Types of human behavior in extreme situations. Human behavior in extreme situations. In a stressful situation, we are capable of miracles. a person in front of mortal danger The main characteristics of a person's behavior in an extreme situation
Many scientists, psychologists and psychophysiologists paid attention to the description of extreme situations. (So, for example, L. A. Kandybovich and V. A. Ponomarenko talk about “tense situations” that people of certain professions have to face; “abnormal conditions” are mentioned in their works by S. A. Shapkin and L. G. Wild; sometimes this kind of situation is called stressful, based on the teachings of Hans Selye.) Regardless of the name, this situation is characterized by the fact that, getting into it, a person goes beyond the usual state and "loses the ground under his feet."
Even a situation of conflict in which there is no threat to life can become extreme. Working as a psychologist in one of the Russian airlines, I was faced with the fact that flight attendants, as well as airport employees, literally fall off their feet after a work shift spent communicating with passengers. A work situation in which there was no direct threat to life, but there were many conflicts up to insults, may well turn out to be extreme, in terms of danger to health, both psychological and physical.
What happens to a person in an emergency situation?
If a person, on duty, often has to deal with the so-called emergencies, he knows that the main enemy of rational action is fear. Fear drives inexperienced firefighters to flee from a burning house, it forces pilots to make irreparable mistakes. It interferes with thinking and solving tasks necessary for survival.
Fear can manifest itself in flight or panic, it is often accompanied by narrowing of consciousness, distortion of perception and loss of control over one's own actions and even aggressive outbursts. Another unpleasant manifestation of fear is a stupor, during which a person cannot move from his place *.
Another “enemy” of ours is emotional stress. Even if we were able to suppress our fear or insecurity, this does not mean that it has disappeared. In fact, we keep it inside, spending an incredible amount of soul energy. And restraint sooner or later leads to breakdowns, mistakes and even illnesses.
Is it possible to predict human behavior in an extreme situation? How do you know if you can overcome fear? To answer this question, psychologists have found that people who lose their minds in difficult situations are anxious, emotionally unstable, with low or too much high self-esteem and weak nervous system. However, even people with all these traits can pull themselves together and overcome their weaknesses. And strong and self-confident often lose their heads. It also does not guarantee the experience of a person.
In 1987, an incredible incident occurred in the skies over England. In a passenger plane, the windshield flew out during the flight, as a result of which the commander of the aircraft, who was not wearing his seat belt, fell out and was pressed by the air stream to the nose of the aircraft. His assistant, a very young pilot who had no experience of independent flights, was forced to land the liner alone in conditions of lack of oxygen, while a tornado raged in the cockpit. He brilliantly coped with his task, the flight ended without casualties.
How to explain these and other similar cases? What allows a person to gather and not fall into a stupor or panic? There is no single answer.
No one can give an accurate prediction of the behavior of a person in an acute situation. So what about those who recruit employees for difficult or dangerous work? What should a person do who is going to connect life with a difficult profession and wants to know if he can maintain a sober mind if there is a risk to his life? The answer is simple. You need to prepare for extreme situations, you need to learn to control yourself and your behavior. Such training can be called ensuring one's own psychological security.
Ensuring psychological safety
Psychologists of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, who daily face extremely difficult situations, pay great attention the ability to manage emotions. Let's look at some techniques that can help you take control of your own emotional sphere.
- Intentional relaxation. This exercise allows you to learn to consciously relax certain muscle groups, and since our emotions are connected with the body, we learn to control them too. To perform this exercise, you need to sit or lie down as comfortably as possible and begin to relax the body from the legs to the head.
- Awareness of emotions and drains. You need to take a piece of paper and a pen, and then start writing down the feelings that overwhelm you at the moment. It is important not to hold back and write "without censorship", releasing on paper what has accumulated inside. Then the sheet must be discarded. Some recommend burning it. This method allows you to learn how to cope with fear, insecurity, anxiety and other unpleasant conditions. At the same time, it relieves restraint and tension.
- Suspension. V conflict situations you can use the following approach. Imagine that your opponent is behind a wall, and his insults and attacks do not reach you. This method allows you to "close" from someone else's aggression, divert attention and not be offended. This method is good for service workers who understand that they should not waste their energy on sorting out the relationship in a conflict.
How to act in a difficult situation?
