Situational Awareness

Situational awareness is a term often used in aeronautical and military training to instruct combatants and pilots to be cognizant of what is happening around them. It is a skill that is infrequently used by many people in their everyday lives,  "I never saw it coming."  Many people go about their business with little awareness of where they are and what is in their vicinity. Situational awareness is like a mother’s claim of having eyes in the back of her head, but actually employs more senses than just vision. When walking down the street, many people unconsciously watch where they put their feet (and some don’t) and subliminally assess anyone they are approaching.  They make a judgement about a person or situation, and adjust their stance on a sliding scale of friend or foe. This instinct comes from the animal kingdom. We humans can fine-tune this simple scale into many tones on our way to making the decision about how to react. Do we ignore them, make eye contact, cross the street, or stop and speak to them?

Our awareness and reaction are also influenced by our surroundings. Is it day or night? Am I in familiar or strange territory? Are there other people present? What are the cultural habits of the place I am in? We use this skill of situational awareness to pass safely, and to communicate whatever it is that we need or want. This helps keep us safe in our world. 

When one begins driving lessons, an instructor may raise the point of situational awareness, because it is critical to safe driving. Bad driving is a perfect example of how people aren’t observant, as it results in an inability to judge situations and act appropriately. The worst case of a driver with a lack of situational awareness is a driver with tunnel vision, who drives straight ahead, looking only in front of him, but not too far.  He doesn’t look side to side, or use his mirrors, but drives his car like he has no control except stop and go. He may be driving in Bangalore, where this is normal, but for clarity's sake, we'll stick to Western habits. The tunnel vision driver may suffer from compromised motor and observational skills, so that staying inside one lane of traffic pushes him to the maximum of his capabilities. He fears that if he looks sideways or back, he may lose control of his forward motion, which, in his state of reduced capability, may happen. Driving is a skill that requires multitasking, but some people find this difficult or impossible. Apart from some differences in speed and capacity to retain information levels, humans can be trained to multitask. A new mother learns this from necessity, as there are many rapid changes in children, and they require constant attention.  Multitasking while driving is the ability to control the speed & direction of a vehicle, while being fully aware of what is happening on the rest of the road, and trying to anticipate what might happen. Some drivers believe that multitasking while driving is the ability to eat, drink coffee, apply makeup, window shop, and talk on a cell phone, all while changing lanes, gears, and radio stations. These dangerous habits would be better substituted by thinking about where they want to go on the road, and what is the best way to arrive.  Driving responsibly requires awareness of the other vehicles on the road whose drivers have their own agenda, which may or may not make sense.

An important point about situational awareness is that those who lack it are not only a danger to themselves but  a danger to others. What will happen to a child whose mother isn’t aware of the child's needs? What would happen in traffic if all drivers thought in only forward mode? What would happen if we perceived all who approached us as an enemy and reacted violently toward them with no reason?

Situational awareness can also be used to maintain our own physical and mental health. A doctor will often tell a patient to pay attention to his own body, repeating this obvious reminder because it is too often ignored. When an obese or thin person looks in the mirror, do they only see what they want to see, or do they see the objective truth about the state of their bodies? If a person experiences constant headaches, do they examine their life and try to discover if the cause is mental, physical, environmental, or do they just take a pill to cover up the pain?

There are three stages of situational awareness: the perception of the situation, the placing of the perceived factors on our own personal scale, and the decisions we make about our actions in this situation, which usually involve projecting any situation into the future.  How will this situation play out? Several factors figure into our ability to react appropriately to any given situation. The first is experience, the second is knowledge, the third is processing velocity, and the fourth is the degree of transparency of any situation.

In the absence of professional counselling, many people are unable to apply the concepts of situational awareness to their own life choices, and many people subvert the obvious. We know from information received from the outside world, from our own experience, that smoking is bad for us, yet we carry on with an addiction like this despite all the information that it is harmful. Overeaters continue to overeat and either admit that they do this or they delude themselves about what and how much they eat, yet continue to make unhealthy choices. Even in illogical situations like this, situational awareness plays a part. We may consider our life to be valueless, so we eat, drink, and smoke to comfort ourselves while we pass the time. We all die sooner or later, and if the future doesn’t look particularly bright, we choose to indulge ourselves along the way. This bleak perception of the future is particularly prevalent in the young. Negation of the future is a common state in adolescents and young people.  They don’t see themselves as capable of great things or their world to be heading in the right direction, so why try?  It's better to put on the blinkers and enjoy the ride, even if it leads to their own destruction. It is particularly damaging when this nihilistic approach is carried into full adulthood. These people may or may not be aware of the state that their negative beliefs have brought them to, but willful self-destruction is not a tenet of life – it is anti-life.

Our society doesn’t encourage people to think for themselves, nor to examine the causes of things that happen around them. Governments know that people are more easily controlled if they are accustomed to being told what to do. This creates a world in which people often don’t know how to react to an unfamiliar situation until someone else tells them. People feel comforted when they can easily categorize an event into a box that allows them to assimilate the event, and they feel righteous when that particular box is a widely held belief in their own culture. They feel unified and validated, even if they are mistaken, since they have lost the skill of judging information for themselves. They are not encouraged to be aware, to think for themselves, to act of their own volition, to trust their own reading of a situation, and to act appropriately based on what they know. When people have lost situational awareness, their own survival is at risk. Many people live their lives so entangled in petty dramas that they lose sight of who they are, where they are going, and how to get there. Like the Tarot fool with one foot off a cliff, they don’t realize that their lack of attention to necessary things severely compromises their survival.