What really happens to your mind in a crisis? We all think we know how we’d react in an emergency—but according to journalist and author Amanda Ripley, we’re usually wrong.

Drawing from interviews with real people in disasters—from plane crashes to terrorist attacks, research on human behavior under stress, and firsthand experience in disaster training, Ripley explores the psychological patterns that unfold in crisis: denial, deliberation, and decisive action.

AMANDA RIPLEY: We all have ideas about how we're gonna behave in a crisis or emergency. It's almost never how things actually go. People found that when they were in a life-or-death situation, it was not anything like they'd expected. In some ways, it was better, and in other ways, it was worse. What you learn in a real disaster is that you have another personality, a disaster personality, and it's helpful to understand it better before you need it.

[Narrator] - How to survive a crisis

- When I worked at Time Magazine, I ended up covering disasters, all kinds of disasters, sort of by accident, but also because of 9/11, I ended up covering terrorism attacks, hurricanes, wildfires, and after a while, I felt like I was just doing the same story over and over. Those were important stories, like stories of grief and blame and stories of loss, but there were also other things that I was hearing from the survivors of these disasters that weren't making it into the stories, really interesting, surprising, useful things that also weren't making it into official conversations about how to prepare for disasters. People found that when they were in a life-or-death situation, it was not anything like they'd expected. In some ways, it was better, and in other ways, it was worse, but their brain behaved differently than what they expected based on movies and news coverage. And these survivors had things that they wanted the rest of us to know, things that they wish they had known that would really help us to meet our disaster personalities before we need them. We all have ideas about how we're gonna behave in a crisis or emergency. It's almost never how things actually go. What you learn in a real disaster is that you have another personality, a disaster personality, and it's helpful to understand it better before you need it. So if you look at human behavior across all different kinds of disasters across all of history, you see a huge spectrum of responses. Some of which are understandable, right? Sometimes people start hysterically screaming. Other times, most often, people shut down, they freeze, they stop moving altogether. Sometimes people fight, sometimes people flee, sometimes, believe it or not, people laugh in the face of a life-or-death situation. Sometimes, maybe most often, people carry on doing whatever they were doing before. Our brains can become incredibly creative in helping us pretend that whatever's happening is not really happening. And sometimes people rise to the occasion and do incredible things. There're heroes who lead hundreds of people out of mayhem, who save lives at great personal risk. So there's a huge range of behaviors, and it's really hard to predict just looking at the person how they're gonna behave. For my book, "The Unthinkable," I followed people who had survived really hellacious disasters of all kinds, and what you find is there's a pattern, even across very different contexts, from plane crashes to earthquakes. Almost always, people go through a period of denial, profound disbelief, and delay, then people go through a period of deliberation. People get really social. They do something that researchers call milling, where they discuss with each other what's happening and what they should do next. And finally is the decisive moment where people either take action and flee or cooperate in some way, or most often, shut down and do nothing at all. So there's something called a normalcy bias, which you see in all kinds of disaster situations where people tend to think that whatever is happening, it's gonna be fine. Our brains take whatever input we get and compare it to what we've experienced before. So every firefighter has a story like this, where they come into a bar or restaurant and there's smoke filling the ceiling and the fire alarms are going off and nobody's moving. Everybody's still drinking their drinks and acting like it's not happening. This is very, very typical, especially for people who either have no training for emergencies, which is most of us, or who have never been in a life-or-death situation like that. It is the most common response by far. In fact, just the other day, I was walking through DuPont Circle in Washington, DC and I heard a gun go off around four o'clock in the afternoon on a random Tuesday, and it was very close. I could tell it was like a block away, and I looked around and nobody reacted. Everybody in that neighborhood, where there aren't a lot of shootings, kept walking as if it didn't happen. People were on their phones, they're talking to their friends, they're drinking their coffee, and I was like, "What?" And then I remembered that, of course, people don't expect this to happen here. So they're acting like it didn't happen. In fact, there was a shooting right there at that intersection, and most people just kept on going like it didn't happen. Now, if the same thing had happened in another neighborhood, you might see a different reaction, right? But there's a million examples like this, where often, our reaction is to normalize whatever's happening around us. One of the tricky things about fear is that it's super helpful to you in small doses, but when you have too big of an injection of stress hormones like cortisol, you start to deteriorate. You lose eye hand control, you lose your peripheral vision, that's very common. It feels like time slows down. Sometimes you lose your hearing altogether. It's wild. There's