirmed it. He said he would end the affair, and for a moment, I had something to hold onto. We would work on our marriage. A few days later, the ground moved again when he told me he wasn’t giving her up.
I wasn’t sleeping properly, and I barely ate. I cried, yelled, and questioned everything. There were unknowns, half-truths, and information that seemed to change as quickly as I could process it. My emotions moved from anger to desperation, hope to despair. More than anything, I remember thinking, “I cannot believe this has become my life.”
For more than 25 years, I had worked in investigations, governance and risk. Professionally, I knew how to establish facts, recognise patterns, and question information that did not make sense. But this time, I was standing in the middle of my own investigation, trying to establish the facts of my life while simultaneously questioning what had been real.
I collected an extraordinary amount of information about the other woman and the relationship. At the time, every new piece felt important. Looking back, I understand that behaviour differently.
I wasn’t collecting evidence. I was collecting safety.
When the story you believed about your own life suddenly becomes unreliable, certainty can feel like oxygen. If I could understand enough, perhaps what was happening would feel less frightening.
What is a survival brain?
When I use the phrase “survival brain,” I am not talking about everyday stress, nor am I using it as a clinical diagnosis.
I use it as accessible language to describe what can happen when the brain and body are responding to traumatic or overwhelming stress after profound threat, shock, or disruption. Betrayal can be one example. Abuse, sudden loss, workplace trauma, serious illness, or another experience that shatters a person’s sense of safety can also produce an intense stress response.
When we perceive threat, systems designed to help protect us become active. Attention can become increasingly focused on identifying danger, resolving uncertainty, and determining what is safe. That response has a purpose, but protecting ourselves from a perceived threat and calmly evaluating several uncertain futures are very different cognitive demands.
Stress and decision-making
Some of the abilities we rely on for complex decisions fall within what researchers call executive functions. They include working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control. In everyday language, they help us hold information in mind, shift between possibilities, adapt when new information emerges, and resist responding purely to an immediate impulse.
Research into acute stress has found that significant stress can affect working memory and cognitive flexibility. Research into decision-making under stress is nuanced. Stress does not automatically make someone irrational, incapable of making a good decision, or mean every decision made while distressed will be wrong.
What the research does give us is reason to recognise that significant stress can influence the cognitive and emotional processes involved in evaluating information, uncertainty, risk, and possible outcomes.
That mattered when I placed it beside what I had actually experienced.
I was absorbing new information while trying to remember what I had been told before. I compared stories, identified inconsistencies, separated facts from fears, and imagined multiple futures. I was questioning information from the person I had trusted most while beginning to question my own perception of what had been real. I was doing all of that while barely sleeping, barely eating, and experiencing profound emotional distress.
That is what I mean by a survival brain. It is not a broken or irrational brain. It is my way of describing a brain and body attempting to protect someone during overwhelming threat or disruption.
The important distinction is this, the conditions under which you are being asked to make the decision have changed.
The pressure to decide
Some circumstances cannot wait. If someone is unsafe, experiencing abuse, protecting children, facing legal deadlines, or safeguarding financial interests, immediate decisions and appropriate professional support may be necessary.
But many life-changing decisions do not have to be made in the first hours or days after profound shock.
There is an irony here. The moment we feel least safe can also be when we feel the greatest urgency to decide because we want the uncertainty to stop. Leaving, staying, confronting, resigning, forgiving, ending, or committing can appear to offer something we desperately want, certainty.
But ending uncertainty and reaching clarity are not always the same thing.
A decision can bring immediate relief because it removes the unbearable state of not knowing. That does not necessarily mean it is the decision we would make once we have enough space to understand what we actually want.
The people around us can be uncomfortable with uncertainty too. They ask, "Are you leaving? Are you staying? What happens now?" Those questions may come from love and concern, but another question may need to come first, “What do you need before you are ready to decide?”
Not deciding yet can also be a decision. It can mean giving yourself time to sleep, eat, breathe, obtain reliable information, seek appropriate professional advice, and understand what has happened. It can mean allowing enough of the immediate intensity to settle that you can begin to hear your own voice again.
That is not avoidance. It is creating better conditions from which to decide.
Stabilise before deciding
The affair eventually ended in December 2023, but the end of the event did not mean the end of its impact. Rebuilding safety, trust, and eventually my trust in myself would take far longer.
That experience left me with a principle that has shaped the work I do today. Don’t ask a survival brain to make life-changing decisions.
This isn't an instruction to stay or leave. It is not an argument for remaining in a damaging situation, ignoring reality, or waiting indefinitely for someone else to change. Nor is it about taking someone’s agency away because they are distressed.
For me, it means almost the opposite. When circumstances allow, stabilisation is about creating enough space for your agency to return.
Instead of immediately asking, “Should I leave?”, perhaps the first question is, “What do I need to feel steadier today?” Instead of demanding an answer to “What is going to happen to my marriage, my career, or my life?”, perhaps we begin with, “What do I need before I am ready to make that decision?”
If I could sit beside the woman I was on 18 June 2023, I would not ask what she was going to do. I would tell her she did not need to solve her entire future that night.
You do not have to decide the rest of your life while you are still trying to comprehend what happened to the life you thought you had.
The biggest decisions of your life deserve more than the most frightened version of you making them. When circumstances allow, create better conditions for the decision. Stabilise. Understand what is happening inside you. Reconnect with yourself. Then choose.
Don’t ask a survival brain to make life-changing decisions.
If life has changed without your permission and you are trying to understand what is happening in your brain and body, explore practical resources, Take Back Your Power, and further insights from Graceful Discoveries.
Read more from Iesha Taraboulsi
Iesha Taraboulsi, Founder of Graceful Discoveries
Iesha Taraboulsi is an author and founder of Graceful Discoveries, where she helps women understand what happens to the brain, body and sense of self after betrayal, trauma and unexpected life disruption. Drawing on lived experience, her study of neuroscience, and 25+ years in investigations, governance, and risk, she created the Calm the Chaos Method to help women stabilise, regain clarity, and rebuild self-trust. Her guiding principle, "Don’t ask a survival brain to make life-changing decisions."
