What to Do When You Do Not Know What to Do

A mountain rescue team leader in the Scottish Highlands has spent thirty years walking towards people who are in trouble. He says that in the overwhelming majority of the incidents he attends, the emergency was created not by the original problem but by the twenty minutes after it. Someone twists an ankle, which is survivable, and then makes four decisions in a row while frightened, which is often not.

His training uses three moves, always in the same order, and they are deliberately not decisions. Stop. Sit down. Eat something. Only then think. Trainees find this faintly ridiculous until they have been cold and lost once, at which point they find it obvious. Movement while frightened feels like progress and is usually the mechanism by which a recoverable situation becomes an unrecoverable one, because every hundred metres you walk in the wrong direction doubles as a hundred metres you must later walk back with less light and less energy.

Sitting down does something specific to a body. It ends the physical feedback loop in which exertion raises heart rate, which the brain reads as alarm, which produces the urge to exert. Eating does something specific too: low blood sugar produces, with great reliability, the sensation that a situation is hopeless. He says he has watched grown, competent, experienced hill walkers become calm and capable people again within eleven minutes of a chocolate bar, and that if he had to teach one thing to the general public it would be that despair is frequently a metabolic event wearing a philosophical costume.

The generalisation to ordinary life is direct, and it survives translation better than most mountain wisdom. When you do not know what to do, the first error is almost never choosing wrongly. It is choosing at all, quickly, from within a physiological state that is optimised for escaping a predator and is useless for anything requiring more than four seconds of thought. The urge to act immediately is not information about the urgency of the problem. It is information about your adrenaline.

The fourth move, the thinking, has a shape as well. He teaches people to establish what he calls the known fixed points before considering options: where you are, what you have, how much daylight remains, who knows you are out. Not what should I do — that question is unanswerable in the abstract, and the mind will spin on it indefinitely. Four facts first. Options only ever look infinite in the absence of facts; once four are nailed down, the realistic list of things a person can do usually collapses to two or three, and choosing between three is an entirely different mental operation from choosing in a fog.

He adds one caution, which is that the method has a failure mode, and the failure mode is staying stopped. Sitting down is a reset, not a residence. He gives it twenty minutes. After twenty minutes you have whatever clarity you are going to get, and the third-best plan executed in daylight beats the best plan executed in the dark.

So: stop, sit, eat, then four facts, then twenty minutes, then move. It is not a philosophy of life. It is a checklist built by people who have carried the consequences of the alternative down a mountain on a stretcher, and it works equally well in a kitchen at two in the morning when the problem is not a mountain at all.