Why does it seem like we go brain dead in a crisis? We plan and prepare assiduously, locking procedures into our minds and increasing our muscle memory with regular exercises. Then when ‘the big one’ hits, we seem to forget everything we’ve learned. Even if we don’t, it seems like everyone else has. Everything seems to slow down, and the procedures we’ve practiced suddenly don’t work. What happened? Stress happened, and our ‘lizard brain’ took over.
What’s our lizard brain? Here’s what the American Museum of Natural History has to say: “Lizards and humans share similar brain parts, which they inherited from fish. These parts handle basic body functions like breathing, balance, and coordination, and simple survival urges like feeding, mating, and defense. Together, these parts–the brain stem, cerebellum, and basal ganglia–are casually referred to as your “lizard brain.”
Consider everything you do in a response to fall under the ‘defense’ role. We’ll leave the other simple survival urges to another time, though you see evidence of the ‘feeding’ urge in the amounts of food put out at for an exercise!
How we react to stress
You see it every time you’re stressed; you get tongue tied, you forget where you’re going, your motions slow down and you strain to hear what is being said. Our brains focus on survival, and stop thinking about the unimportant things like strategy, response activities, organization or critical thinking.
Of course this impacts our ability to do our jobs! It impacts every area of stakeholder communication. We depend on our ability to listen, hear, analyze and determine response strategy and words. And suddenly it isn’t there.
Sometimes the basic motions continue to work – enough people are in the room to develop a ‘group think’ that pushes us forward – enough habits coalesce into a resemblance of effectiveness.
But the lizard is still there, manifesting itself in subtle and dangerous ways. What impact does our lizard brain have on our actions? Much. Here are two examples:
1) The survival instinct – pushing the same buttons
Every response is different from every other response, but we can find ourselves doing exactly the same thing we’ve done before. Our muscle memory remains but the critical thinking it’s designed to support is hindered. So we do what we did ‘last time’. We do this because ‘the known’ feels safe, and our lizard brains are focused on safety.
We might even find our behavior reverting back months or years, to the most dominant habits we’ve developed. How do we break this survival instinct and focus on what needs to happen, now?
- Verify current facts: What happened? How bad can it be?
- Look forward: What will we have to do to return to ‘normal’? How long will it take?
- Focus outward: Who will be impacted by the event? What will their concerns be? How do we help them understand and accept our actions?
Draw these points out. Focus on them. Plan your actions around them. These considerations will allow you to break away from you lizard brain, leave behind ‘safety’ habits and pursue planned, logical and conscious actions relevant to right now.
2) Tunnel Vision vs. accurate decisions
We’re all aware of the false warning issues by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency. A drill designed to assure preparation and capability devolved into doubts about the same. Note that results of the Agency’s internal investigation are still pending, and will likely be amended, appended or adjusted ad infinitum due to this very public failure. What caused such an error?
Let’s look at an early account:
“The state worker in Hawaii who sent a false wireless alert warning of an inbound ballistic missile on Jan. 13 issued the message intentionally, thinking the state faced an actual threat, the Federal Communications Commission said on Tuesday.
The mistake, which touched off widespread confusion and panic in Hawaii, occurred when an emergency management services worker on the day shift misinterpreted testing instructions from a midnight shift supervisor, the commission said. Believing the instructions were for a real emergency, the day-shift worker sent the live alert to the cellphones of all Hawaii residents and visitors to the state.”
In another account, “In a written statement, the employee, who was not identified, said he believed there was a real emergency on Jan. 13 after hearing a recording that stated “THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” But the employee did not hear the first half of the message that stated “EXERCISE, EXERCISE, EXERCISE,” the FCC said in its preliminary report Tuesday. Though the recording also ended with the “EXERCISE” message, the officer did not hear it.”
The officer did not hear the most critical part of the message – the EXERCISE, EXERCISE, EXERCISE part. Other people did, but there appears to have been ‘a misunderstanding’. And that misunderstanding can be caused by our lizard brain. It’s how we don’t hear words, don’t connect sentences, don’t think critically about what we have just heard or seen. Stress and threat cause this. Remember that the alert warning of a nuclear attack (Stress!) was sent out as part of a ‘no notice drill’ (More stress!).
Stress + More stress = Lizard Brain!
What can be done to prevent this type of tunnel vision? There are many possible solutions, and many recommendations will be posited from investigations, lessons learned and policy changes.
But here’s a short, simple discipline any of us can use right now:
- Read or listen to the entire message
- Ask yourself what it means
- Write or recite the original message out in your own words. Be sure you keep the same first word and last word (those pesky ‘Exercise’ or ‘Drill’ words, or thosae ominous ‘NOT an exercise’ or ‘NOT a drill’ words)
- Ask yourself who will want to know the content of the message
- Ask if the original wording will be clear to those people. (This step may have rectified the conflicting phrases ‘This is not a drill’ and ‘Exercise, Exercise,Exercise’)
- Reread the original message
- Accept/deliver/send it.
This approximately two-minute discipline forces us to engage in critical thinking, hopefully enough to break away from any tunnel vision so we can actually process the data correctly.
This applies to all received information. In this case an Exercise Text was misused, but it could have been an injury notification, an evacuation notice, an incident update. Test your understanding, comprehension and recognition of all information to be sure your lizard brain is safe in its cage.
Remember too that by definition, the more critical or impactful the information, the more likely our lizard brains will kick in, and the more important a process of re-engaging our minds becomes.