1
How We Experience Crises

What Is a Crisis?

When I say the word “crisis,” what do you think of? Maybe you picture a person who is choking and needs their airway cleared. Or a flooding basement. Or an emergency evacuation due to nearby wildfires. There's no doubt that these are crises. But the truth is, crises come in all shapes and sizes. A missed deadline. A fender bender. A canceled flight. A broken arm. These are not usually what we think of when asked to imagine a crisis, but they can be powerful inducers of stress, and set off a physiological response that can mirror what we experience in a larger‐scale crisis such as a school on fire or an active shooter event.

Dr. Saul McLeod defines stress as “a biological and psychological response experienced on encountering a threat that we feel we do not have the resources to deal with.”1 The body and brain have an automatic, programmed response when they detect stress. This means that we're practicing crisis management on a near daily basis. This is an important reminder to kick off this book, and for our understanding of how we, as people, respond to emergencies. Because it means you already have many of the tools we'll work to galvanize together.

I want to note that I'm using the word “crisis” here intentionally. Throughout this book, we talk a lot about emergencies, which we define as situations that have the potential to cause physical or emotional harm to a group of people. Here we're using the word “crisis” because we're referring not to the nature of the event itself but the stress response it triggers in individuals. Whether it's a burning building or a burnt dinner, our brains can see both as a crisis, depending on the circumstances, and both can trigger a stress response that impacts us physically, psychologically, and emotionally.

What happens to our brains and bodies in crisis?

Have you ever been on an airplane with more than a little turbulence? You likely have—perhaps many times—and you likely know the feeling you get when it happens. Maybe your heart skips a beat when you're lifted out of your seat by one of the bigger bumps. Maybe your stomach is in knots. Maybe you feel a rush of anxiety as your mind races and envisions what might happen next. Maybe you go into planning mode—deciding what you'll do if something goes wrong and the plane has to make an emergency landing. Maybe you tell yourself, “I've been on a million flights before with turbulence; this is just like those. I'll be fine.”

That's the human stress response. Every moment of every day, our bodies and brains are interpreting what's happening around us. With every experience we have and every situation we find ourselves in, our bodies are taking in information, putting the pieces together, assessing it, and deciding whether it's stressful. The decision is based on a combination of sensory input and processing (what did I see and hear in the situation?) and stored memories (what happened the last time I was in a similar situation?).2 This information is sent to the amygdala, an area of the brain that contributes to emotional processing, which then interprets the images and sounds. If it determines there is danger, it instantly sends a distress signal to the hypothalamus, the part of the brain in charge of the stress response.

Here's what happens next:

• The hypothalamus operates as your body's “command center” (a term we'll use throughout the book to mean the center of decision making for the key stakeholders). Your brain communicates to the rest of your body via the nervous system, which controls your body's core functions such as breathing, heartbeat, your fight‐or‐flight response, and more. In essence, your nervous system can be further broken down into two sections:
  • Your sympathetic nervous system: fight‐or‐flight response (think of the accelerator in your car); and
  • Your parasympathetic nervous system: rest and digest (think of the brake pedal in your car).

When your hypothalamus (command center) sends a danger signal to your sympathetic nervous system, you go into what's commonly known as fight‐or‐flight mode, and your body begins to activate its response. On a school campus, this would be like telling all your security officers to brace for incoming danger. They'd run around and check every exit, stop releasing students from the buildings, “shunt” all the people they could into a specific part of campus and then work to defend that part of campus to the best of their ability while they wait for help. Well, your biological and physiological systems are doing the same thing. Your body begins shunting all available resources to your brain, heart, and core and begins using a stress hormone called cortisol to speed things up that need to go quickly. Your heart rate speeds up, your blood pressure goes up, your breathing gets faster, your sight, hearing, and other senses become more sensitive, all of which helps your body put on a better defense against the risk you're facing.

All these changes happen so quickly that you're not even cognitively able to process the event until after your body has processed and distributed some of these chemicals and fortified its defenses. It's truly incredible to reflect on all that our bodies are hardwired to do. Every so often we hear about a mother who lifts a car off her child or some other seemingly superhuman feat. This is thanks to the strength unlocked via your nervous system releasing epinephrine (adrenaline) and shifting blood glucose and other naturally occurring chemicals to your cells in order to accelerate and strengthen your defense mechanisms.

Similarly, every so often we hear about the person who jumped out of the way of an oncoming train. Same concept here. They probably didn't even realize what they were doing in the moment, but we are biologically hardwired to protect ourselves, and sometimes our biology takes over.

But these states are designed to be short‐term. And your body will eventually require a recovery period to downshift from the crisis experience. We'll talk more about that in later parts of the book, but for now, I want to remind you that you're not superhuman, just human. That means you can do truly awesome things and you'll also be exhausted by them (that's the parasympathetic nervous system at play).3

How does this all apply to emergency response? Well, a lot. But the first thing is that the way we think, react, feel, and even move might look different in an emergency than it does in everyday life. Many times, people actually respond very differently from how they expected they might during an emergency response.

In The Unthinkable, Amanda Ripley's book on crisis and what enables some to survive when others don't, she deeply assesses the reality that our “disaster personalities can be quite different from the ones we expect to meet.”4 She shares what you might have even seen in your own behaviors: some people expect to be apoplectic during an emergency, yet they become the ideal leaders. Others, the opposite.

Knowing how our brain and body are reacting in a real‐time crisis also helps us understand where to leverage our adrenaline‐induced strengths and navigate the things that become harder when we're under stress. When we're in crisis, these are some of the things we can expect:

• When the amygdala takes control, adrenaline floods the brain, which allows us think faster;
• The parts of our brain that control rational thought are suppressed, which means we have increased anxiety and are quicker to act and react;
• Muscles get tense, and blood flow increases, which dilates our pupils to let in more light;
• Our breathing becomes shallow, which increases our heart rate and blood pressure;
• Our short‐term memory is impaired, which makes it more challenging to handle social or intellectual tasks or behaviors;
• Pain is temporarily lessened.

As a result of these physiological changes, we tend to simplify messages. Under intense stress and possible information overload, we often miss the nuances of health and safety messages because we either aren't fully hearing information, can't remember the information, or are misinterpreting information we're receiving.5

We also look for additional information and opinions. We remember what we see and tend to believe what we've experienced. During crises, we want messages confirmed before acting. We often seek these out through looking for multiple channels or accounts reporting the same information, calling people we trust to find out if something is accurate, or looking to a credible leader. (There will be much more on leadership throughout the rest of this book.)

Finally, we experience fear. Obviously, crises can induce this, and the fear may be based in any number of concerns. How will this affect me? Could this hurt me? Could this hurt my child? Could this harm my reputation? Fear can be a limiting factor or an agent of progress, a catalyst for action. For the purposes of this conversation, we'll focus on the other elements/components of the crisis, but to explore fear more globally, you might pick up a copy of Gavin DeBecker's The Gift of Fear.

For a test of sorts on how you'll stress and potentially experience a crisis,...