Finding Your Marbles
A Mental Health Survival Guide

I used to be terrible at crisis management. When anything bad happened that was outside my control, I would always come apart at the seams. I would start to panic, and I would end up making a huge mess of things and getting myself more depressed and anxious.

At an old job I had, one of my projects was to write up a crisis management plan. When I was finished this project, I began to wonder if I could apply the same skills and techniques that I used at work to my personal life to see if I could do a better job at crisis management. After some experiments and fine tuning, I developed a five-part personal crisis management system. By applying this system, I was eventually able to manage my anxiety during a crisis. I wasn’t as unprepared when things went wrong, and I was able to quickly calm myself down and get the crisis under control.

The Crisis Management System

My crisis management system is based on five separate elements: (1) Build a Plan, (2) Get to Safety, (3) Get Help, (4) Manage the Crisis, and (5) Improve the System. Although each element is separate, they all share some basic features. For example, #4 “Get Help” is pretty useless unless we set up a plan to get help in #1. Once you have all 5 parts moving smoothly you should have a useful crisis management tool.

(1) Building a Plan

Always Be Prepared
The first step towards creating a good crisis management system is to have a solid, well-thought out plan. Preparation is key. When a crisis occurs, a good plan gives you something to fall back on, so if you are panicking or things seem to be going out of control, you can pull out your plan and see what you need to do first.

The most important thing to remember when building your plan is to keep it simple. Only include the things that you need. Complicated plans are more of a nuisance than a help when you need to get things under control quickly.

There are three main elements to a good crisis plan. They are: 1) awareness, 2) guidance, and 3) support.

Awareness
This is probably the single most important crisis skill to have. Awareness means two things. The first is becoming aware of the signs of an upcoming crisis in your internal and external environment. For example, if you are phobic, and you are going into a situation where you might face triggers, you should be aware that you might find yourself in crisis.

The second meaning of awareness is to keep track of safe areas and escape routes when you enter unfamiliar buildings or areas. For example, when I used to suffer from panic attacks, whenever I went into a building or a restaurant I would always try to find the bathrooms first before I did anything else. That way, if I felt an attack coming on, I could escape to the bathroom and get calmed down.

It is easy to train yourself to become aware. Use a memory trick, like tying a string around your finger, and make a point of “checking your situation” every 15 minutes or so. After a couple of days, you will find that you will begin to do this check automatically. It is a really useful trick to learn.

Guidance
The second part of a good plan is guidance. If you find you are having difficulty managing crises, speak to your therapist or doctor and ask if they can teach you any crisis management tricks. There are all kinds of great tricks that you can learn, such as breathing exercises, grounding tricks, and exercises that can help you calm down and regain control of your body during a crisis. Once you learn a few of these tricks, practice practice practice.

Support
Even with the best-made plan, sometimes you will still need a lifeline. That’s where your support network comes in.

Try to arrange a “support” relationship with a friend or family member, or even with your therapist. What you want to do is tell this person about your trouble managing a crisis, and set up some sort of arrangement with them to help you get through it. For example, I had a friend who I would call who would walk me through breathing exercises.

Write down your support person’s contact info and carry it around with you. And, when things start to go wrong, remember to call them.

Write it All Down
Once you have figured out your plan, get it all written down. It’s best to write it on a card or a small piece of paper so you can carry it around with you. Remember to keep it simple.

(2) Get To Safety

When a crisis occurs, your first priority should be to make sure that you are safe. This is where your plan comes in. If you are aware of your situation, have the right calming skills, and have a good support network, getting safe will be a matter of just following your plan.

The main goal of getting to safety is to get yourself calm so that you can approach and manage the crisis with a clear head. Therefore, when you sense that a crisis is starting, try to get to a safe place as soon as possible. (bathrooms are wonderful for this)

Once you are in a safe location, start focussing on getting calm. If your therapist has provided you with calming exercises, do them now, or try Breathing Exercises or Grounding to get yourself calmed down. Alternatively, if you have been prescribed anti-anxiety medication and your prescription allows for “crisis” dosages, it might be helpful to try that.

Once you are safe and have calmed down, then you can approach the crisis and try to manage it.

(3) Get Help

This is not really a “stage” in crisis management, but it is more of a general skill. At any time during a crisis, please don’t be afraid to ask for help. Crisis management is tough even if you are completely calm, so there is no shame in asking for help if you feel things slipping out of your control.

There are a couple of ways to get help. First, if you have a support person (see Planning, above), contact them and ask them for help. Don’t be afraid to ask for specific help. If they are unable to help you, they will let you know, but if you don’t tell them what you need help with, they will have no way of knowing how they can help you. It can help to write this down. For example, if you need help getting through a grounding exercise, you can write down, “ask for help with grounding.”

