Preempting Panic: Mastering Stress Before It Strikes
06 Nov, 2023·By Kolin Simon
It was a night that could have been a scene straight out of a slapstick comedy, except it was me starring in it, and it felt anything but funny at the time.
I had just gotten back to the my 5th Floor Walk up in NYC, only to realize I had locked myself out. In fact, I had no idea where my keys were. There I was, middle of winter, staring at my keys, with no way of getting into to the warmth of my apartment.
Understanding Stress and Its Impact on Our Brains
This personal debacle, which me to spend hours in a diner and then roaming the city streets, was a stark reminder of the fog that descends on our brains under stress.
Neuroscientist explain how stress triggers a hormonal cascade including cortisol, ramping up our heart rate and muddling our thoughts. It's a biological alarm system that, while lifesaving in the presence of an actual predator, is less than helpful when the "threat" is a lost passport, key, or a crucial meeting.
The Power of Prospective Hindsight
During that sleep-deprived night, sandwiched between frustration and the hum of the city, I pondered over 'prospective hindsight' — a strategy discussed by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Danny Kahneman. This pre-mortem approach involves envisioning potential problems ahead of time and taking steps to prevent or mitigate them. It's the art of anticipation, a chess game with fate where we aim to be always one move ahead.
Practical Strategies for Everyday Life
The first step to mastering this art is deceptively simple: organization. By assigning a dedicated home for frequently lost items like keys or passports, we tap into the spatial memory prowess of our hippocampus — the same brain structure that allows squirrels to locate their nuts amidst a sea of leaves. The key (pun intended) is consistency, ensuring that our items have a designated spot that we habitually use.
Making Informed Decisions Under Stress
But what about when the stakes are higher than a misplaced key? Consider the stress of medical decisions. Here, the pre-mortem becomes crucial. It demands that we ask tough questions about potential outcomes and side effects. It means not just accepting a treatment plan at face value but understanding the statistics, like the 'number needed to treat', which can offer sobering clarity on the efficacy of interventions.
Preparing for the Unexpected
Life, as I learned in a rather literal way, will throw an obstacle into our well-laid plans. Thus, we must design systems to help us be resilient to stress.
The next day I made multiple copy keys to my apartment and handed them out to friends (to be better prepared). My next residence had a combination lock installed, ensuring that even if my keys were out of reach, my home wasn't.
These simple systems are metaphors for broader life strategies — backup plans and safety nets are what protect us when our primary plans go awry.
Conclusion
My misadventure taught me that while we can't always control the stressors in our lives, we can control our responses to them.
By implementing systems of organization, decision-making, and preparedness, we can transform panic into poise. So, let's prepare our pre-mortems, design our designated spots, and remember that the true measure of calm isn't the absence of stress but the presence of strategies to navigate it.
