What disaster work taught me about staying calm

Years spent around emergencies rewires your relationship with stress. Not because you stop feeling it, I never did, but because you slowly learn what it is for and how to put it to work instead of being run by it.

Here is the reframe that helped me most. Panic is just energy with nowhere to go. The physical sensation of a crisis, the racing heart, the tunnel vision, is your body handing you fuel. Left unchanneled it becomes paralysis. Pointed at a task it becomes exactly the focus the moment requires.

So in the worst situations I learned to do the smallest next thing. Not solve the disaster, that is too big to hold, but make the next decision. Triage it, make it, move to the one after. A crisis is never one enormous problem. It is a long sequence of small ones, and you can always do the next small one.

Calm under pressure, I came to believe, is not a personality trait some people are lucky enough to be born with. It is a practice, and the practice is unglamorous: deliberate small action when every instinct is screaming at you to either freeze or flail. You do it badly at first. You get better.

The strange gift of disaster work is that it recalibrates your sense of what counts as a crisis. After you have helped coordinate a response while two emergencies competed for the same exhausted team, an ordinary bad day at the office has a hard time rattling you. Perspective, it turns out, is a transferable skill.