Don't Ever "Stay Calm": Why Anxiety in Disaster is Your Greatest Asset

If I see one more disaster plan that starts with "The first thing you should do is stay calm," I’m going to punch a hole in my office wall.

It’s the most useless piece of advice in the industry. Whether it’s a 7.0 earthquake, a tsunami pulling back the tide, or a active threat in the hallway—nobody is staying calm. Your heart is pounding, your palms are sweating, and your brain is in full hyper-vigilance mode. Trying to force yourself to be "Zen" in the middle of a catastrophe isn't just ineffective; it’s a mental trap that makes you fight your own biology.

In this episode of Dismantling Disaster, we’re killing the "stay calm" fallacy. I spent years training EMTs and disaster responders, and I’ll tell you exactly what I told them: Don’t be calm. Be focused.

We discuss why the "Fight, Flight, or Freeze" response is natural, why you shouldn't fight those symptoms, and how to weaponize your adrenaline. If you’re waiting for the "perfect" emotional state to act, you’re already behind. We’re moving from static, boring drills to high-pressure simulations that prove one thing: when you redirect fear into a set of clear, actionable tasks (what I call ESIPL: Evacuate, Shelter-in-place, or Lockdown), you stop being a victim of your nerves and start being the person leading the response.

Inside this episode:
00:00 - The "Stay Calm" Lie: Why your disaster plan is failing you
02:52 - The Physiology of Panic: Why you can't "think" your way out of anxiety
06:33 - Fight, Flight, Freeze: The three traps of a non-telegraphed disaster
11:22 - The Shift: Why "Fear is My Focus" is the new standard
13:46 - ESIPL: The only three decisions that matter in a disaster
17:45 - The Drill Trap: Why most school and business drills are a waste of time
23:55 - Bruce Lee, Martial Arts, and the Art of Adaptability
26:09 - Training for Reality: How to run drills that actually prepare you for the worst

Stop training for convenience and start training for the real world. Your anxiety is energy—stop wasting it by trying to suppress it and start using it to execute your plan.

Empowerment Architecture means refusing to inherit a boilerplate document as your survival strategy. Prepare for a disaster, and you'll never experience one.

#DismantlingDisaster #DisasterPatrick #EmergencyPreparedness #AnxietyManagement #FocusOverCalm #ESIPL #SurvivalSkills #RealWorldPreparedness #5pocketmethod

