The outrageous happened. I was about to take a ride back to home in my father’s car when this lady sped towards me, almost causing a collision. At the split second I just moved back calmly within half a second of being hit, and said to my father: “alright, let’s get out of here.” I didn’t show fear and didn’t yell, I just shrugged it off and got into the car.
Seriously, how did I not just panic from the situation minutes ago?
You will wake up at 3am in a cold sweat when it hits you.
IOW delayed reaction.
Yes, I find when I empty my mind at bedtime, that is when something like this will replay itself. Just talk yourself through it, you’re OK now, the worst did not happen.
I did that when I made this thread. “Seriously, how did I not die at that time” before I instantaneously shrugged it off again.
But is it your bedtime yet?
Yeah, I’m wired the same way, and other people have commented on it - when it’s time to panic, I tend to get a little too focused. I’m actually grateful for this trait, as it’s helped save my skin a number of times.
And I’m not so sure that the enormity of the situation is bound to stagger you later - it doesn’t always with me, maybe because at some level I understand that the danger wasn’t really so great, provided I made the right decision in the moment. Although I’ve heard of people who’ve experienced near misses and then died shortly later, apparently from the adrenaline dump.
I am the say way and I have a job that depends on that trait. I am very high-strung as a base level, but, paradoxically, I call down when things are truly going wrong.
I had an incredibly serious medical condition 7 years ago. When the ambulance delivered me to the emergency room, I got the full attention of every doctor, nurse and staff member on call right away. They didn’t sugarcoat anything and told me that they needed to get forms signed, relatives notified and as much information as they could before I went unconscious and died that night. I was oddly unphased and didn’t react to it at all. I felt completely at peace and just really wanted them to stop talking to me so that I could get some sleep.
My main ER doctor left about 2 am expecting me not to make it through the night but I greeted him by name the next morning completely not dead. He was shocked when I got up and walked on my own because my tests were still well beyond the normal survival range. I was in horrible shape and had to spend two weeks in ICU but I loved the fact that I could just hang out, watch crappy daytime TV and sleep. I got much better since then and don’t want to repeat the experience but I was surprised how not scary it was.
People react very differently to stress and unusual situations. I always wanted to be a Medivac pilot or nurse because that would help me be calm all the time.
The closest thing like that that’s happened to me lately was in my 105-mile hike in the Cotswolds this summer, which traverses, amongst other places, several golf courses. During the last one (on day four, when I had already hiked over 100 miles), I had just gotten past a dogleg and was a few feet from a forest, hiking with another slowpoke (some people run the whole 25-something miles every day!) when a golf ball comes whizzing a few feet from my head and lands in the rough next to the forest. I don’t stop hiking and just say out loud “whoa, a golf ball!” Now, I’ve never been hit by a driven golf ball but I assume I may have been just a few feet away from a hospital visit had it hit my head.
That’s been pretty much my response to hyperstressful situations. It’s hard to tell how you’re going to react until it happens, but the couple times it has happened to me, it was a calm, laser focus until the the situation was dealt with, and then, anywhere from a few minutes to several hours after the stressor was removed, my body reacted to it (and, at least once, not at all). From talking to other people, it does not seem to be an uncommon reaction. And I have no idea if this is some inherent way I have of dealing with stress, or it just happened to be the way I reacted to stressors those few times. Maybe next time I’ll just panic. But it is an odd feeling to have that sense of calmness and focus come over you when you should objectively be losing your shit.
Inches & seconds, what life is all about.
A second is as good as a year and an inch is as good as a mile.
I have been there.
Crossing the street (with the light) late one night and some idiot in a big old boat of a car comes whizzing around a corner like a bat out of hell, hightailing it out of a bar fight gone bad.
Ended up with my hands on his hood and my knees kissing his bumper. We lock eyes, he sneers at me like I have no excuse for living, and floors it as soon as I get out of the way.
Went home, calmly crawled into bed, and only woke up in a cold sweat with my heart pounding hours later.
