Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1: The Resilient Mindset
Catastrophe is an equal opportunist. It doesn't care about your personal wealth or social status, your religious convictions, or how nice of a person you are. Catastrophe doesn't operate or execute on timelines and constraints. It doesn't have an objective or a goal outside of turning your life into complete and utter chaos. The question here is, are you prepared? Are you ready to be confronted-head-on-by the worst day of your life?
In preparedness, it is often said, mindset is everything. You hear that phrase a lot from those who have built a business around the idea of "improving your mindset." What I've often found is that the so-called experts don't have any tangible advice for improving mindset. Like, how do I actually make my mindset better, and what is mindset in the first place? Let's start off by answering those basic questions.
Many people walk through life either numb or vibrating from self-induced anxiety. They have lots of everyday worries that have fried their brains and maxed their capacity to cope with life's curveballs. This has become the new baseline in modern society. We have grown accustomed to lives full of low-grade stress that cause us to overreact emotionally. This means we underrespond cognitively and fail to source solutions that lead to improved outcomes. This ultimately leads to disastrous results when we are confronted with compressed timelines and high-grade stress, otherwise known as catastrophe. Essentially, we have redefined our baseline coping mechanisms and are less resilient as a society.
When I talk about having the right mindset, what I'm referring to is resilience-having the ability to withstand the initial shock when catastrophe strikes, and then having the wherewithal to respond in a timely and constructive manner. A resilient mindset is everything, because your ability to withstand an acutely traumatic event and respond to it may very well mean the difference between life and death.
It doesn't get more conclusive than that.
Of course, it's not so simple as knowing what to say or what to do and then wishing resilience into existence. To develop resilience requires training and exposure. It requires an understanding of stress and how both the mind and body respond to it. And to understand that, you first and foremost require a solid grasp on your very own mental machinery.
The Nervous System
The brain is the command center of the body. Nearly every action the body takes, whether it's voluntary (like walking and talking) or involuntary (like breathing and blinking), is initiated in the brain. The signal runs down the spinal cord, which together with the brain make up the central nervous system, then out through the nerves that make up the peripheral nervous system, which trigger the movement of muscles and the function of organs.
Voluntary movements are guided by the somatic system, which is made up of sensory and motor neurons. Sensory neurons take in information from our interaction with the world around us-touch, taste, sight, sound, smell-and relay it to the brain. Motor neurons go the other direction, sending information or instructions down through the spinal cord and into our muscle tissue, creating movement. You can think of it as a loop or a circuit-like arteries and veins. One sends blood from the heart to the body, the other sends blood from the body back to the heart.
Let's say you're walking down a city street. Your motor neurons tell your leg muscles to fire, your ankle to flex, and your foot to roll heel to toe, making a step. Your sensor neurons take in information about the unevenness of the sidewalk under your feet, the sound of the ambulance siren around the corner, the sight of the traffic light about to turn yellow, and the person coming from the other direction, headed right into your path. The brain processes this data in an instant and sends a set of commands to motor neurons that slow your pace and angle your hips. Your knees and feet follow by sidestepping a couple paces to the right to avoid the oncoming pedestrian.
The purpose of this little ninth-grade biology lesson is only to point out that, whether you realize it or not, you have conscious control of all the movements where the somatic system is activated. That is not the case with the autonomic system, which is the other half of our peripheral nervous system that controls involuntary movements: functions like heart rate, digestion, respiration, perspiration, and pupil dilation. This is important to note because this is the part of the nervous system that lights up like a Christmas tree under stress and in catastrophe.