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:41

I remember the very first disaster plan I ever looked at, it was this 900-page behemoth. It was amazing. And on the very first page, it said, no matter what the disaster is, you need to stay calm. And that is a trend I have seen in disaster plans all over the place. Whether I'm working with restaurants or bars or nursing homes or alligator farms or underwater cable operations or hair salons, anything I've worked with, every time I pick up a disaster plan, one of the first things it says is, it says stay calm. Tornado, earthquake, tsunami, lions and tigers and bears, oh my, doesn't matter what it's facing, even when we're talking in security, and I have read mass shooting plans that were attached to the disaster plan, it would say stay calm. As if you're going to stay calm when there's somebody with a a weapon in the hallways. Or you're going to stay calm when there's 7.0 earthquake, meaning all the walls, everything is just shaking, and you feel like the world's about to end. Or when there's a massive tsunami and you can see the pearly whites of the ocean because all the water is being pulled back out for this one massive wave that's just about to come in. I think it is the worst advice imaginable. I tell people all the time don't ever write stay calm in a disaster. And there's a big reason for that. Because you're not gonna be calm in a disaster. You're never gonna be calm. That's just never gonna happen. So the but the issue is that I see this constant, but I see this constantly in disaster plans where people say, Well, we need to remain calm, we need to stay as as calm as we possibly can. Even though that's not realistic, that's never going to happen. And in addition to that, when you're trying to make yourself calm, you are fighting it. You are fighting the anxiety, you are battling it. And one of the things that mental health professionals and others tell us is you can't fight it. You can't fight anxiety. So don't try. Don't try to fight the anxiety. And so I'm gonna advocate for you to have a different thought process when it comes to staying calm because frankly, you should never stay calm in a disaster. That's what I say. Never, ever, ever stay calm in a disaster. I never want you calm in a disaster. When I was training EMTs, okay, these were 18-year-olds fresh out of high school. The last big concern they had was who they were gonna ask the prom. Now they're out on the street having to make life and death decisions, not every day, but life and death decisions when they are rolling up on scene and dealing with someone who's in who's had a traffic accident, there's a cardiac emergency, or there's a neurologic issue, or there's you know, some kind of ballistic injury, so meaning someone's been shot. And when I train them, when I train them dealing with mass casualty incidents, acts of terrorism, you know, hazardous materials, and other uh major disasters, I would turn to them and I'd say, don't be calm. So let's talk a little bit about anxiety and let's talk about why it is that we should never, ever, ever stay calm in a disaster. The first problem is let's talk first about the physiology of anxiety. When you start to feel anxiety and nervousness, a series of things happen, right? So we start to feel nervous. We there's that actual kind of nervous feeling. Our hands maybe get a little sweaty, maybe we perspire on our forehead, maybe we, you know, the all all the vessels start to dilate, right? Your heart's beating a little faster. You're you're starting to become what we call hyper-vigilant, right? So you're really anxious and perceptive and looking around constantly. That's very common. And then, of course, with that, as people begin to feel these symptoms, it's like their body is simulating as if there was something incredibly dangerous going on. And when you're having an anxiety attack, so when you have anxiety and depression, when you have an anxiety attack just under regular conditions, just you know, it happens at work or you're in the car, I mean, nothing, you're not in a dangerous situation, then people start to panic. Right? Because the symptoms are simulating, people think they're maybe having a heart attack, or they start to get severely claustrophobic, or they become, you know, they feel like they have to move around somehow. This happens in airplanes too. I've I've flown many times, and I'm I'm actually a very nervous flyer. It doesn't prevent me from flying. I fly everywhere. So I am very cognizant of the fact that there's going to be anxiety on the airplane. That's just the given for me. That's the way it's gonna be. It's it's genetic in my family. Everyone who's been on airplanes for three generations gets this way. But what the other point of it is is in disasters, when people start to feel these symptoms, right? The first thing that happens is you feel a need for one of three responses fight, flight, or freeze. It's gonna be one of those three things. So let's talk about each in turn. Fighting means that you're trying to actually attack, you're sort of going after whatever caused the anxiety. And the analogy you hear about all the time online from in mental health forums and from commentators and podcasters is they say it's like the tiger is in front of you. Right? It goes back to our ancestors that you know, you have a tiger in front of you, your body immediately begins this with the this immediate response, and that's the fight response. So maybe you want to attack the tiger. Okay. The second is flight, and that makes obvious, right? The tiger's in front of us, so what are we gonna do? We're gonna run.

unknown 6:34

Right?

SPEAKER_00 6:35

So we run away. And in anxiety attacks, I see that an awful lot in people during disasters, after disasters, when they are still traumatized, people begin to run around all the time. When a disaster is about to strike, well, I've I've been there when there were when in lead up to hurricanes, and people sort of have this crazy anxious response. Happens all the time. Then the last one is freezing, right? Is that we approach the tiger and we immediately freeze. Our entire body just goes into this state of shock. We can't move. This happens all very often in what we call sudden non-telegraph disasters. What I mean by non-telegraph disasters are disasters that you don't know were coming for the most part.

unknown 7:30

Right?