This must have been 2004 at the latest, and even now I’m getting an adrenaline rush just thinking about it.
I’m thinking, like others had said upthread, that your reaction kicked in much later, but kicked in nonetheless. You OK now?
I had an instrument failure in my plane while buried deep in a low overcast of clouds and quietly went through the emergency check list, developed a plan to get back on the ground safely, discussed it with ATC, and executed it. I landed with fire engines following me down the runway.
I was completely calm the entire 1/2 hour it took to get on the ground. As soon as I shut off the engine my legs started bouncing up and down banging off the yoke. I had to just sit there for 10 minutes until I could walk again.
Not exactly the same but close. I never knew my legs could shake that much.
Did what you had to do when you had to do it. Good pilot that. 
A couple of weeks ago I was sitting on the back porch when there was an enormous lightning strike about 20 feet from me. It happened too quickly for me to register shock or fear, then my reaction was “well, lightning never strikes twice, might as well stay right here.”
It’s good not to get freaked over fleeting danger that doesn’t cause any harm. Can’t do anything about it anyway.
I saw a big SUV (Tahoe or Suburban) on the other side of the interstate hit the jersey barrier at speed, in driving rain. It flipped on end,did two flips, and then went rolling sideways down the interstate.
Thing was, I was in the left lane myself, about 100 yards away, so there was every chance that had it not hit just right, it would have flipped onto our car.
For whatever reason I just sort of watched it flip and roll right past us on the left in a detached way, and then looked in the mirror to see what happened, but it was raining hard enough that I couldn’t really see much.
Never got the shakes, never freaked out; just kind of had an intellectual realization that yep, that could have been it. Usually with me, the reaction is immediate or not at all; I haven’t had a delayed reaction to stress like that.
Many years ago when I was a young Marine, lean and mean and in great shape, I was walking with my grandparents in San Francisco along a very busy street where traffic drove by at 40 mph, two lanes in each direction. There were two kids, about 11 years old, they were skateboarding and one of them lost control of his skateboard and it rolled out into the street. Cars flying by.
I skateboarded as a kid and in a split second I felt badly for that kid losing his skateboard. I figured it would get crunched by the cars. The next split second I find myself sprinting into the street, dodging the cars in both directions, getting the undamaged skateboard, and sprinting and dodging my way back to the kid. I handed it to him and we continued walking along. Nothing was said, nothing more than that. Neither kid asked, “Who was that masked man?” 
Afterwards I realized, hey, that might’ve been a stupid thing and I could’ve gotten hurt or even killed. But in that split second I guess I sized up the traffic flows, the positions of the cars and the path the skateboard was taking, and my brain must’ve decided, hey, I can do this.
To this day I chuckle at that. Could I do it now? No way? Why did I do it? Who knows, it was just a reaction, I guess I felt badly for the kid.
Did I shit my shorts later, or wake up at 3am freaked out? Naaah. It was just the innocence and ignorance of youth, I guess.
But boy could I run and move quickly! As I tell my wife and kids, the older I get, the better I was.
I think there are two different kinds of emergencies being describe in this thread:
In the OP, and others, the whole near-death experience happens quickly and is over in one second.
I’ve been in a couple of almost-car-accidents,but they didn’t bother me too much. A quick swerve, a little luck, and it was all over in one second.
But in other examples,(the pilots in posts 12,13)-- preventing the near-death emergency required a half-hour of constant,careful activity, lots of difficult decisions under pressure.
I’ve never been in a situation like that, and I doubt if I’d show the heroism you guys describe.
How about narrowly avoiding killing someone?
Mom was picking me up from Blockbuster after my shift, and at the first intersection, we were going straight, heading for the Taco Bell.
When our light turned green, we went forward-- but I immediately yelled out, “STOP!”
There was a bicyclist traveling perpendicular to us with no lights on his bike, making an illegal left turn that would have surely resulted in us crashing right into him if I hadn’t said anything. (This was before Mom’s cataract surgery, too.) Boy howdy did I want to follow that guy into the Walmart and cuss him out.