Years ago, I read a book by Amanda Ripley that really made an impact on me. It was about the psychology of folks who’ve survived horrible disasters like plane crashes, earthquakes, and 9/11.
The book is called The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why.
Forget all the DIYs and wilderness survival books. Obviously, it’s important to learn about that stuff too, but nothing matters more in a crisis than your response to that crisis.
It honestly changed everything about mental preparedness for me, and I strongly recommend the book.
Ripley, a journalist, researched the aftermath of extreme disasters and spoke to survivors to discover what they had in common.
We have completely different disaster personalities than our everyday personalities. Some are helpful, and some are absolutely not helpful.
There are different stages of acceptance when a crisis occurs, and how rapidly you process those stages can be the difference between life and death.
The question here is: Who will you be?
Have you ever been in a life-threatening emergency?
Have you experienced a life-threatening crisis like the ones in the book? If so, were you surprised – or perhaps – disappointed – with your own response?
If you weren’t happy with how you reacted, don’t despair. You can improve your crisis personality and your responses to emergencies. It requires a lot of personal study, education, and effort, but will be worth its weight in gold when you need it.
Have you read this book? Do you have an experience you could share with us? Let’s discuss it in the comments section.
6 Responses
Sheeple responses, is generally what she is talking about. At about the 6 min mark, she talks about an alert, prepared individual and their response. No real delay, no denial, etc. They preplanned for the scenario. once it occurred they moved ahead with the plan.
This shows that you should be observant at all times and have a plan for possible scenarios that you might face. This will reduce denial and speed up the reaction time.
Something she does not seem to factor in, in group interactions, is sex. We see this in the Men vs Women Survival challenges. The Women took a lot longer to get anything done, (if it ever got done), by trying to find a group consensus before acting. Groups of Men tended to organize quickly and get right to getting things done. In Mixed sex groups this could also create delays and problems based upon cultural norms. In a survival scenario this would be part of the denial and delay in response times. Probably, the lack of strong of Alpha or Sigma personalities would affect group response times. So a lot of factors were not well covered in the video.
Some people are better at this than others. Even among those having the same training. Such as in Military, Fire and Police personnel. So I am not sure that this can be learned, to some extent it can, but some of it is in our biology.
Bet Daisy and my wife would beg to differ.
Thank you for finding this video! I’ve read the book several times, and I am due for another read through. I know I usually ‘freak out’ about emergencies, so I find the more I read about it – especially in a thoughtful fashion – the calmer I can be, just as Amanda Ripley brings out. The closest emergency situation I’ve been in was in late 2018 we had a big quake – I was taking an online course with YOU, we talked about it! You mentioned how everyone was so polite :). In that instance, I was responsible for getting a couple of my students to safety. I think that is what helped me keep my act together – being responsible for someone else.
I have read three such books. This one is on my bookshelf within touching distance from my chair. I have found that I face crazy situations almost immediately. I would be one who leads others out of disaster. In fact, that is one of the reasons I read this site–to get the info needed to act quickly, and to help others.
This is a sobering, but an enlightening video. I know that as I age, (60+) my response time is a lot slower. Daisy you have helped me put that into perspective and this video also is a great help!
I have not read this book, but I will. Thanks for the article, reminder and the video.
I’ve been in a couple of earthquakes. Not counting little ones. The first one was rather soft, epicenter fairly far away, it felt about the same as a mild earthquake until I realized that it was taking longer than usual. The building I was in was designed to withstand earthquakes, so I wasn’t worried. The second major one was closer, about the same strength, but again about the only thing to do was to hang on until it stopped. There was no damage, nothing fell off the shelves where I was. We went back to work until the electricity failed. The scariest part was at night—we could see the glow of a major fire, but none of us had a working radio, so we didn’t know how close was that fire nor whether or not we needed to evacuate. Phone service didn’t come back for a week.
Lessons learned: get a radio that doesn’t need to be plugged in to work, preferably a two way radio (Ham) to be able to communicate.
Sometimes too much knowledge could be a danger. If I were in the Twin Towers, I could very well have been a victim. I knew the buildings were designed to take a direct hit from an airliner and survive. But who would have expected that those buildings were wired up for demolition and that someone would pull the trigger while there were still thousands of people in the buildings? Not I. (No, I’m not part of the Truther Movement—they are trying to find the whodunnit. I have no idea whodunnit and won’t waste time in fruitless speculation. I just know enough about engineering that the signs of deliberate demolition are obvious.)
Knowing what to expect and readiness to act correctly are very important in survival. Preparedness, having things set up in such a way that facilitates deliberate action helps. And don’t do stupid things.