Book Freak 128: How to Survive a Disaster
Book Freak is a newsletter with mental tools you can use to improve the quality of your life and the lives of others.
In this issue: four pieces of advice from The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes — and Why, by Amanda Ripley
If you sense danger, get out
“Why do we procrastinate leaving? The denial phase is a humbling one. It takes a while to come to terms with our miserable luck. Rowley puts it this way: ‘Fires only happen to other people.’ We have a tendency to believe that everything is OK because, well, it almost always has been before.”
Develop resilience
“Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a belief that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences.”
Rehearse for the worst
“The best way to get the brain to perform under extreme stress is to repeatedly run it through rehearsals beforehand. Or as the military puts it, the Eight P’s: ‘Proper prior planning and preparation prevents piss-poor performance.’”
Sometimes you have to yell
“In a series of experiments, safety officials ran regular people through mock evacuations from planes. The trials weren’t nearly as stressful as real evacuations, of course, but it didn’t matter. People, especially women, hesitated for a surprisingly long time before jumping onto the slide. That pause slowed the evacuation for everyone. But there was a way to get people to move faster. If a flight attendant stood at the exit and screamed at people to jump, the pause all but disappeared, the researchers found. In fact, if flight attendants did not aggressively direct the evacuation, they might as well have not been there at all. A study by the Cranfield University Aviation Safety Centre found that people moved just as slowly for polite and calm flight attendants as they did when there were no flight attendants present.”
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