Like the somatic system, the autonomic system is best understood in two parts: the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS). The sympathetic nervous system governs your fight-or-flight response to external, physical threats and acute psychological stress. When you hear the gunshots at close range; when the proctor begins the exam, and you forget everything you studied; when the sky goes black and you hear the train whistle sound of an approaching tornado; when the spotlight hits your face and you have to deliver a speech to a packed house; and when you're standing between a mama bear and her cubs and she has you in her sights. This is when the sympathetic nervous system kicks in and dumps a bunch of adrenaline into your bloodstream. Your pupils and the secondary pathways in your lungs dilate, increasing visual acuity and lung capacity. Your heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration rate go way up, making your hands sweat. Your blood glucose spikes, and stored body fat gets released for more energy. Your skin goes pale while your face goes flush as the blood rushes to major muscle groups. All these bodily reactions are happening at once to facilitate the primal mobilization tactic in survival: fight or flight.
If the perceived threat persists beyond a moment or two, the brain then sends a signal to the adrenal glands to release cortisol-the body's primary stress hormone-to keep you on high alert. If the threat doesn't materialize (or when it ends), cortisol levels dissipate and the parasympathetic nervous system takes over to wind down the overall stress response and return the body's systems to normal. Whereas the SNS controls "fight or flight" in this capacity, it is said that the PSNS governs "rest and digest." And in that transitional phase when the body is catching up to the brain's understanding of the situation as the parasympathetic nervous system clears all the hormones from the bloodstream, it's not uncommon for someone to feel dizzy, nauseous, or exhausted.
Adapted over six million years of hominid evolution, this is how the human nervous system is supposed to work. But that's nowhere near the full story, right? None of us are so finely tuned to our nervous systems that our conscious actions perfectly sync up with the hormonal tsunami released into our bodies every time we're under stress. Often, there is a disconnect or delay between the instinct and the action, between the unconscious reaction and the conscious response. Building resilience is about bridging that disconnect and shrinking that delay as much as possible so that you will be able to act, when it counts, in time to save your life or the lives of the ones you love.
If you're reading this book, there's a good chance you or someone you know has experienced a traumatic event and discovered, in real time, that the disconnect was too wide, the delay too long. You neither fought nor fled . . . at least not quickly enough. Maybe, you froze. Or maybe, you've been lucky so far, and this is what you're worried will happen when catastrophe finally finds you. Like it did for the citizens at Virginia Tech University, on a normal day, in a routine schedule, on a beautiful spring morning.
Tragedy at Virginia Tech
Around 9:30 a.m. on April 16, 2007, a senior at Virginia Tech University named Seung-Hui Cho walked into Norris Hall-a classroom building on the north side of the school's campus-armed with two semiautomatic pistols, approximately four hundred rounds of hollow point ammunition, and heavy-duty chains with which he locked the building's three main doors from the inside. A few hours earlier, Cho had entered a residence hall across the campus where he had a student mailbox, found his way up to the fourth floor, then shot and killed a young female student and the resident assistant who came to her aid. It was shocking and frightening and horrifically tragic. And it was about to get much, much worse. For the next nine minutes, Cho would go from classroom to classroom on Norris Hall's second floor, firing methodically yet indiscriminately at students and teachers alike, targeting the rooms with the greatest number of people inside.
In room 206, a hydrology class, Cho stood in the doorway and shot and killed the instructor first, then nine of the thirteen students. Of the four survivors, two were injured, two were unharmed. Next, he entered room 207, a German-language class, and shot and killed the teacher and four students from the doorway, then walked down the aisle between rows of desks and shot six other students. This would be Cho's modus operandi for each of the classrooms he would ultimately enter: shoot from the doorway, walk up the aisles shooting students scrambling to hide, walk out into the hallway to reload, return to a classroom, and walk around the room once again, shooting those who were wounded but still alive or those he had missed the first time.
It would take a minute or two for students in nearby classrooms to register what was happening. Several students reported to investigators that they thought the gunshots were construction sounds or explosive reactions from chemistry lab experiments taking place on the first floor. The first 9-1-1 call came from room 211, a French-language class, where Cho went next. Students had barricaded the door with a number of desks, but Cho was able to push through them and enter the room. He shot and killed the teacher and the nearby student who had quickly pushed together the obstruction. Cho was then rushed by an ROTC cadet named Matthew La Porte, who was attempting to distract and disarm him. Cho shot La Porte seven times at close range, killing the twenty-year-old before walking silently up the aisles between desks, shooting students at very close range.