SPEAKER_00 7:30

Earthquakes theoretically can be predicted, not all the time. I mean, sometimes I read from companies saying, well, we can predict earthquakes, you know, hours in advance, and I'm very skeptical of that because I've heard a lot of folks say we can predict this and that, but then, you know, why is it we're stopping earthquakes in LA and no one knows about it until it happens. There was an earthquake in Riverside about a month and a half ago, and no one predicted that in advance. Nobody. Someone claimed online that they had, but they hadn't. Other types of sudden non-telegraph disasters are ones that are um you could even consider tornadoes non-telegraphed, even though, and I know some of you live in tornado areas. I was just in Joplin, Missouri recently. I, you know, tornadoes are telegraphed in the sense that you can get tornado watches and then tornado warnings, and once a tornado warning happens, you have just a few minutes, less than five minutes, you've got to find gelter, you've got to find shelter immediately, as fast as you can, but but five minutes at the latest, because the conditions are there, there's gonna be touchdown, and so you need to be prepared for that. But in many times, that's non-telegraph too. I've been in areas before where they weren't necessarily expecting a tornado on that day, and then all of a sudden conditions changed very rapidly. People had plans, they were doing things, all of a sudden things changed, and they had to and they had to modify the way they did things. In telegraph disasters, things like hurricanes, tsunamis, even volcanic eruptions, uh, when those occur, and volcanic eruptions can be predicted in many ways because you'll get earthquakes, there are certain conditions, you'll start seeing smoke out of the volcano. There are ways that they know to predict these things with some degree of certainty. Now they don't know exactly how the eruption is going to occur, how severe it's gonna be, that they can't predict, no one can predict that, but they certainly can predict that something is going to be occurring. This happens a lot, I've done work in Indonesia before, and when I've I've put the I was working with some small businesses in Indonesia in developing this scorecard I developed, I was evaluating some small businesses there, and one of the things they were talking about was they knew when they started feeling certain kinds of earthquakes, people would look to see, you know, is there gonna be volcanic activity? They look for ash, they they love it, look for those kinds of things. It's gonna be a big deal. So those are the three major reactions people get to disasters. They do the fight, they do the flight, and they do the freeze. And what I would say is that you shouldn't do any of those three things in a disaster. You shouldn't do any of those things, and those absolutely make sense. But here's the thing not only should you not be doing those three things, you shouldn't combat the symptoms that result in those three things. You're going to be nervous in a disaster. Your heart's gonna be pounding, you're gonna be hyper-vigilant. You know what I say to people? Great. I want you to be nervous. I want you to be hyper-focused. Good. I don't want you to think about anything else. I want you focused on what we're doing here. And so what I propose to you is instead of trying to fight the symptoms, staying calm, trying to be zen, what I want you to do instead is I want you to focus. I want you to focus it. I want fear to be your focus. That's what I say to myself. Fear is my focus. And I say that to people because I want you to use the symptoms your body is already experiencing to your advantage. I want you to take everything that you are experiencing and feeling and put it into something productive and put it into something that's incredibly productive. Because in a disaster response, one of the issues that happens constantly, I've been a disaster professional for over two decades, and in that time I see people who are not focused, they're trying to do other things, and instead I say, if you have a good disaster program in place, where people understand that you know you're not just supposed to leave, you're not supposed to leave, you're supposed to be assisting on the property or at the school or at the church or at the faith-based organization or at the business, whatever it is, or at the campground, all those things. Assuming they know that, assuming you've trained them effectively in knowing what needs to be done in a disaster response, then the next thing you absolutely positively must do is utilize the symptoms to your advantage. You need to be focused because a good disaster response has a lot of activities involved. There's a lot of things that are going to happen. And what I say in every disaster is the first decision you have to make is am I going to evacuate, am I going to shelter in place, or am I going to lock down? That is the decision you must make in every single disaster. And I have a podcast coming out, an episode in a couple weeks, where literally I address this very issue. The decision you must make at all disasters is evacuate, shelter in place, or lockdown. Don't think about 30 things. Do I need to do this? Do I need that? No, no, no, don't worry about that. Figure out whether you're gonna evacuate, SIP, or lockdown, because those three things, what I call the ESIPL, E for evacuation, SIP, shelter in place, and L for lockdown. ESIPL. When I tell people about ESIP L, I say that is the decision you need to make multiple times throughout the disaster response. And the only way to continually make that decision is by conducting tasks, things that you find important in the disaster response, whatever that is. If you're at home, that's going to be different than if you're at your business or you're at the school or you're at the faith-based organization, whatever. You're you're volunteering or you're you know running a marathon. Everywhere you're going, you need to make that instant decision. Am I going to evacuate, shelter in place, or lockdown? And that requires a lot