If you don’t have a support person or your support person is unavailable, try to find public help. Growing up, I was taught to trust cops, so whenever I am lost or just need some help in a public place (say, to find a bathroom) I always try to find a cop. Also, cops are trained in first aid intervention, so if you are having a medical crisis such as a panic attack they can help you or get help to you. Other sources of help are hospitals or clinics (most big public buildings such as government offices, airports and malls have public first aid clinics, usually with a nurse), churches, or information and aid booths (like the booths in malls where they sell lottery tickets). Alternatively, if you can reach a phone, you can dial “211″ or “0″ and ask the operator for a crisis center.

The important thing is to never be afraid to ask for help. Sometimes it is impossible to face a crisis alone, so there is no shame in asking someone to help you out.

(4) Manage the Crisis

Ok, you’re calm, you’ve got your plan, and you have an army of wonderful people who are willing to help you. Now it’s time to tackle the crisis.

Go Sloooooooow
When you are ready to begin dealing with the crisis, the first rule is to take things slowly. If you throw yourself right into the thick of things you’ll wipe yourself out. Unless the crisis is life or death, there is probably not much to lose if you slow down a bit and take a calm, measured approach to solving the problem.

Break Up and Prioritize
The second thing to do is to look at the problem that is causing the crisis, and trying to break it down and set priorities. For example, if you are having a panic attack because you are outside during a thunderstorm and thunder triggers you, then you have a very clear solution to the problem that is causing your crisis; that is, you need to get inside out of the storm.

The important thing is to not get lost in the problem. Try to focus on the main issues behind the crisis, and then set priorities depending on how important they are. For another example, if you are at work and you make a very big mistake in a report to your boss, the first thing you should do to resolve the crisis is to go to your boss and tell them about the mistake. However, since this will be a very stressful meeting, your first priority should be to prepare yourself for your meeting with your boss by calming yourself down, and making sure that you have all the information that your boss will need. You might still get yelled at, but you will be prepared for that and once the yelling is over you will be able to get right to work on resolving the crisis.

One thing to remember while managing the crisis is that if you feel yourself starting to get anxious or you feel as though you are losing control of the situation, it is important to take a short break and get yourself calmed down again. It is better to be a bit slow in getting things resolved than ignoring the warning signs that you are getting anxious and eventually having a meltdown.

Finally, the key to crisis management is simplicity. Focus on the problems that need to be fixed, not on the “emotional side effects” such as people getting angry at you or your own self-blame. There will be time after the crisis is over to work through that stuff, but right now your focus should be on getting the crisis under control while staying calm.

(5) Improve the System

You’ve done it! By being prepared with a good plan, keeping yourself safe and calm, knowing when you needed help, and breaking the problem into manageable pieces and focussing on resolving the causes of the crisis and not its symptoms, you have successfully managed to resolve your crisis. Well done!

After you have managed the crisis and taken a well-deserved break, it is time to work on improving your system, so that it works even better for the next crisis.

The first step in improving the system is to do a post-mortem. Write down what skills, actions or tools didn’t work for you when you were trying to manage the crisis. Were you unable to get yourself calmed down? Was your support person unavailable when you called them?

Next, write down the things that worked for you. Say for example that you found that grounding really helped you calm down and take control of your situation. Make a note of everything that worked, and why you think it worked.

The second step is to take your post-mortem list and get to work on improving it. If things didn’t work for you, how can they be improved? Are there other skills that you can use? If your support person was unavailable, is there another person that you can rely on? If you have a therapist, take this list to them and see if they can offer any advice on how to improve your crisis management plan.

The third step is to revise your plan, and practice any new skills or techniques that you have learned.

Don’t Panic!

I know that this seems like a lot of information all at once, but building a crisis management system takes some time. It took me several weeks to develop this system, and it took me a couple of months to get it working to the point where I was happy with it. The key is to keep at it and practice as much as you can.

I found that once I got my crisis management system in place, my general anxiety level went down. I didn’t spend so much time constantly worrying that things would go wrong, and when the inevitable crisis did come along, I was able to manage my way through it with a minimum of stress. Like I mentioned earlier, a crisis management system isn’t easy to put together, but once you get through the hard work of getting your system together the freedom you will gain from anxiety will make it all worthwhile.

Good luck.

Anxiety Depression Life Living Mental Health Panic-Attack Personal Growth Stress Work

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Anxiety, Depression, Life, Living, Mental Health, Personal Growth, Work. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment or trackback from your site.

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