Knowledge Under Pressure

On Defining Emergencies and Psychological Flexibility

Photo by Tobias Nii Kwatei Quartey on Unsplash

Field notes from what we’ve been up to, what we’ve been taking in, and what we are thinking about at The Emergency Mind Project.

If you have ideas or things you’d like to see — or if you want to help and get more involved — I’d love to hear from you: dan@emergencymind.com

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Is This Really an Emergency?

Learning to separate real emergencies from simply bad situations is critical to matching the right tools to the right situation, triaging effort, and avoiding catastrophizing. In and out of the emergency department, emergencies share common features including uncertainty, pressure, high stakes, complexity, and liminality. In this Psychology Today article, we explore the different features of an emergency and help separate life and death from life and “meh.”

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Psychological Flexibility and Toughness

Great compilation episode from the awesome Toughness podcast on mental flexibility: “performers in cut-throat environments — from Navy Seals to NASA, from Firefighters to First Basemen, even Cirque du Soleil acrobats and Olympic sprinters — flex their mental muscles in unique ways in order to withstand the fire…