The Warrior's Mind and How to Stay Calm During Crisis

Every now and then, things will go wrong.

Someone around you is going to be injured, your car will break down on a four-lane highway at 7p and your cell battery is almost dead, maybe you picked the wrong stock and just found out that you’ve just lost an enormous amount of cash.

Your natural reaction now could also be to panic. After all, why wouldn’t you? These could have detrimental impacts. Your mind is probably dizzying with things like, What am I going to do now that you’ve lost the money? What is going to happen to your friend or relative who just fainted and is now looking so sickly? How am I going to get off this highway? Tow companies are going to charge me an arm and a leg and I just lost all that money! But while panicking is natural, it’s also entirely unhelpful.

If this is often your response, then you're likely to make matters worse, not better and you'll potentially cause more problems than you solve.

The best response is to remain calm and almost robotic, almost stoic. You'll likely appear cold and emotionless, but this is often the foremost efficient and useful mindset necessary to react to such a situation. This is often how you’re getting the solutions – you can panic, cry or mourn later.

The question though, is how you'll overcome that initial emotional response. How are you able to keep cool when everything goes awry around you?

• Breathe

The first you need to do is take a step back and take a breath, slow deep breathes, before systematically assessing things.

That initial urge to panic or to cry and scream is caused by a flood of adrenaline – your fight or flight hormone. This will be later, immensely useful for fueling your reaction speed, increasing muscular strength and so on, but we’ll get there. The unfortunate drawback, it also suppresses activity within the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain that we use for future planning and reasoning.

So instead, you need to first regulate your breathing and calm yourself down. Just inhale through the stomach deeply then let it fill your lungs.

You are not in as much of a rush as it feels like you are, most likely, so just be methodical and don’t rush. If you rush, you'll make matters worse. Even in time-sensitive situations, remember the adage: less haste, more speed.

• Look for The Solution

Now, think of the simplest solution to the actual matter at hand. Attempt to remove yourself emotionally from things by watching it as an outsider. What would you tell your friend who was explaining to you the situation you’re in right now. Consider this an exercise and then narrow down your actions to the foremost, useful & fewest options.

While during this scenario, you are likely to be afraid to act, remember that each action you think about is still likely to have an immediate future negative outcome however this is something you must accept and focus, one thing at a time. Now that you’ve considered carefully the choices and efficiently weighed up the simplest course of action, the subsequent step is just to act.

Yes, you’re uncertain, but you must be decisive and act. Doing this suggests accepting the likelihood that things might fail and naturally, it'd be your fault, however, it means accepting your responsibility and being willing to shoulder that responsibility if necessary. It means having the ability and willing to place yourself out on a limb and to face any storm which may come.