Day Eleven: the Psychology of Reactions

I usually am not that good at role games: what I do is start laughing for no reason just because I am not able to (or don’t want to) see nor feel the situation as real; this time however I believe I did better than expected during the car accident game: my role was the one of giving first response to the injured person, basically calming everybody down, giving psychological support and, in few words, saving the whole situation. To be honest, I have no idea what I would do in case something like that would happen in real life, whether I would freeze, flight or fight – or worse, how I would react if I am to be the one injured – but I’ve felt the role assigned to me quite congenial to my person: usually, as a matter of fact, I can become quite anxious and / or stressed if it is about something that depends on me or something that should have gone another way, on which I haven’t put the proper effort maybe (school homework or cooking can be examples), but when instead it is about something completely external from me, for example offering support to a friend in a bad situation or deal with particularly heavy periods of pressure, I do handle these situations much better, with calmness and preparedness. Besides I consider myself a quite resilient person in general, good at helping the others and at transmitting security, but of course acting efficiently under pressure and in urgent circumstances is a total different situation… What really interested me from the lecture was the talk about psychology: the use of different parts of our brain, the inputs that affect our responses, and the emotions we may feel afterward are all interesting factors which changes and differences are interesting to notice among the people you encounter. Some people can appear super relaxed and with the situation at hand every time but then they freak out for the smallest thing gone wrong, some people instead may be totally laid back and almost careless but when it comes to danger they are the first to act, or maybe some people just feel like to flee away as soon as they sense danger…

In particular, however, what I’ve found really interesting is the ‘procedures’ and responses put up by our brain itself when we enter a state of alert and emergency: specific neuronal circuits are

disinhibited in order to awoken the senses and be more reactive; it’s like we become a more evolved version of ourselves, a kind of superman with the perception of time of Flash and the sixth sense of Spiderman – we enter the ‘autopilot’ mode and we do what is appropriate to do without even realizing it or knowing we could do that kind of stuff. Of course, it would be cool to be always like that, with super senses, but for obvious reasons of survival and preservation it is not exactly possible…

Another thing that interested me was the sentence ‘affective forecasting is the prediction we make on how we are going to feel in some future situations; evidence suggests we are terrible forecasters.’ Not that I didn’t know it yet, but being highly fascinated by the psychological world, I’ve done in past many researches about how can we use our feelings to ‘predict’ (in a broader sense of the term’) future outcomes: what I’ve discovered is that people who have a high trust in their own feelings are more likely to get a prediction right than those with a low self-awareness. Moreover, if you are a particular empathic person, you are even more likely to predict other people’s behaviour too… In the end I think it’s all about training our mind: the same way we can train ourselves to adopt a certain type of response after an incident, we can also train our brains to pick up signals (self-awareness and empathy are of curse the most valuable tools in this sense) which can help us to prevent or at least reduce certain unwanted behaviour.