How to Practice Emergency Preparedness as Self-Care

It's not just about buying a lot of stuff from a list. The key to being ready is all about framing your planning with gratitude, rest, and community.
Various emergency supplies
Photograph: Getty Images

Preparedness is personal, and it exists on a broad spectrum. For some people, it's tied to a season—hurricane season in the South or wildfire season in the West. In some communities, you have folks boarding up the windows days before a storm makes landfall while others ignore evacuation warnings, figuring they can just settle into the laundry room with a box of donuts, a flashlight, and a good book.

Luckily there is a middle ground.

"It's an investment in yourself to be prepared," says Katie Belfi, who was an attorney for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during Hurricane Sandy. After Sandy, NYU Langone recruited Belfi to rebuild the hospital's emergency preparedness/emergency response program. But her interest in emergency planning started years earlier, as a 3-year-old nagging her mother to buy escape ladders for the family's bedrooms.

"Preparedness has always been delivered through a filter of fear," Belfi says. "And it takes on a tone of 'You have to do this or else,'" One of her goals is to get people to see resilience through a mindfulness lens, by switching the narrative from something you have to do to something you get to do.

Instead of talking about emergency preparedness in terms of numbers of MRE meals, cases of bottled water, or solar panels, Belfi frames emergency preparedness in the context of things like gratitude and rest, things that we already associate with self-care. "We have morning routines, exercise routines, and skincare routines," said Danielle Roberts, an emergency physician in Norwalk, Connecticut. "Why shouldn't we have a readiness routine?"

Roberts is the medical director for The Readiness Collective, which twins Jesse Levin and Sefra Alexandra founded out of a concern for a society that remains reactionary, unprepared, and vulnerable due to a disjointed relationship with readiness. "When we work to acquire the skills and mindset that make us ‘ready,’ the fear, sense of vulnerability, and divisiveness typically experienced in emergencies are replaced with calm and an eagerness, capability, and desire to help others," Levin says. It's hard to know where to begin with personal preparedness, but the best time to do it is right now.

Where Do We Begin?

After someone has lived through something traumatic, whether it’s a wildfire or a global pandemic, they're in the best possible place to look at things objectively when the experience is fresh in their minds. It's overwhelming, and so many people want to fling their masks aside, forget about the Texas power crisis, and ignore hurricane and wildfire predictions. Despite strong impulses to push the past aside and move on, Belfi says, "this is the most important time to sit down—whether it's with yourself, your family, or with a larger group in your community—and reflect on what worked and what didn't. From that information, you'll have an amazing blueprint for building your plan."

After reflecting on what worked well and where your household needs improvement, you can refill, restock, replace, and repair supplies and tools. The next step is a little challenging because this is where you dig deeper, polish some skills, and tweak your plan.

Belfi offers a guide on her website to help you get started, along with Bringing Resilience Home, a free, printable ebook that lists the essential questions to ask yourself as you draft your preparedness plan. It's critical to know how much food and water your family needs. A freezer full of meat isn't the best stable food source, but it's something. Twenty-pound bags of rice, beans, and lentils are better. The worst is relying on takeout, as many people learned the hard way when everything was closed at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Some people have more critical vulnerabilities, such as those reliant on electricity to run a C-PAP machine or other medical equipment. Most people don't have a backup—either a backup device or a backup plan—and for most of us, it takes going through the experience of not having things to realize we need them. Bringing Resilience Home asks the questions before disaster strikes and assists your household in evaluating your food, water, and power needs, as well as determining your evacuation locations and the routes to getting there, what circumstances require evacuations, and who decides to leave.

Prepare a Plan and Then Practice It

Belfi describes what she calls a ripple effect of resilience. "Because we're looking at our public resources being stretched so thin, I believe that the only way for us to move forward as a resilient nation is to cultivate resilient communities, and that's one household at a time."

