If you have to exit a plane in a emergency, grab your bags and leave like normal, or panic and start screaming we are all going to die and start shoving.
Of course everyone who reads about it responded exactly right in their heads.
"Panic" is associated to irrational decision making, and is usually not what produces the best outcome. This is why there is a lot of training provided to professionals and even everyday people in potentially serious situations. If a plane crashes, they don't want you to panic and storm your way out of the plane, you'll just end up putting more lives at risk.
Why do people keep saying that panic is bad? Sometimes panic is the appropriate action and is necessary to motivate us to take extreme life saving action.
A lot of airplane passanges die in crashes because they are unable to unbuckle the seat-belt (everyone is trained by cars to push on the button not pull the buckle).
Unbuckling airplane seatbelt is far easier then having secret door handle in the doors.
Unfortunately, during a panic attack, that may not seem like an option at the time. And, if you force yourself to do whatever it is you're trying to do at the moment, a panic attack could result in fainting or something, which may not be desirable. Anxiety, and "the fear", are both normal, but an attack is something hard to describe and triggers the flight response usually, for me.
>Couldn't disagree more with your definition, panicking is never a desirable action
Well, complains should be directed to evolution.
>Being chased by a predator and you run? Are humans likely the fastest animals?
Depends on the predator, for humans it will many times be other humans (or other homo species), and the extra boost panic mode gives you can very much help. Besides you don't have to merely run, you can run and hide, run and jump on some tree, etc.
>The only way out is to outsmart it and you can't do that if you're panicking.
You don't care much for outsmarting and subtle strategy when it's life or death either.
From Wikipedia:
"An evolutionary psychology explanation is that early animals had to react to threatening stimuli quickly and did not have time to psychologically and physically prepare themselves. The fight or flight response provided them with the mechanisms to rapidly respond to threats against survival."
If I come at you screaming with a knife would you sit and think how to outsmart me for a while, or start to panic / hide behind something / run trying to escape/avoid me? I'd like to see someone try the former...
>The word itself carries an undesirable connotation and is never - by definition - the best course of action
That's at the human cultural level, where it's 99.99% applied to non life-threatening situations, one should not worry as much about.
On the evolutionary/animal level, panic (aka fight or flight) is an excellent mechanism to stay alive...
Neither is much use on a plane with an engine on fire.
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