From room 211, Cho returned to room 206, killing a student who was wounded. He then tried to reenter room 207 and enter for the first time room 205, but failed on both counts because students had blocked the doors. (All six students in room 207 who'd previously been shot survived because four of them had barricaded the door with their wounded bodies.) Cho then returned to room 211, went up and down the aisles again, shooting those students who were still moving, before moving across and down the hall to room 204, an engineering class with sixteen students in attendance, where the professor, a seventy-seven-year-old Romanian Holocaust survivor named Liviu Librescu, held the door shut for as long as he could while his students fled out the second-story window, dropping into bushes and onto the lawn below. Eventually, Cho fatally shot Librescu through the door and forced his way into the classroom. Ten of the sixteen students had made it out the window by then. Four of the remaining six would be shot, one of whom would die.
The shooting began at 9:40 a.m. Police gained entry to the building through a side door at 9:50 a.m. and quickly converged on Cho's position. When Cho heard them coming, he walked back into room 211, where he'd returned most frequently and killed or injured the most people, and shot himself in the head. In the end, he'd attacked five classrooms-entering four, returning to at least two-and fired approximately 175 rounds, killing thirty-one people (twenty-five students, five teachers, and himself). It would become the deadliest school shooting in the history of the United States.
Fight or Flight . . . or Freeze
A few feet away from Cho's body in room 211 lay Clay Violand. In a class of eighteen students, in which eleven were killed and six injured, Violand was the only one who survived unharmed. Like a few of his fellow classmates who survived after being shot, Violand had played dead. Unlike them, he played dead from the moment Cho first broke into the classroom.
"I wanted to go to the window," he told Amanda Ripley for her book The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes-and Why, "but as soon as I saw the gun come in, I just froze." Violand collapsed in a heap behind his desk, landing on his side with his limbs twisted in unnatural directions. For those nightmarish nine minutes, while Cho was moving silently and murderously in and out of classrooms, Violand didn't move a muscle. "I tried to look as lifeless as possible," he said. "I remember thinking, 'he's going to shoot the moving people first.'" Violand was almost certainly right, because Cho came back into room 211 and, reloading as many as three times by Violand's count, put second and third rounds into wounded students who were still moving. He also put fresh rounds into those he'd missed the first time, cowering young men and women-kids, really-who were curled up in the fetal position, trying to hide, frozen with fear but clearly alive.
What's most interesting about Clay Violand's experience, from a physiological perspective at least, is what he was feeling as this horror was happening around him. The short explanation was . . . nothing. It was like he was paralyzed. "His whole body felt numb," Amanda Ripley described in her book, "as if all his limbs had fallen asleep." Something in Violand's mind told him to play dead, and his body had listened. Seung-Hui Cho clearly thought he looked dead, too. And in a way, you could say Violand really did feel dead. So much so that he was convinced, for a stretch of time, that he also must have been shot. Why else could he not move his arms and legs, or wiggle his fingers and toes?
The answer was: he truly did freeze. This freezing instinct is actually a third (and much less frequently discussed) facet of the fight-or-flight response that goes by a few different names: tonic immobility, thanatosis, and of course "playing dead." Like fight or flight, freeze is a survival instinct and reflexive fear response that is very effective when it's employed in the right circumstances. Weirdly, it is very poorly studied in humans. It's mostly observed and studied in the wild. It's common in prey animals across the animal kingdom, from ants and frogs and snakes to ducks, rabbits, baby deer, and, most famously, possums-which is where we get the phrase "playing possum." When a prey animal senses imminent, inescapable danger from a predator, including humans, it might go limp, it might roll on its back with its eyes wide open and stiffen as if in rigor, it might even emit foul-smelling discharge, like the possum does, to mimic the stink of a rotting corpse. Some will play dead like this even when the predator has already attacked them, because further movement is likely to trigger additional (probably fatal) attacks and because most predators only go after live prey.
