Panicking
Panicking almost always makes everything worse. Panicking causes overreactions or excessive overreactions. Panicking causes potentially harmless or avoidable circumstances to escalate. Panicking causes accidents or misunderstandings to become or be deemed uncontrollable. Panicking causes people to act in extreme and or unhelpful and or harmful ways.
Panicking is prevented or mitigated by preparation. Preparation prevents or mitigates damage by arming humans — who are each responsible for themselves and their actions — with knowledge and skills and abilities. Preparation includes awareness and training. Awareness is built through education and exposure to more likely or prioritized possibilities. Training includes repetition and refinement of beneficial reactions to those possibilities. Preparation also includes an understanding of contingencies and what might be done about them, and enhances intuition. Preparation is the difference between believing and knowing, or, knowing enough to know that not even diligent preparation — and certainly not just unfounded, intangible, blind belief — is necessarily enough.
Awareness plants seeds and training builds competence. Competence can include confidence and confidence can by increased by competence, but confidence does not necessarily signify competence. Competence is provable and repeatable, whereas confidence (without competence, meaning overconfidence, arrogance, and or self-deception) can be feigned by even the poorest of actors. Alone, confidence requires support. But even alone, competence speaks for and supports itself. Competence fosters calmness and increases the appropriateness of actions and reactions.
Responsibility requires preparation. Preparation requires action. Whatever positive feelings they may evoke, hoping, wishing, and praying are not preparation because they create no change in ones knowledge and skills and abilities or have a tangible effect on reality. Are you wanting to tell yourself that everything is or will be okay? Or are you wanting to much more certainly know when things are not okay, and or that when (not if) bad things happen, that you know what to do and can do it and will do it and otherwise handle it?
Panicking helps nothing and no one (it hurts everything and everyone). Help protect yourself, your friends and family, and everyone better prevent, mitigate, or otherwise overcome the negative effects of panicking and poor decision making, by preparing.