PANIC! Sanity In The Times Of Safety Concerns

#CoachMusings

In his seminal 1954 paper 'The Nature and Conditions of Panic', sociologist Enrico Quarantelli talks about how humans behave during disasters. In a famous story he narrates, he talks of a woman who heard an explosion and fled her house, thinking a bomb had hit it. It was only when she had covered some distance that she realised the explosion had occurred somewhere else and she remembered she had left her baby behind.

Panic, something the whole world is dealing with (in different ways), is a curious reaction we have to stimulus. At the core is the need for survival and safety.

Fear & Anxiety in the Times of Covid-19

Human survival has always depended on both the twin #emotions of fear and anxiety, requiring us to react immediately when we encountered a threat as well as being able to mull over perceived and potential threats. We know that the amygdala, the emotional centre of the brain, wants us to get out of harm’s way immediately - a reaction.

But the frontal cortex, which handles our behavioural responses, insists that we think first, consider options, and plan what to do about them.

Yet sometimes anxiety gets in the way of the processing.

Rather than talking directly to the parts of our brains that are good at planning and making decisions, the frontal cortex gets confused by all the cross-talk between other parts of the brain that are determined to play out all the possible scenarios for how we might face disease, disaster and death. Panic happens when the whole thing short-circuits.

While our frontal cortex wants to think and assess where real risks can be coming from, our amygdalas go into overdrive. Our fear becomes so acute that the amygdala takes over and adrenaline kicks in.

The Effect of Anxiety

Of course, in certain scenarios, #panic can be life-saving. When we’re in immediate danger of being attacked by a gun-carrying crook or hit by a car, the rational response may be flight, fight, or freeze. It's the wrong situation for our brains to spend too much time debating options and choices and consequences. Some amount of anxiety can be good in the face of disasters like a pandemic. Fear can be a motivator, raising our alertness and energy levels, making us more responsive. It reminds us to wash our hands, pay attention to the news—and, yes, even stock up on essentials at grocery (not necessarily gun) stores.

On the other hand, anxiety can be a terrible thing to suffer from over the longer term and we become more anxious, and our brains keep spiraling into panic mode more often. Studies indicate that chronic stress can actually shrink the parts of our brains that help us reason, which can further fuel panic.

They point out that our bodies really aren’t made to live with acute stress and anxiety for weeks and months. Though they may give us a short term energy burst, it ultimately leaves us exhausted and depressed. This can ultimately have serious implications for society’s response if people get so burned out on social distancing that they start going out again before the pandemic has hit its peak.

“Panic, rather than being antisocial, is a nonsocial behavior,” Quarantelli wrote. “This disintegration of social norms… sometimes results in the shattering of the strongest primary group ties.”

Think about the fights breaking out on the aisles of supermarkets, and people buying guns. “If you’re led to believe that everybody else is competitive, everybody else is irrational, then it makes absolute sense for you to behave in exactly the same way,” Stephen Reicher, a professor of social psychology at the University of St. Andrews, said. 

All the stories of panic buying, price gouging and other selfish behaviours are pitting people against one another. But that's not necessarily their natural state. What is driving this?

Uncertainty and Noise

Humans are notoriously bad at assessing risk in the face of uncertainty—and we are often bad at it in different ways that cause us to overestimate or underestimate our personal risks.

This explains why, even when we are deluged with information and messaging during this pandemic, some people hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitisers while others are dismissing the risks and packing into bars or flying around the world?

Psychology research into how anxiety affects decision-making, shows that’s particularly true now during the coronavirus pandemic.

Inconsistent and confusing messaging from governments and other bodies, the media (news and hype), and public health authorities (cryptic and opaque) fuels this anxiety. Yes, all the WhatsApp forwards don't help either.

So we react. "I think it probably stuck out in the dramatic images in social media because it was quite clear, the packets are quite distinctive and it's become associated in the minds of people as a symbol of safety," says Steven Taylor, author of 'The Psychology of Pandemics'. "People feel the need to do something to keep themselves and their family safe, because what else can they do apart from wash their hands and self-isolate?" So we buy toilet paper.

Biases & Thinking Traps

It's not that we don't know this. Yet, in our over-connected, excessively-communicative world, we have developed dependancies and desires for knowing, even when we know that some of it is not helping.

As a #Coach who deals with people responding and reacting to situations, I see Cognitive Biases and Thinking Traps at play here. I want to mention one of each here (my colleague Smitha and I run complete workshops on these).

Obviously, the incessant media and social media noise is leading to us demonstrating strong AVAILABILITY BIAS. The more prevalent the coverage, the more stories we hear, the easier it is to imagine what's happening to be real and universal. This makes even rare occurrences seem common, once it gets played up in the news, with all the details and embellishments. Of course, the positive is that the media’s increasing coverage likely helped people to take the pandemic more seriously and start modifying their behaviour sooner than they would have otherwise. At the same time it has pushed us to act irresponsibly and selfishly, and quite irrationally as well - as we see in the way people are reacting in supermarkets!

On the other side I see many Thinking Traps at play. These "Traps" cause us to perceive reality differently to how it really is, triggering feelings of negativity and pessimism (and in many cases, depression). And panic!

The most relevant Trap at play here is CATASTROPHISING!

This trap involves imagining that the worst possible thing is about to happen, and predicting that we won’t be able to cope with it when in reality the worst-case scenario usually never happens and even if it did we are probably more capable than we believe. Of course, the pandemic is unprecedented for many, yet some responses show this Trap at play. This cognitive distortion is also known as magnifying and occurs when you exaggerate the importance of insignificant events or the possible outcomes.

A typical example of this is the assume the worst case scenario in the pandemic, that we will never recover and land up in a bleak, dystopian future where life is brutal and survival driven. At a personal level, it is the fear of surely contracting the virus, irrespective of precautions, and modifying behaviours based on the belief.

At the end, we will have to come out of this. What we will look like, as a race and society, will depend on how we our Cognitive Biases and Thinking Traps shape our Fears and Anxieties.

As Prof. Reicher of St. Andrews said, “Crucially, our ability to get through this crisis – and it is a real crisis – will be contingent upon our ability to come together as a community and have a sense of this is about us, not a sense of me and you. And that’s undermined when people come to believe that other people are not supportive, not there for them, but are their competitors.”

Sanity is the need of the hour.

References

Mathews, A., & MacLeod, C. (2005). Cognitive vulnerability to emotional disorders. Annu. Rev. Clin. Psychol., 1

Steinman, S. A., Smyth, F. L., Bucks, R. S., MacLeod, C., & Teachman, B. A. (2013). Anxiety-linked expectancy bias across the adult lifespan. Cognition & emotion, 27(2)

McKeever, Amy (2020), Coronavirus is spreading panic. Here’s the science behind why, National Geographic.

Quarantelli, E.L., The Nature and Conditions of Panic, American Journal of Sociology 60, no. 3 (Nov., 1954)