Crash Drill

This self-care guide is one of my new favourite things.

As I see it, there are two really clever things here:

1. Know what to do before you need to do it. The advice in the guide is all really obvious, in the same way that "leave your bag behind and follow the emergency lights" is a really obvious way to exit a burning aircraft. But in the smoke-filled cockpit of a Bad Day, nothing is obvious except what you've drilled so often that you can do it instinctively.
2. Make your own plan. The guide's author writes that "you are encouraged to customize this document to your own needs", but I'd go further: if you don't, it's unlikely to help you. Under pressure, you won't obey random instructions off the internet, even sensible ones, but like Leonard's instinctive trust of his tattoos in Memento, you'll listen to yourself.

I think the application is broader than "everything is awful", too - I'm lucky enough to apparently not be vulnerable to mental illness, but I can still get flattened by a hard day ("mental injury"?). I'll generally recover overnight anyway, but this is potentially faster.

I've used Sinope's template to refine my own Crash Drill, which is gloriously specific and likely to be actively unhelpful to anybody but me. (It's basically "Look, you need to eat something and then go for a run. Seriously."). I'd encourage anyone who finds this interesting to do the same thing, perhaps using an online PDF editor to edit the existing template.