In conclusion, I would like to give some advice to those readers who, on duty, may find themselves in difficult conflict situations. How to act? How to protect yourself if you find yourself alone with an angry mob or an aggressive person and are not going to fight with them?
When dealing with a crowd, it must be remembered that a person in a crowd loses his individuality. The crowd is a kind of organism, sensitively reacting to the change of states of the opponent. Try to stand in such a way that there is a wall behind your back. Better, between you and the crowd there will be a table or other barrier. Never show fear or anxiety. Avoid aggressive tone and threatening gestures. Speak clearly plain language, in short sentences, without emotion. Try to let people see that you are calm and confident. In this case, you can enter into negotiations, and if you're lucky, even direct the actions of the crowd.
As Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote, action saves from fear. Often the aggression of the crowd or individuals is caused precisely by fear or uncertainty. If your position allows it, try to channel people's energy into specific actions that can be beneficial. This will change their state.
If you have entered into a difficult conflict, try not to insist on your own. Use the techniques of "psychological aikido" created by M. E. Litvak. Remember that an aggressive person expects resistance and indignation from you. Don't let him drag you into his game. Remain detached and do not show irritation or aggression. Very quickly, his fuse will dry up, and he will stop the skirmish.
Perhaps these recommendations will help you learn not to lose yourself even in the most difficult conditions. If you learn to manage emotions and build your behavior correctly, many situations will cease to be extreme for you.
Psychologist Natalia Chirkova
*Details about fear: the book by Malkina-Pykh " Psychological help in crisis situations."
The concept of an extreme situation and general signs of an extreme situation
Extreme situation- this is a situation that goes beyond the "usual" situation, requiring an increased concentration of physical and (or) emotional efforts from a person, with possible negative consequences for a person's life, in other words, this is a situation in which a person is uncomfortable (an unusual situation for him).
Signs of an emergency
1. The presence of insurmountable difficulties, the awareness of a threat or an insurmountable obstacle to the realization of any specific goals.
2. The state of mental tension and various reactions of a person to the extreme nature of the environment, overcoming which is of great importance for him.
3. Significant change ordinary (habitual, sometimes even tense or difficult) situation, parameters of activity or behavior, i.e. going beyond the “usual”.
Thus, one of the main signs of an extreme situation are insurmountable obstacles to implementation, which can be seen as a direct threat to the implementation of the goal or intended action.
In an emergency man is opposed environment, and therefore it should be considered in accordance with the situation, which is characterized by a violation of the correspondence between the requirements of the activity and the professional capabilities of a person.
Extreme situations are associated with markedly and dramatically changing conditions in which activities take place. There is a danger of failure to complete the task or a threat to the safety of equipment, equipment, human life.
Extreme situations are an extreme manifestation of difficult situations, they require the maximum tension of the mental and physical strength of a person to get out of them.
Human behavior in extreme situations
Human life is a series of all kinds of situations, many of which, due to their repetition and similarity, become familiar. Human behavior is brought to automatism, so the consumption of psychophysical and physical forces in such situations is minimized. Another thing is extreme situations. They require a person to mobilize mental and physical resources. A person in an extreme situation receives information about its various elements:
About external conditions;
About their internal states;
about the results of their own actions.
The processing of this information is carried out through cognitive and emotional processes. The results of this processing affect the behavior of the individual in an extreme situation. Threat signals lead to an increase in human activity. And if this activity does not bring the expected improvement in the situation, a person is overwhelmed by negative emotions of various strengths. The role of emotions in an extreme situation is different. Emotions can also act as an indicator extremeness both as an assessment of the situation and as a factor leading to a change in behavior in the situation. At the same time, it must be remembered that emotional experiences represent one of important factors human behavior in emergency situations.
As a rule, an extreme situation is generated by objective reasons, but its extremeness is largely determined by subjective components. So:
There may not be an objective threat, but a person or a group of people mistakenly perceive the current situation as extreme. Most often this happens due to unpreparedness or a distorted perception of the surrounding reality; however, there may be real objective threat factors, but the person does not know about their existence and is not aware of the emergency situation that has arisen;
- a person can realize the extremeness of the situation, but evaluate it as insignificant, which in itself is already a tragic mistake that can lead to unpredictable consequences;
Finding himself in an extreme situation and not finding a way out of the created situation, having lost faith in the possibility of its resolution, he escapes reality by activating the mechanisms psychological protection;
The situation can be objectively extreme, but the availability of knowledge and experience makes it possible to overcome it without significant mobilization of one's resources.