Belfi acknowledges that there's a privilege to investing in emergency preparedness, and not everyone has the space, money, or access to tools to do it. But those who can prepare their household are doing it not only for themselves but for those around them. “It’s not novel,” Belfi says. “It’s neighborly.”

Helping each other also reduces the strain on public resources. FEMA's mission is to guide people through all stages of disasters, but it's not unusual for the agency to manage over a hundred simultaneous disasters. Even with 20,000 employees across the nation, FEMA can't do it all, and state and local agencies are consequently overwhelmed. That leaves it up to individuals to learn how to take care of themselves and their neighbors when disaster strikes.

There's something called a "therapeutic vacuum," which Bob Otter, a 25-year fire and emergency medical service veteran, explains as "the time between a critical injury and the time help arrives." There are natural delays in responding to a car accident, for example, but when there are violent incidents like a shooting—which our country experiences too often—"the therapeutic vacuum is extended because the scene has to be secured before people receive care," Otter says. The same is true for natural disasters, when hospitals might be evacuating or operating on generators and thus can't take on additional patients. However, people still get injured and need help. "Too many people are dying preventable deaths," Otter says. "Over the years of responding to those incidents, it became clear that we needed to figure out a way to empower the public to treat those injuries prior to us arriving."

How Can I Help Save Lives?

After encountering too many people on emergency scenes who told him "I didn't know what to do," Otter founded citizenAID, an organization that empowers and equips the public to help save lives before EMS arrives. There's a free app that gives step-by-step instructions on what to do during a stabbing, shooting, bombing, or vehicle attack. We don't necessarily want to know what to do under these circumstances, but we should know.

CitizenAID's programs are modeled on the military's Combat Lifesaver Courses, which were designed to give an average soldier eight easy steps to keep their buddies alive in the field while waiting for medics to arrive. The initiative led to a 25 percent decrease in fatalities, allowing many more soldiers to return home.

The app is available on both Apple and Android and is appropriate for kids 12 and over. For $14 you get citizenAID's "Stop the Bleed" course, suitable for ages 13 and over, plus you can gift a course to a teacher of your choice.

Many people take CPR training and learn how to remove an airway obstruction, administer chest compressions, and recognize heart attack and stroke signs. Similarly, there are a number of other apps and services that also keep important and useful emergency information on your phone. Everyone wants to pull out their phone and take video in a crisis—and there are documentation benefits to doing so—but this is an opportunity to pull out your phone and have a roadmap to save a life.

What Else Do I Need to Know?

A lot, actually, but most emergency planning professionals explain that a little preparation is better than nothing at all. "We all have a responsibility to be able to respond," says Sefra Alexandra, who, in addition to being a cofounder of The Readiness Collective, is also an ethnobotanist on a perennial hunt to safeguard wild seed biodiversity. "True self-care is care for yourself, your family, and your community," she said. "The mindset and lifestyle around readiness invites us to put the fun back in providing the fundamentals of human needs."

The Readiness Collective is headquartered in a high-end mall in Norwalk, Connecticut, making it one of the last places a person might expect to learn about seed sovereignty or winching a Land Rover, but it's actually a prime location for these skills. Many New Yorkers relocated to Connecticut during the pandemic but don't have the skills a person needs in an area that is mostly suburban but that gets rural pretty quickly. The fact is, many people don't know how to use a chainsaw or efficiently pack a car, and mistakenly think that being prepared is about purchasing and stockpiling gear when it's actually about acquiring skills, fortifying a mindset, and building community.

The Readiness Collective has a unique business model because despite having a storefront, they're more of a gear gallery. "The potential of the gear we own starts with our knowledge and competency in its use," Roberts says. Levin adds, "We won't sell a customer gear until they've been trained in how to use it."

"The discipline and practice of readiness are not just applicable to emergencies," Levin said. "Learning to keep calm under duress, to become more situationally aware and medically skilled promotes creating more capable and competent individuals that can lead in uncommon circumstances whether in a business, relationship or hurricane."


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