How to think clearly when everything feels like an emergency
People whose jobs deal with actual emergencies are trained to slow down first. Here's how to borrow their strategies.
By Danny Kenny
You’re driving. Your phone is going off in the cupholder: three Slack pings, a text from your manager, an email stamped “URGENT” that is almost certainly not. Then your kid throws up in the back seat. It’s everywhere. Oh god, it’s everywhere.
Now something — or namely, someone — actually needs you. There is at least one real emergency to deal with, and it involves a bucket and a mop, but your body has been treating the phone like a five-alarm fire for the last ten minutes, if not the last two weeks. You pull over to take care of your child, but your nerves are already fried, and so you handle the situation worse than you would have just an hour earlier.
That’s the easy version because the thing that mattered announced itself (or in this case puked). The harder days are less obvious. You wake up and immediately careen into the office, feeling the pressure from the first coffee to the last email. You reach the end of the day exhausted and having accomplished nothing meaningful. Nobody threw up in the back seat to announce the highest priority. Those small, loud, less important tasks just won. All day. Uncontested.
Over time, I have gotten better at this challenge by first understanding why it happens and then by borrowing coping strategies from people whose bad days make mine look quaint.
Want to go deeper on staying focused under pressure? Check out this Big Think Class featuring Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable.
Why are people so bad at distinguishing what’s important from what isn’t? Meng Zhu, an associate professor of marketing at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, designed a set of experiments to find out. She asked participants to choose between two tasks: one paid five Hershey’s Kisses and the other three. They were told exactly what the payout would be, and fully informed, these allegedly rational people were still more than twice as likely to choose the three-Kisses task when it was set to expire in ten minutes instead of at the end of the day. The ticking clock made all the difference.
Zhu called this phenomenon the “mere urgency effect” because closing out an urgent task feels like a win, even if the benefits do nothing substantial for your larger needs. People under the influence of this sense of urgency, Zhu says, “are choosing objectively worse options over objectively better options.”
There is real urgency that exists in the world, of course. Deadlines expire. Flights will leave on time whether you’re on the plane or not. But not all of it needs to wind you up. That milk will expire on Tuesday whether or not you finish the carton. But stress, warranted or not, creates a false sense of urgency, which narrows our attention and focus.
The more your day feels like a string of emergencies, the more your attention narrows and the less bandwidth you have left to distinguish a real emergency from what’s just loud.
It’s a lovely little spiral we create for ourselves. Something is urgent, so your stress heightens. As your stress heightens, other tasks feel more urgent, and your perception continues to narrow, making it more likely that you’ll miss something that’s important.
The urgency you feel is real information about your internal state, but it is unreliable. It does not necessarily tell the truth about a task’s importance. So, if the mere feeling of urgency can’t be trusted, what can we do instead? One answer is to borrow strategies from the people who handle genuine emergencies for a living.
In my various jobs, I’ve had the good fortune to spend time with former special forces and emergency managers, people whose decisions decide whether people live or die. Their jobs come with stakes that are riskier than whether a PowerPoint needs alignment.
The message I hear from all of them is the same: Panic serves no one. Breathe.
Their paths into that calm are different, but the principle holds: Nobody makes a good call acting in a full-on tizzy. People in fields facing genuine emergencies are all trained to slow down first. Pilots call it “winding the clock,” doing one deliberately slow thing to break the panic loop before they touch a single control. First responders check the safety of the scene before running into it. Special forces practice box breathing.
The amateur move under pressure is to speed up. The trained move is to steady yourself first, then sort. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Whether it’s a literal fire or your phone going off while the vomit piles up in the back seat, restoring a moment of calm before you decide what to do next is going to be the move. I’ve found that move has two parts.
First, stabilize. One deliberate, slow action before you decide anything. Your breath is the tool that’s always on you, and a single intentional breath counts. You don’t have to sign up for silent meditation in the mountains to start; take the small move that’s actually available in the moment. Getting things down on paper works too. It drags the swarm out of your head to somewhere you can look at it and discern what belongs at the top of the list.
If you catch yourself thinking I don’t have time for this, do the math on how much time the wrong move costs you, and the effort it will take to fix afterward. Now do you have time for this? Ounce of prevention, pound of cure.
Second, sort decisions by consequence. On his blog Farnam Street, Shane Parrish offers one way to categorize decisions: reversible versus irreversible. Put another way, if a decision goes south, what does it really cost me, and can I undo it? Bezos runs Amazon on the idea of a two-way door you can walk back through versus a one-way door you can’t. Most of what feels urgent is a two-way door. For truly irreversible decisions, you need attention and focus. These should probably move to the top of your list.
None of this makes your phone stop buzzing or the back seat clean itself. But without restoring a moment of quiet, the loud wins by default. Finding calm buys you a few seconds of clear sight before you move, long enough to see that most of what’s screaming at you can wait. With a moment’s pause, you get a half-second to choose. Everything after that is just having the nerve to act on it.
The next time your day catches fire, what would it take to find a moment’s calm before you choose the next action?
Danny Kenny is a behavioral scientist, a writer, and an Associate VP at InspireCorps, where he designs leadership programs and coaches executives at the intersection of performance, meaning, and wisdom. You can find Danny on LinkedIn, Substack, and his website.
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Slow down first to stabilize and focus - counterintuitive at first but echoed wisdom
Interesting article: Has anyone studied the gender differences in reaction? I'll bet most mothers would automatically (no slow thought) put full attention on the child. Do guys have to think about it?