So, who makes it? Here's the bare-bones stuff out of the book- but I still recommend the book, the stories not only reinforce the points, but you learn a lot from them too.
Section- The Profile of a Survivor
Basically how you are in your "normal" life, may NOT be how you are in a crisis. This is either nothing new to you (cuz you've seen it in yourself or in others) or maybe you hadn't considered this idea before. Nature and nurture is involved here (biology and life-experience) as you might assume.
"But before behavior even comes into play, our basic profile can dramatically alter our odds." For example- those things that hamper our lives under normal conditions WILL hamper us in an emergency. Any physical handicaps... they'll still be there - in spades. Weight issues make a difference - obviously the more you weigh, the slower you will move, the harder it will be to move, etc.
This may be controversial to you - but gender plays a part as well. Men seem to be better suited for some emergencies while women seem to be better suited for others. About 2 times as many men die in fires than women do. Party- men tend to do more dangerous jobs and take more risks than women. "Almost every survey ever done on risk perception finds that women worry more about almost everything." From pollution, to kids to guns, and traditionally are more responsible for caring for others she says. Don't know if I agree that this is so different than me - is she saying that men tend to think less for others (even others they are responsible for?) than they do for themselves? I don't buy so much since I know guys are often have their families in their minds all the time. "How do I protect them, what do I have to do to help them", etc.
Thing about worry is - if you worry more, it can motivate you to evacuate more quickly. She says it's easier to get women and children to evacuate than it is to get men out of a burning building, for example.
Also- women tend to be "fashionable"... if you're a lady, consider what you have on your feet. Could you run in those shoes if you had to? Evidently there were a whole slew of women's shoes in the stairwells of the twin towers.
"Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a belief that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life's turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences. These beliefs act as a sort of buffer, cushioning the blow of any given disaster." To these people- dangers seem more manageable and as a result they perform better. She quotes George Everly, from the John's Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness in Baltimore - I went to one of his workshops on Psychological First Aid back in 2009 - "Trauma, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder." She says a healthy proactive worldview should logically lead to resilience. But, she says... if the worldview leads to resilience... then what leads to the worldview? What makes some people come through an experience mostly in tact, while others are really thrown for a loop on some pretty small scale event?
What's one thing resilient people have in common? Confidence! So- how do you get confidence? Are those people born that way, or do they get this confidence in another way? Well, one way to get confidence is through training! "Confidence comes from doing." Train, train, and train. So, when you get into something... you feel like you already know what to do... actually your brain will already know to lead you right, if you know what I mean.
"Special Forces Soldiers Are Not Normal" In this section she says SF soldiers consistently outperform other general infantry soldiers- they were more mentally clear, stress didn't make them stupid as fast. But SF soldiers were "chemically" different than the average soldier. Blood tests showed they had much more of a chemical called neuropeptide Y - a compound that helps you stay focused on a task while under stress. But people who are more resilient can be identified not only through blood tests, but through a standard questionnaire- SF candidates where given a set of questions, a psychological test to determine dissociative symptoms. The more questions they answered yes to, the less likely they were to successfully complete the very stressful Special Forces Assessment and Selection course.
Here are some of the questions:
At this time, in this room...
Do things seem to be moving in slow motion?
Do things seem to be unreal to you, as if you are in a dream?
Do you have some experience that separates you from what is happening; for instance, do you feel as if you are in a movie or a play, or as if you are a robot?
Do people seem motionless, dead, or mechanical?
Do you see things as if you were in a tunnel, or looking through a wide angle photographic lens?
Do things happen that you later cannot account for?
Do you space out, or in some other way lose track of what is going on?
Does it seem as if you are looking at the world through a fog, so that people and objects appear far away or unclear?
It seemed there was a correlation between the amount of times a soldier experienced dissociative symptoms... especially under normal conditions... and his performance under stress.
More to come...
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