of focus. You have to assume a lot of facts because you're not going to know everything. I say this DMTs when they roll up on scene for the first time. You know, you'll get a 911 call and then the dispatcher will contact you over the radio, you know, code two county fire or code three county fire, you know, on the 405 at this street, and you know, it's been a traffic collision involving three, four, or five vehicles. Okay, that's a big scene. Five vehicles, that's that's that's pretty good. It's it's one thing if it's just a couple cars, but three, four, five vehicles, that means what I used to say to the MTs is if you say five, assume it's seven. Because now you have five vehicles that are strown all over the freeway, and that means other cars are gonna hit it. Because in California, people drive very fast, so there's gonna be a lot of traffic collision. It isn't just gonna be the one or two. So you are going to be nervous, and so what I say to them is when you are on scene, you are gonna be nervous for the first time. Don't fight that. Instead, I want you to utilize it and turn it into focus. Don't try to be calm, be focused. By focusing, now you're not fighting the symptoms, now you're utilizing them to your advantage. You're using them in a way that makes sense to you. Because if you're fighting it, I'm not gonna lie to you. If you think to me to yourself, well, I can just combat the symptoms. I'm telling you, somebody who has dealt with anxiety his whole life, it when you have the anxiety, when you fight it, it only gets worse. When you try to say, Okay, trying to get out of this, trying to forget, it doesn't help. It doesn't help. So, what I say is redirect yourself in a disaster. Now I'm not a mental health professional, so I should give that disclaimer. So, of course, anything I've just said to you, you should go and see a mental health professional if you have anxiety and depression. And you should go to a mental health professional if you experience anxiety attacks. Everything I just told you is specifically from the perspective of a disaster professional. That's it. But when you're looking and you're in a disaster area or you are experiencing a disaster of some kind, there is a lot that is gonna have to be done over a long period of time, depending upon the size and scope of the disaster, period. And the only way to do that is you gotta focus. You have to focus yourself. And so what do I mean? So now that I've said focus, everyone, you know, you think, okay, great. Patrick said it's focus instead of calm, sounds good. Well, what do you mean now what? Well, when you are conducting those tasks, if your heart is beating fast, great, keep doing the tasks, do the next thing. That frenetic activity, that's gonna come naturally. I've run drills before, I do this all the time. I'll run a drill, and when people when I start to put people under time pressure, now I start to see the way people will really behave in the disaster. But when I say to them before, saying, please, you know, pretend you have a broken leg and stuff, I don't do that. Like I actually say, like I actually take, I don't break someone's leg, obviously, but I mean like all I do is I take a leg brace so that they can't move their leg, I put that on them, and then I'll turn to a responder and I'll say, you have, you know, two minutes to get that person out of here. Two minutes. Or I'll put, you know, five or six or seven victims, you know, these are victims in quotation marks, right? This is a drill, so these are not real victims, and I'll put them out and I'll say, You need to move all these people, and you have ten minutes to do it. And when people start to get anxious and they're standing around saying, I don't know what to do, I immediately say, focus yourself. What do we need to do first? I mean, what I tell them usually is, you know, take a deep breath. Now, do this, do this, do this, do this. That breaks it. And it's weird because I say, do A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and it's like I'm taking a hammer and I'm immediately shatter the ice that someone was encased in. Because I'll hit by with those words, it'll be like a hammer. It's like I'm smashing the ice, and suddenly the responder comes out of it. Suddenly the responder is unleashed. And I didn't really need to tell them A, B, C, D, E, F G. They already knew A, B, C, D, E F G, and I wasn't gonna have to prompt them. They just needed something to get them to A. Once I got them to A, they did B, C, D, everything, all the training took effect. And that's the reason why I emphasize to you that yes, it is important to focus, but you see the problem when you do nothing, when we do no preparedness at all, because then if you don't know what to do, you don't have a set of tasks to complete, then it's all very nice to say fear is my focus. But if you don't have things to do, then you're focusing on what? What are you focusing on? Right? So that's why the preparedness angle of it is so important. It isn't just me simply saying as some gimmick, oh, fear is my focus, and I want you to be focused, not calm. That's all very nice to say, but when it comes to a disaster response, if you have a series of tasks that you need to be that you need to complete or that need to be completed, then that's the A B C D E F G. You only really need to get to A, maybe B, and then really from there they're good. All know how well you have trained people if you can get them to A, and then they take on the rest. They do B, C, D, E, F, G on their own. Because then they'll utilize the nervousness. One of the disservices that people do, and I have a podcast that's come up in a few episodes. Actually, I think it'll be it'll be released, I think, in early October. And one of the episodes I I have recorded is about drills, and I get so angry about drills, and I mean this. You wait till if you think I'm angry now, you wait till you see me about drills. I get so annoyed at school drills, and I and I I and I and I can say that because I come from five generations of elementary school teachers and principals. And I mean that. My