LANE WALLACE

When I was flying my Grumman Cheetah VFR from New Orleans to Florida one time, for example, controllers put me below 1,500 ft and 3 miles offshore to avoid Pensacola. But that far offshore, the weather was iffy and deteriorating. When the lowering ceiling forced me to drop below 1,000 feet, I asked the controller two separate times to let me fly closer to shore, where the weather was better. He said no. The third time I asked, I was at 700 feet, the horizon was getting fuzzy, and my emergency mode had kicked in. When the controller told me to maintain my position again, saying he had jets to land, I immediately replied (in a very firm tone of voice), “Unable. Either you let me come closer to shore, or I’m declaring an emergency, heading straight in to Pensacola, and we can sort this out on the ground.” My request was granted.

 

That kind of emergency mindset isn’t exclusive to pilots; a lot of people can switch into a highly-focused command mode when situations warrant it. The difference is, pilots have to have that ability. When it comes to emergencies, we don’t have the luxury of choosing fight or flight. We have to take command, if we want to survive.

 

Anyone who has an effective emergency command mode tends to be good at taking charge and getting things done in all kinds of circumstances. We’re the ones friends and family call when there’s a problem or crisis that needs to be managed. Or an event that needs to be organized. Or the plumbing explodes. Or a kid is in trouble. Or … fill in the blank. My late friend Pat once said that if she were ever stranded on a sandbar in a tsunami with a dying cell phone battery, and could place only one call to try to get rescued (a situation that actually happened to 12 people in Thailand in 2005), I was the person she would call. “You’d be on the damn helicopter, if need be,” she said, laughing. “And you wouldn’t take no for an answer until I was safe.”

 

It’s true. When we kick into emergency war power mode, we can move mountains. In that mode, I’ve achieved any number of outcomes others told me were impossible. I survived a car accident that should have killed me. I saved my dad’s life when he suffered a traumatic brain injury, and kept both of my aging and disabled parents alive, well, and lovingly cared for at home until they died, despite their limited funds and reliance on state assistance. In a matter of days, in the last weeks of my mom’s life, I even managed to cobble together a low-cost, independent, 24-hour, professional home hospice operation that gave her what one of her caregivers characterized as the best end of life care she’d ever seen.

 

But there’s a flip side to that superpower. Two, actually. The first is, using war emergency power comes at a cost, whether we realize it at the time or not. The WWII fighters were placarded with exactly how many minutes the pilot could sustain that power without doing permanent damage to the engine. Humans don’t have such clear warning labels. But the risk, and the cost, is the same.

 

If we’re only called on to use our emergency gear on rare occasions, we have time to recoup and recover our everyday energy and margins. But if we’re faced with too many successive emergencies, or a draining, long-term battle, as is often the case with intense medical management and caregiving, or simply days upon days filled with too many overwhelming demands on us, we can end up doing damage to our core—just like those WWII fighter engines. We can find ourselves so burned out that we have little resilience, patience, or tolerance left to help us absorb the everyday frustrations of life. It’s simple human engineering and physics. But it’s also not healthy.

 

The other danger in operating too often or too long in command emergency mode is that—without our even realizing it—it can become the default setting with which we approach the world. Pilots I flew with in Africa talked about a hazard they called “normalized deviance.” Humans are incredibly adaptable creatures. So if we operate too often in conditions that deviate from our normal safety margins (say, landing on a short, muddy runway that’s partly underwater), we start to view those conditions not as deviant, but as normal. And that’s when the risks skyrocket.

 

By the same token, if we find ourselves fighting too many battles where the stakes really are high, we can inadvertently find our systems “down and locked” in emergency mode. That emergency mindset can begin to seem so normal that we start approaching every problem with the same fierce, take-no-prisoners intensity we would if lives were at stake, even if the battle is over a misdelivered package or a problem getting the right result from an overseas call center. Which, ironically, makes us less effective at getting the results we want. It also takes a toll on our physical and mental health and makes us—not to mention those around us—fundamentally less happy.

 

So what do we do about that? Ideally, we send the engine back to the factory for an overhaul; which is to say, we take a long vacation without stress, and learn to breathe normally again. But life doesn’t always allow us that luxury. In which case, the best we can do is: 1) Ask ourselves honestly if maybe we’ve gotten locked in emergency mode. 2) If we have, work to separate where that still might be necessary, and where it’s just become a reflex. 3) Try to pause before responding to anyone, to give our brains a chance to consider the situation and possibly choose a non-emergency reaction. And 4), prioritize whatever helps us return to our normal margins, tolerance, and blood pressure.

 

None of that is easy, as I can attest from first-hand experience. But here’s what I also know. Power is a tricky and dangerous thing. And learning how to pull the throttle back from war emergency power is just as important to our survival and happiness as learning to use it in the first place.