Thus, a person reacts to an extreme situation depending on how he perceives it and evaluates its significance. There is another specific human reaction to an extreme situation - mental tension. This is the mental state of a person in an extreme situation, with the help of which a person, as it were, prepares for the transition from one psychophysical state to another, adequate to the current situation.
Forms of tension.
Perceptual (occurring with difficulties in perception);
Intellectual (when a person finds it difficult to solve a problem that has arisen);
Emotional (when emotions arise that disorganize behavior and activity);
Volitional (when a person cannot control himself);
Motivational (associated with the struggle of motives, different points of view).
Mental tension is characterized by an increased level of activity and significant expenditure of neuropsychic energy. The levels of mental tension in different people can be different, which is primarily due to the mental stability of a person.
Such a case was once described in the press. Trans-Atlantic flight. Temperamental Hispanics roar all night in a crowded fourth grade. Their neighbor - an Englishman - is forced to go on deck to take a break from the hubbub and stuffiness. Walking in the dark, he took one extra step and was overboard. The loss of the passenger was noticed only when he did not appear for breakfast. Reported to the captain. He decided to turn the ship back and start searching for the "man overboard". The search continued for about twelve hours. And, lo and behold, they succeeded. The Englishman did not give up, did not go to the bottom, and all this time, economically spending his strength, kept on the water. He understood that the chances of salvation were almost zero, but still stubbornly continued to swim. The most curious thing happened when he was brought up on deck. With a straight face, he said: "Gentlemen! The weather is great today!" After that, he collapsed unconscious.
Perhaps this is a common newspaper duck, but it may be true. After all, there are documented examples of such courage. Alain Bombard (French doctor, biologist, traveler) claimed that, even while in lifeboats, most of her passengers die of panic and depression. It is not hunger and thirst that kills them, but fear. To prove how important it is to maintain composure and survive in the ocean after a shipwreck, he did a deadly experiment. Alone, on an inflatable boat, without food or water, crossed Atlantic Ocean. He rowed and sailed 4,400 kilometers in 65 days. Caught fish with a homemade hook, drank a little sea water, collected rain. The bomber lost his health, "planted" his kidneys, lost half his weight, but survived. And he wrote a very instructive book about this: "Overboard of his own free will."
As a rule, a person does not know the limit of his abilities. They appear only in extreme conditions. Often, inveterate optimists and merry fellows "break" faster than ordinary, modest people. I have observed this phenomenon of fear through many trials on expeditions. Here is a simple example. There was one big guy and a merry fellow in my team. His character fully corresponded to the first phrase of Yuri Olesha's novel "Envy". The novel begins with the phrase: "He sings in the morning in the closet." This guy also sang, although Olesha's novel was hardly read.
Once, in the late autumn in the Sea of Okhotsk, our little boat got into a serious storm. A double collapse of waves formed near the shallow coast near Poronaysk. On the first collapse, a diving breaker demolished a flimsy wooden cabin near the boat, half-flooding the boat itself. Fortunately, the stationary engine did not stall. I stood on the steering wheel and could not leave it, as the boat would inevitably turn lag to the wave and turn over. Two of my colleagues scooped water at a frantic pace. But the third (merry fellow) huddled in a corner. He wept and prayed. Neither shouts nor selective mate had any effect on him. Here is the panic reaction.
We didn't take him to sea again. As sailors say, such people are ballast. Moreover, the ballast is dangerous.
During the fire, saving the belongings acquired over a lifetime, a wizened, slender old woman dragged a huge chest from the second floor of the burning house. After the fire, two young guys with difficulty managed to put it back in its original place. One polar explorer, while repairing an aircraft, saw a polar bear behind him, gently pushing him with his paw, as if inviting him to turn around. In the next second, a man was standing (!) On the wing of the plane. Didn't climb on it, didn't pull up, no. Stood.
WHAT the body will not do when we are talking about life and death. Fear and self-preservation are great stimulants. They can make our spine withstand a load of 10 tons, the respiratory rate will increase 4 times, instead of 35 capillaries per centimeter in a calm state, 3 thousand will earn in an extreme one. What about our brain? It functions only at 5 - 7% of its capabilities. What do the other 95% do and in general why does a person need such a physical and mental reserve and why not use it all the time?
