Editor’s Note: Correct Course with Metacognition

How well do you know your own thought processes? Chances are you haven’t given the concept much consideration. But maybe it’s time to change all that.

Metacognition is generally defined as “thinking about thinking,” and it involves monitoring, recognizing, and controlling one’s own cognitive processes to affect an outcome. It’s frequently employed in classrooms to encourage students—from kindergarten to higher education—to think more deeply about subject matter and develop a sense of context about what they learned and how it relates to them. Metacognition helps you recognize what you know and what you don’t know. But it can also be applied to help you recognize how you think and what you do.

“Metacognition is the ability to train myself to observe and be aware of how I’m doing in stressful situations,” says Jude Bergkamp, a psychologist and faculty member with Antioch State University. “The limbic system is going to turn all focus externally—the fight, flight, freeze, befriend sort of systems will all push attention outward. So, the real trick, the real discipline and training, is to maintain this kind of metacognitive self-awareness during really acute, stressful circumstances in order to really get to know how you personally react to these things.”

Security practitioners are often told to control their own stress response before attempting to affect someone else’s state. But without appropriate self-awareness about how your individual cognitive responses to stimuli, that can feel like shouting at yourself to calm down—you’re failing to de-escalate your own state of mind.

The three stages of metacognition should be familiar to many security practitioners and emergency managers: planning, monitoring, and evaluation. Essentially, it’s a self-reflection preparedness plan, response, and after-action report. When it comes to improving your responses to stimuli, being able to track and influence your stressors can improve your ability to fulfill your mission.

Metacognitive therapy techniques are sometimes employed to help people with anxiety or who have problems overthinking or fixating on negative experiences. But the same practices can help first responders, security personnel, and analysts—as well as journalists and other information-evaluating professionals—recognize the shortcuts their brains take when under stress, evaluate if those shortcuts are useful or if they introduce biases or blind spots, and correct any unhelpful patterns.

When you are in an unfamiliar or stressful situation, ask yourself four questions:

• How do I feel? (Anxious or fearful, angry, excited)
• What am I thinking? (Passing thoughts, recollections, points of focus, assumptions about the situation or people)
• How am I physically feeling? (Increased heart rate, sweating, tension, relaxation)
• What was I telling myself? (Encouraging or discouraging self-talk, catastrophizing about potential negative outcomes)

By reflecting on your unconscious and conscious responses to a scenario, you can parse out which reactions were reasonable and helpful and which ones undercut your mission by sidetracking you or escalating your stress response or emotions. Then, you can recognize those behaviors more easily during the next incident and course correct.

Personally, during periods of high stress I tend to procrastinate on starting any of the tasks on my “urgent” pile because I can’t decide which goes first (which of course makes the to-do list longer and more daunting). So, I plan: When I start feeling overwhelmed, I will take five deep breaths before making any decisions. Very few situations don’t allow time for five breaths. I monitor: How does the short break affect my thinking and physical response to stress? And I evaluate: Am I now able to prioritize the first three tasks to tackle? Where did I get off-track, and could I think about it differently next time?

Remember: Calmness is contagious, and so is self-awareness, says Bergkamp. You likely know someone who conveys a sense of calm and self-assurance. In stressful meetings or incidents, those people are likely to provide a moderating presence that cools down hot tempers and brings people back to the table to find solutions. Some people have this presence naturally, but it is more likely to be thoughtfully cultivated through repeated metacognitive practice of planning, monitoring, and evaluating. It’s a soft or executive skill, and skills can be honed.

So, what will you do to boost your self-awareness during incident response or high-stress periods?

Claire Meyer is editor-in-chief of Security Management. Connect with her on LinkedIn or via email at [email protected].