a lot of really interesting research that's been done on police officers in shootings, and they will often report really intense distortions, like they don't see who's firing their gun. Turns out it's them, right? They don't hear the gun, their ears aren't ringing afterwards. They can describe in great detail the other person's weapon, but they can't describe their face, right? So you tend to do a lot of things. Your brain is trying to help you under extreme stress, but unless you've had some kind of really good realistic training, it tends to become counterproductive, like it's too much stress. So your eyes, your brain will fixate on the perceived threat, which may or may not be the full threat, and then you miss things. So it's a really tricky, slippery slope. Any kind of disaster you're in, fear is useful, but not too much. One of the disasters I spent a long time studying was the evacuation of the World Trade Center on 9/11, partly because we have incredible research and survey data on the thousands of people who evacuated that day, and what you find is that, on average, people took about six minutes before they even began evacuating. People took the time to gather books they were reading and other things. They would shut down their computers before they left. But most of all, the first thing people did was to talk to each other. And we've all experienced this, right? I mean, you've probably been in a situation where a smoke detector goes off. The first thing you do is you look around to see what everybody else is doing, right? That's a very natural reaction and it's a good survival response if the people around you know anything about how to get out of the building or what might be the actual threat. So this was a huge factor in the evacuation of the Trade Center. Unfortunately, on 9/11, many, many people heard an official order over the PA from the Port Authority to stay in place, right? There were lots of reasons for that, some of them good, some of them not so good, but the end result is that many people took much longer to leave than you would want or expect, given that they had experienced a pretty intense explosion, even in the second tower. So there was a long delay for a lot of people in leaving for this reason. But deliberation's really helpful in a lot of cases, because it is kind of like the wisdom of the crowd. If you have people around you who know things that you don't know, then you can make better decisions, right? We know that, for example, on average, people check with five sources before deciding to evacuate before a hurricane, right? So that might mean they check with their neighbor and with their mother-in-law and with their local weather person, right? But also, the mayor's orders or whatever else, and they're of course gonna weight their own past experience in all of that. So one of the things that people are often surprised by is how social disasters can be. Typically, people become much more polite and nicer than they are normally, which is the opposite of what we might expect. But going back to the World Trade Center evacuation, one of the reasons the evacuation took so long is that people who were evacuating from the upper floors would let the coming in below them go first, right? Which means the people who had the farthest to go took the longest to get out. On average, the World Trade Center evacuation took about a minute per floor, which was twice as long as safety engineers had predicted, even though the buildings were only half full at the time. And part of that was because of delay and denial, but also because of deliberation. The third and final phase of the disaster arc is the decisive moment, where you either take action or not. This is where everything that's happened before and the denial and delay and deliberation phases comes home to roost. It can make all of the difference. So as an example, most serious plane crashes are actually survivable, which is surprising, but it turns out that most planes, if they crash, they end up on the ground and on fire, and the whole trick is to get out really fast. But that delay and deliberation phases can really slow you down, right? There was a famous plane crash in Tenerife, the Canary Islands years ago, and what they found is that even though people could have gotten off the plane, they actually died there from smoke inhalation from the fire, and they were found just many of them sitting in their seats with their hands crossed across their laps. So there was a lot of research done about why had this happened. And what you find is that humans, like most mammals, tend to shut down in really frightening situations for which they have no training or prior experience. But there was one gentleman on that plane who before the plane even took off, he looked around and noticed where the exits were, which is what people who study plane crashes always do, and he knew exactly how many rows away that the exits were, and he kind of had some kind of mental model for how to get out of that plane. So when the crash occurred, he grabbed his wife's hand, who was at that point kind of frozen, paralyzed, he grabbed her hand and he said, "We're getting out of here," and they got off and they survived, but the people sitting around them did not. So that's the decisive moment where your past experience, who you're with, how long you're stuck in denial, all of those things really shape what you do or don't do. The biggest problem in most plane crashes is what researchers call negative panic. People do nothing, they shut down, which is actually a good survival response in certain situations, but not on a plane crash. So that decisive moment is the culmination of everything that's come before. What I noticed in writing "The Unthinkable" is that a lot of our survival instincts don't serve us very well in the modern world, where we've built huge vertical buildings that take very long