I become very calm, quiet and rational during when under intense pressure. At these times, I often perform my best. It’s not that I am particularly courageous or fearless. This is simply my natural reaction.
Here are some examples:
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- When I was a scrawny teenager, my friends and I got jumped in downtown Pittsburgh late one night by a bunch of older, big black dudes. One friend went down from a sucker punch. I quickly pulled him and my other friend into the only store that was still open, got ice from the staff for my friend’s face, asked them to call the cops and called his brother to come get us. Instead of a beat down, we suffered just a sucker punch and an adrenal rush.
- When my wife was diagnosed with lung cancer, I took over everything: scheduling appointments, managing insurance, taking care of the household, updating friends and family. I became machine-like in managing the chaos that ensued over the next 8 months. It was an awful time, but my efforts made it as easy as it could be.
- When I was in high school, I heard my neighbor screaming. I ran down and found her husband unconscious while she was screaming I coherently. I suspected a heart attack and began CPR while calmly instructing the wife to call 911 and then hand me the phone. After attempting CPR for 10 minutes with no response, I ran up to the main road to flag down the ambulance because I knew they’d be confused by our one-way split street. (They were – had I not been there they would have circled around losing precious time.). I later learned the neighbor had a massive heart attack and despite my efforts, he died.
There have been many other times in my life when this instinct has kicked in. It has spared me numerous beatdowns, injuries and consequences of hasty reactions.
During the past year and a half of the Covid pandemic, I’ve witnessed what happens when society at large panics.
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- Panic buying and hoarding resulted in shortages of toilet paper, eggs, meat, hand sanitizer, Tylenol and most staples at grocery stores for months.
- Face masks, guns and medical supply prices shot up as people tried to combat their fears by purchasing something to “protect” themselves.
- In response to the Colonial Pipeline hack, people in North Carolina rushed the gas stations for two weeks to fill up on gas and stockpile reserves causing stations outages, shutdowns and supply issues.
In the years before Covid, I saw the same behavior in Florida during hurricane warnings. Panic buying caused surges in demand that overwhelmed our supply lines. Water, canned food, gas, generators and plywood would sell out in a day as prices skyrocketed by profiteering stores. People would ensure hour long lines, fight, steal and plunder to get these “essential items” even thought most times, they had what they needed to survive a week or more at home already.
This panic behavior is fueled by several things:
- The media, which hypes up the fear mongering as much as possible.
- People succumbing to fear of “being without” – while never pausing to consider the likelihood of this happening or even considering how they could live with a short term inconvenience.
- Selfishness. “I need to make sure I’ve got what I need” is a common theme I hear.
I’m going to recommend a different approach.
Have a week’s work of emergency supplies on hand all the time. Buy two 5 gallon water jugs and keep them filled. Have a week’s worth of medicine, food, batteries etc. in case you were all stores are shuttered for a week. After a week or two, either systems recover or we’ve got much bigger problems that will require other adaptations.
The next time the media, Facebook, your neighbors or your TV spouts off about “what you need to be concerned with”, “why we could all be afraid” or the next “impending disaster”, consider the source and weigh the information against history.
I remember when the news reported on the ebola crises in Africa and tracked how we had 2 people enter the US with ebola – forecasting a potentially catastrophic plague in the US. It never happened.
The following year the Zika virus hit and pictures of babies with shrunken heads were all over the news, as fears for unborn babies were promulgated nightly. I lived through “the Zika crisis” in Florida – there was not a single shrunken head baby born nor any deaths or serious illness as a result of Zika reported. I am confident of this because it would have been all over the news and social media.
Think about the panic reactions of the past year with Covid – the toilet paper hoarding, the scrubbing of packages with lysol, the lockdowns, the belief that a cloth mask would protect us from microscopic aerosol particles.
I think most people already know what to do. A bit of deep breathing and reliance on your own intuition will go a long way in fighting the urge urge to give in to panic.
Trust your instincts.
Even if you don’t have the natural reaction that I have to pressure, you don’t have to panic.
Most of the time, everything goes back to normal in a few days.
For the times when it doesn’t, you’ll be better able to make clear headed decisions.