Fight flight or freeze. Which do you honestly believe you would you do if disaster struck? If it struck quickly, powerfully, and without warning. Everyone of us has wondered, at least once, how they would handle a sudden emergency. What would I do, if I was in x, y, or z, situation? If I was attacked, if someone was breaking in my home, if a loved one suffered a sudden medical emergency before my eyes. How would I react? Would I make the right decisions?
Well believe it or not, there is both a science and a very specific methodology for ensuring you can. They are combined and employed by everyone from firefighters, to police officers,to soldiers, to engineers and doctors. In this blog and its accompanying video, I’m discussing heuristics and stress inoculation, and how they work together, to make you harder to kill in a survival situation.
Let’s begin with hueristics:
Heuristics (as a subject matter) refers to the study and use of practical methods, rules of thumb, and mental shortcuts that enable problem-solving, learning, and decision-making when optimal or exhaustive methods are impractical. To make that a little more plain, You could say that Heuristics are mental shortcuts used to make judgments under uncertainty.
The practical uses of heuristics in sudden and dangerous emergencies are to;
Reduce cognitive overload
• Enable rapid decisions under uncertainty
In training it can also
• Provide workable solutions to complex problems
• Guide exploration and discovery
• Support adaptive behavior in dynamic environments
Heuristic Methods in Problem-Solving
Common heuristic strategies include:
• Trial and error
• Working backward
• Simplifying the problem
• Pattern recognition
• Rule-of-thumb estimation
• Analogy-based reasoning
The Availability Heuristic:
Now here is where stress inoculation can come in. Stress inoculation, much like heuristics, can help us reduce the chance of cognitive overload in a sudden emergency. It can prevent you from freezing, and help quickly guide you as to whether fight, flight, or some combination of both are appropriate.
Stress inoculation, when trained properly, can fill your availability heuristic with useful memories and responses, especially trained responses.
Now, you don’t want to just do whatever ooos in your head. If your availability heuristic isn’t trained through stress inoculation, it can lead to these types of troubles;
• A cognitive bias where people assume that if something can be recalled quickly, it must be important or frequent.
Causes: Memorable, recent, or emotional examples (e.g., plane crashes, news, shark attacks) are recalled faster, skewing perception of risk or frequency.
Impact on Decision-Making: It often results in distorted risk assessments, such as fearing rare, sensationalized events more than common ones.
Overcoming the Bias: Individuals can overcome this by seeking out objective data, statistics, and different perspectives rather than relying on immediate mental examples.