time to evacuate, for example, or where we have to evacuate a city days and days before the storm even arrives. The good news is you can actually evolve on purpose through realistic training. So the better you understand your environment and the risks that you face, and the more prepared you are for some of the problems you might encounter, especially denial and delay, the better you can push through those phases and make an intelligent decision under stress. So while it can be kind of scary how many threats we face for all kinds of reasons, from pandemics to climate change, we also have an incredible ability to do better and to train and educate ourselves for whatever environment we're in. As an example, people who study disasters, they're kind of weird, right? But they do things that I have learned to do as well. They're just more aware, just like people in the military, they're more aware of their environment, so they know where the exits are. When I go to a hotel, I always check where the stairs are. I might go down the stairs, see where I come out. There's a lot of little tricks like that that are small and maybe symbolic, but the idea is you have more awareness of where you are, and even metaphorically, that's important, right? Knowing where you live, what the threats are, who you can trust, building those relationships and that wisdom before you need it. People who tend to do better in disasters are people who have had some training or some rehearsal beforehand. So in the case of the gentleman on the Tenerife flight who got off with his wife, who evacuated the plane with his wife, he had actually been in a house fire as a kid. So he knew how quickly smoke can fill a space, and that the real threat in most fires is smoke. He understood how quickly smoke can fill a space, so that experience helped him push through the denial phase more quickly. In other cases, it's knowing how to get out of a building. In the case of 9/11, I write about in the book, there was a gentleman named Rick Rescorla who was head of security for Morgan Stanley, and he would run the company through regular fire drills in which they had to actually walk into the stairwells, which was unheard of, and to this day, is unusual in most skyscrapers. And he insisted that they evacuate for every fire drill, which people did not like, but he was serious about it, and so people did it, and that saved lives on 9/11 because people had some muscle memory for where the stairs were and how long it might take to get out of them. The fundamental thing that Rick Rescorla and other heroes in the book understood is that we are capable of incredible things, but we have to trust each other in advance. We have to respect regular people enough to help them be agents of their own destiny. We have to trust them to do the right thing, but give them the information in advance. The biggest mistake I've seen in every disaster I've ever covered is that the people in charge do not trust the public. They think that the public is going to panic, to misbehave, to do stupid things, and so they don't them the full truth, which leads the public to do sometimes unwise things. So it's this circle of distrust, and that problem is bigger than most of the threats we face. The fear of panic has killed more people than most disasters themselves. So for "The Unthinkable," I got to do some really cool things. I got to go do trainings with firefighters where they would fill a building with non-toxic smoke, and then we had to get out and repel down the side of the building, and I did flight attendant trainings where you would be in a pool and you'd have to get into a raft and that kind of thing. And that was fun, and it was kind of scary, but mostly fun. But the things that really stayed with me, honestly, were the interviews with survivors, people who had been through hell and back. They had things that they wanted you to know, things that they wish they had known. So those are the things that have changed my own behavior. So for example, whenever I go into a hotel, I always automatically check where the stairs are. It just makes me feel good to know that I have another way out, right? Maybe that's crazy, maybe not, but I do the same thing on planes. Anyone who studies plane crashes, they always count how many rows between them and the exit. It's a way to give yourself a sense of agency, even when you might not have a lot, right? And you then can, God forbid, in the unlikely event you need to evacuate, you can find it really quickly, even when you can't see your hand in front of your face. But more globally, and maybe more importantly, the thing that I've learned is to build relationships before you need them, right? So in every disaster, the first people on the scene are regular people. It's your coworkers, your neighbors, it's the people you live and work with, strangers on the subway, they will save your life. So it's really important to look at this as a collective endeavor, that we are all in this together, that emergency personnel will not get there for quite a while, and so we have to rely on and trust each other. And the only way to do that is to build those relationships in advance, build those relationships with your neighbors. So now, I maybe didn't in the past go to the block parties in my neighborhood in Washington DC where I live, now I go, right? Not just because there might be a disaster, but also because I realize now how those relationships enrich my life before and after a disaster. But the biggest lesson by far is that the health of a community after a disaster strikes is directly related to the health of that community before the disaster. It's actually more important than the disaster itself when it comes to the recovery. So building trust, building relationships is gonna save your life and make your life better in a million ways. That's the biggest lesson I've taken into my own life.