mother was a teacher and a principal. My grandmother, a teacher, a principal. My great-grandmother, a teacher, and a principal. Going all the way back. And when I see elementary schools today running these silly drills that don't that don't make people nervous or they're afraid of making anyone nervous, I say, don't run the drill at all. You are wasting your time, you're wasting the students' time, you're wasting everyone's time. What matters the most is you put people under a monicum of pressure so you get a realistic idea of how they are going to behave when the disaster occurs. If you are unable to simulate that in a drill, then the drill is useless. And I mean that. I'm not being funny here. Like it is a complete waste of time. I've actually stopped drills before that businesses ran. I got into a yelling fight one time with a business owner because he was like, uh, let me show you the drill. I said, Okay, the drill was going on, drill was awful. I mean, it was just like, we go out here, we go over here, and I say, You can't do that. And he goes, and he was like getting really angry, going, Well, what do you mean? And I said, Well, you can't have these drills where everyone's chit-chatting, chewing gum, chatting. There was someone took out their subway sandwich while we were at the quote unquote evacuation place. So, what I did was I brought the whole business back in the office and I simulate a real disaster where I say, Okay, you're injured. This happened to you, you got burned, you're refusing to leave your office, you're cursing at everybody, you're grabbing the equipment and refusing to do you know what I mean? Because that's what. It's really about, folks. And then I'll say to somebody without telling anyone else, I'll say, disappear. Pretend that you're going to see your kids. And I give them a location in the building to sit. I give them, you know, I tell them go get a Coke or whatever. And you can just hang out. Just uh keep up with me by phone so you don't leave the building or anything because you can't leave that. And they'll leave, just like I asked them to. And then, like, all of a sudden, the business owner is trying to make the drill work, and I've simulated it so that everyone's nervous. Because I told him, you have to be prepared for people being nervous. They have to be fearful. And he goes, Well, I can't stop that. I'm not Dr. Phil. I'm not a mental health professional. And I said, You don't have to be. You don't have to have an expertise in it. You don't even have to, you don't even have to interdict it all. All you have to do is is train these people in advance on what they need to be doing. And then during the drill, ask them to do that stuff. Because then they start to at least feel, okay, I'm nervous, but at least I've been trained and I know what the expectation is. Repetitive drills, I'll talk about repetitive drills some other time, but repetitive drills are so important, and I do them all the time, and I never see anyone else doing them, which is good because that's how I do them. And I do them in a way, and that's interesting because that's how I do them. Because I'm very unique. I want people to be responding. I want us to be able to respond in a way that we feel as though we know what we're doing and we know what the expectations are going to be and what is going to be occurring on a predictable basis. Because disasters are asymmetric. In other words, they can occur in a variety of ways, in a variety of different circumstances, in a variety of different places, and we have to have a predictable response that can easily adapt to it. I have a podcast coming up in a couple of days where I'm talking about Bruce Lee. And I'm going to tell you a lesson. And no, it's not the one be like water. No, it's not that. It's something else. But one of the things that Bruce Lee would say is that it's that adaptability that is important because every fight is different. Every time you engage an opponent is different. And I was a martial artist, I was a black belt myself. So when I was a martial artist, there are things we had to adapt to. But I tell you one thing, when I went to tournaments, I was anxious. I was nervous. I was all those things. And my sensei, meaning the instructor, you know, my sensei used to come up to me and he'd say, I want you to focus that into your punches and into your kicks. But that's the reason why when we are looking at anxiety, when we're looking at the physiologic symptoms, mean the physical symptoms, so the physiologic symptoms that we are going to face in a disaster, the only thing I want you to know is that they don't have to be ameliorated, meaning you don't have to stop them. But what you do have to do is you have to redirect them. Redirect them into your evacuations because they're great. If you really think about it, think about what the anxiety does for you instead of what it takes away from you. You don't want to be calm anyway. I want frenetic activity, I want the tempo to go up, I want things to go faster. I've had this conversation with principals, business owners, with um faith-based leaders, all kinds of folks saying, I want this to run faster. I want this to run faster. But the question I have is how do we do that? And the answer is that we use this idea of being calm and changing that to fear is my focus. Fear is our focus when we go into any kind of disaster situation. Because when you are able to redirect those symptoms, you put yourself in a place where you can now do a lot more than you think. And that's really great in a disaster. I can't tell you the number of times I have seen people mature and people do things where people said, I can't believe so-and-so did that. That person was always so quiet, and then during the disaster, they were leading. Because we redirected the energy and put them into a place where they could focus, and therefore they were able to overcome the anxiety and channel it into something that was incredibly productive in any kind of disaster response. This is Disaster Patrick, and remember prepare for a disaster, and you'll never experience one.