No, experts say, you can't. This reserve is a guarantee of our survival, the biological protection of the body, which is very carefully guarded and can be used once or twice in a lifetime in order to save us from death in an extreme situation, or may even turn out to be unclaimed. After all, extreme situations are also different. On the one hand, we all now live in an extreme situation - stress, uncertainty, nervous strain. British scientists have recently applied to the Association of Independent Science at Moscow State University. In their opinion, the experience of survival in our country is unique. A person does not constantly pull tons of cargo on himself, does not overheat at a 100-degree temperature. But no Western citizen could live long in conditions like ours without harming his health. Are we wasting our stock? Certainly. But this happens somehow imperceptibly, but if we take a situation where everything changes suddenly, unexpectedly, instantly. The threat to life is colossal, death is inevitable, and now ...
MIRACLES OF SILENTNESS
A WOMAN lifts a car with her child under it. An elderly man jumps over a two-meter fence, although he was not an athlete even in his younger years. There is a known case when in flight under the pedal in the cockpit a nail fell out of nowhere, the control jammed. Saving himself and the car, the pilot pressed the pedal so hard that he cut off the bolt. Where do forces come from? And unprecedented speed in movements? Many are capable of incredible things at such moments and manage to do such a gigantic amount of work in a few moments, which is simply unrealistic to perform or repeat under normal conditions. True, people who found themselves in such situations, when everything can be decided by a moment, testified that time seemed to stretch, slow down, allowing a person to save a life. For example, in a man who worked on a drilling flock, the mitten slightly touched the drill, it began to be tightened, and with it, of course, his hand. The partner who was at that moment nearby said later that the worker tried to press the button with his shoulder to stop the machine, but missed. The drill continued to "slowly" rotate and twist his arm. Then the partner again slowly raised his hand and pressed the button. "Immediately the noise and roar of the shop broke in (and he somehow left imperceptibly) ... All this took 1 / 8-1 / 9 seconds, and subjectively lasted 25-30 seconds."
According to experts, one should not assume that people stimulated by a sense of fear showed miracles of quickness and repeatedly increased the speed of their movements. There are several versions of why this happens. For example, this: if there is a biofield around every person, then why not assume that in a moment of mortal danger, we, without realizing it, are able to use its energy reserve. Suddenly, the instantaneous release of this energy will lead to a change environment, space, even time, as in the case of a machine tool?
It is likely that the organism reacts to such situations with instantaneous behavior. So why can't this energy also change the environment?
THE SUBCONSCIOUSNESS WILL SAVE
IF this theory is adhered to, it is likely that, having once used up its reserve, the body needs to restore it. Even at the beginning of the century, psychiatrist G. Shumkov believed that this would take at least a day, and a meeting with danger at that time was death. Doesn't this explain why we suddenly don't want to do something or go somewhere? Maybe this is how we subconsciously try to avoid danger. There is, for example, evidence of the paradoxical behavior of the military, impeccable professionals and fearless people, who suddenly, without explanation, at some point felt a categorical impossibility to fulfill their professional duty. The regimental commander saw action many times and was considered a brave officer. Once having received an order: “Tomorrow come forward and take such and such a position,” the colonel came to the brigade infirmary and said: “I want to lie down, I can’t go to the position.” The temperature is normal, the internal organs are unchanged. Night slept well. The next day ... calmly went to the position. The question is, what was he ill with?.. And was it a manifestation of cowardice or the result of a sober subconscious assessment of his capabilities?
Ordinary people resort to their emergency reserve quite rarely. And if this person is healthy, the body will cope with unusual loads, but if some kind of pathology is dormant in you, they can provoke a disease. Any extreme exposure is stress, and stress tends to leave its mark. It is very difficult to determine exactly what the body is capable of in stressful situations with the help of experiments. Whatever burdens a person endures, it is likely that in mortal danger, new opportunities will appear in him. In addition, each person inherits from his parents certain inclinations, the range of which can be quite large and vary by 10-20 times.
Nevertheless, it is pleasant to realize that somewhere in the depths of you lurk unprecedented forces, that you have a colossal memory and unlimited possibilities that, in an incredibly difficult, tense situation of mortal danger, will save your life. But if in order to find out what the reserve of these possibilities is, one has to get into just such a situation, let it be better to be inviolable ...
