Stop Trying to Stay Calm. Do This Instead.
Every disaster plan I've ever picked up starts the same way. Page one. First line. "Stay calm."
I've read this in restaurant disaster plans. Nursing home plans. Alligator farm plans. Hair salon plans. Underwater cable operation plans. I've even read it in mass shooting response plans — actual documents telling people to "stay calm" when someone with a weapon is in the hallway. As if calm is something you can just decide to be while the walls are shaking at 7.0 or the ocean is pulling itself back before a tsunami hits.
It is the worst advice in the history of disaster preparedness. And I'm done with it.
You Are Not Going to Be Calm. Good.
Here's the honest truth about anxiety in a disaster: you can't fight it. Mental health professionals have been saying this for years. When you try to suppress anxiety, you amplify it. You're not calming down — you're starting a second battle on top of the first one. Now you're managing a disaster and managing a war against your own nervous system simultaneously. That's not a strategy. That's a collapse waiting to happen.
When I trained 18-year-old EMTs fresh out of high school — kids whose biggest concern six months earlier was who to take to prom — I didn't tell them to stay calm when they rolled up on a five-car pileup on the 405. I told them the opposite. Don't be calm. Be focused. Those are not the same thing, and the difference between them is the difference between a frozen responder and a functioning one.
What Your Body Is Actually Doing
When anxiety hits, your body fires on all cylinders. Heart rate spikes. Hands sweat. Vessels dilate. Hypervigilance kicks in — you're suddenly scanning everything, processing everything, locked onto the environment. These are not symptoms to suppress. This is your body gearing up to perform at a level it can't reach on a normal Tuesday afternoon.
Every disaster triggers one of three responses: fight, flight, or freeze. Fighting means you're going after the threat. Flight means you're running from it. Freeze means you've locked up completely — which is most common in what I call sudden non-telegraphed disasters. Earthquakes. Explosions. Events where your brain has no warning window and goes into full shock. I've seen all three in the field. None of them are wrong. All of them are just energy — raw, misrouted energy that needs somewhere productive to go.
The problem isn't the anxiety. The problem is what we do with it.
Fear Is My Focus
This is what I tell every EMT, every drill participant, every business owner I work with: don't fight the symptoms. Redirect them. Fear is my focus. I want you nervous. I want your heart pounding. I want that hypervigilance fully activated — because in a disaster response, there is a lot that needs to happen fast, and calm people move slow.
I've run drills where I put someone in a leg brace so they can't walk, then tell a responder: you have two minutes to get that person out. Two minutes. Watch what happens. At first, people freeze. They stand there looking at me like I've spoken in a foreign language. So I do one thing. I say: "What do we do first?" That's it. One question. And it's like I've taken a hammer and shattered the ice they were encased in. Suddenly they're moving. Suddenly they're running through everything they were trained to do — A, B, C, D, E, F, G — and I didn't have to prompt them past A. Once they hit A, the training takes over.
That's the whole secret. You only need to get to A. Everything else follows. But you have to have an A. You have to have tasks — real, trained, practiced tasks — or "fear is my focus" is just a slogan with nowhere to go.
Why Preparedness Is the Missing Piece
Here's where this gets important. Telling someone to redirect their anxiety is useless if they don't know what to redirect it toward. If you have no plan, no trained sequence of actions, no practiced decisions, then all that focused energy has nowhere to land. You're revving an engine with no transmission.
In every disaster — every single one, whether you're at home, at work, at your kid's school, or at a marathon finish line — the first decision is the same. Am I going to evacuate, shelter in place, or lock down? That's it. That's the ESIPL framework I use: Evacuation, Shelter In Place, Lockdown. Three options. One decision. Made fast, made with focus, and then made again as conditions change.
That decision requires a clear head. Not a calm head. A focused one. And the only way to access that focus under real pressure is to have practiced it under simulated pressure — real drills, not Shakespearean ones.
I've watched quiet people become leaders in disaster scenarios because their energy got redirected instead of suppressed. I've watched the most confident people in the room freeze because no one ever taught them what A was. Preparedness isn't about being unafraid. It's about giving your fear somewhere useful to go.
I break this down in full detail — including how to train yourself and your team to use anxiety as a performance tool — in a recent podcast episode. Watch it here: https://youtu.be/QL7_J9gAtG0
Stop chasing calm. Start chasing focus. Your fear is one of the most powerful tools you have in a disaster — if you know what to do with it.