Under pressure

When we become overwhelmed by psychological pressures and task-heavy activities while flying, we don’t have the option to pull off the road or find a safe space to think it through. No superhuman abilities are required, however. Emergency procedures need to be routine, so when stress shows up, the automatic reaction is appropriate. How do we do that?

• Understand how stress generates in your brain.
• Recognize your body’s signs of overload.
• Adopt techniques to keep it together under extreme pressure.

Your brain’s thalamus takes in all your body’s incoming sensory (except smell) and motor information. It then equally relays those inputs to the amygdala—the brain’s first responder—and the prefrontal cortex. If the impulsive amygdala evaluates the visual information as a threat, your body will respond immediately by trembling and sweating. Soon after, however, the rational part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, with the benefit of time and significant details, will shut down the fear response if it is found invalid.

Extreme stress provides no higher functioning effect. Instead, the sympathetic nervous system—responsible for the freeze, flight, or fight response—begins distributing resources throughout the body to prepare for the presumed physical wrangling. Adrenaline inundates the bloodstream, and the heart pounds in a rush to send blood to our muscles. Chemicals flood the brain to prepare to deaden the pain. Your mouth goes dry, and you become nauseated. At this point, fear shuts down your ability to think logically, and you feel as if you’re losing control.

Simple motor patterns are stored in the brain’s amygdala; therefore, no input from the thinking part of the brain is necessary. Because the amygdala will always react to novelty as a threat, because it will always be our “first responder” in an emergency, it is critical that our emergency skills are as automatic as walking and chewing gum.

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Techniques to help

Conditioning. To effectively habituate to an intense fear is to experience the stimulus frequently and steadily. In aviation, we habituate to specific scenarios. During primary training, our flight instructor purposely stalls the airplane methodically. Hence, the student experiences the sensation of a stall, its associated stress/fear response, and, most important, how to recover safely. With routine exposure to what we fear—without harm to ourselves—the positive outcome will override the brain’s fear associations.

Rote drills. Assume higher executive functions will take a hike under extreme pressure or fear; therefore, we must train our automatic response system to know what to do.

Be prepared. To resist real-world stress, we must be mentally and physically fit. Our ability to manage fear improves when we are well rested, eat properly, and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Acceptance. Accepting that you may panic in an emergency is half the challenge; drawing from that recognition to plan around your shortcomings is critical. Psychologists call mental shortcuts heuristics; pilots call them checklists.