Marc Haine explains how your brain hijacks for 90 seconds in a crisis, and why training yourself to stay calm matters. He covers self-regulation in emergencies, anticipating what you'll face, and using vivid mental rehearsal to reprogram how you respond.
How do people become intentional in a crisis? So it's really interesting to note that when this brain actually has gone offline, when we've hit hijack, it takes a minimum of 90 seconds intentional for some of those chemicals to start to dissipate and come back down so I can start to think again. But the other thing that's really important to know is we know when most of the time when stuff is starting to amp, right? And I need to know in advance. How do I wanna show up? Who do I wanna be? And they said, why are you so calm? Like, why are you not losing your mind? 2 things. Number one, I'm trained in an emergency situation or in a stress situation. I have to regulate me so that I can actually process and think and not get hijacked. I have an obligation to those around me to not escalate and make things worse. So there's 2 really important things when we think about crisis. You have to have a really good sense of who you want to be in those moments. Really and truly feel it physically. Imagine scenarios and imagine yourself showing up in that place. The thing that's super cool about mental performance and neuroscience is we know your brain cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is vividly imagined. And that means pictures, sounds, smells. What am I feeling? You can start to script that way of being in advance. And it's not days and weeks of practice. It's those tiny little, something went wrong. How can I get curious about what, what went wrong and how can I go back and rerun that through my brain and have it be differently?
