Stress from Tactical Edge

An excerpt from the book "The Tactical Edge" Surviving High Risk Patrol by Charles Remsberg (Calibre Press book for Law Enforcement only)

Stress Response

Stress is the strain placed on your internal systems by anything that disturbs or makes a demand of you. Being under some degree of stress is a natural part of being alive and reacting to stimuli from your environment.
Your body can accommodate some stress without undue wear and tear but your inner reactions to a major disturbance - like the accute crisis of a shooting, a fight, a high speed chase or some other violence laden event - quickly can tax or surpass your ability to adapt, UNLESS (emphasis mine) your mental conditioning has equipped you with good stress control skills.

In a high intensity episode, your mind/body circuitry is more alive with action than a pinball board. As your brain interprets incoming stimuli as threatening, it broadcasts urgent mesages of arousal along your nerve network.

Adrenalin (sometimes called epinepherine) cortisol, aldosterone and other hormones pour into your bloodstream, mixing a "chemical cocktail" of alarm that reinforces and prolongs the stress reaction. Certain blood vessels tighten down and others expand as your circulatory system diverts blood away from your skin surface, your extremities and your digestive organs and channels it to the large muscle groups most closely related to strength and speed. Your heart and lungs work harder and faster to rush fresh nutrients to these tissues and clear away waste. your spleen discharges more red blood cells into your bloodstream to increase your oxygen supply. Your liver releases stored sugar to hype your energy. Your blood pressure leaps. your muscles tense, especially in your lower back, neck and shoulders, staying near the threshold of action in anticipation of movement. your sweat galnds kick in as your body tries to cool itself and so on.

Uncomfortable feelings spawned by these physical changes are detected by your brain as psychologically alarming These internal signals increase your mental distress which, in turn, prompts even more physical reaction. Before long the stress "feedback loop" is racing in high gear.

Eons ago, when human biology first emerged, cavemen experienced identical psycho-physiological reactions when they confronted dangerous wild animals. The arousal syndrome quickly prepared them either to fight the threat or take flight from it. In that context, stress responses were crucial to survival; the diversion of blood to large muscle groups for instance prepared the arms for swinging and the legs for running, both potentially life-saving movements.

Today, the equipment you carry is more sophisticated than the clubs of your Neanderthal ancestors and the responses that are apppopriate or even possible for you to make to threats are often much more complex than your brute reactions. Your internal response to stress has endured as your legacy from prehistoric times. But because your response otpions now must usually be so different from mere fight or flight, acute stress in your environement may endanger - or terminate - your survival rather than help it.

Extra blood nourishment for your large muscles means less for your small muscles involved in, say, finger dexterity and eye-hand coordination. Thus fine motor movements that ordinarily are easy may become impossible. Firing your pistol accurately and smoothly or reloading quickly without fumbling will be much harder than if you were calm. With your digestive processes disrupted, you may experience nausea that is distracting or disabling. Your tightened muscles may affect your voice, making effective verbal challenges difficult...or your eyes, causing excessive watering and blurring your vision....or your breathing, making you choke or gasp, and robbing you of stamina...or your flexibility, leaving you unable to perform important physical moves with the right fluidity and limberness.

Under high stress bombardment, your brain is so busy devouring input and spewing out responses that other mental functions are necessarily sacrificed. The part of your brain responsible for abstract thought. Your ability to concentrate is disrupted, the risk increases that you will select improper stimuli to focus your attention on. Your judgment suffers; your decisions are less likely to to be appropriate to the demands of the situation, and indeed may be wildly inappropriate. Your analytical thinking is hampered; it's much tougher to reason clearly and logically about strategy and tactics, and harder to retrieve options from your memory. Your creative capacity shrinks, your hope of improvising good maneuvers on the sport virtually evaporates. In short, anxiety overcomes function. During what may prove to be critical moments, you may be overwhelmed by emotion, and, in confusion and fear you may set up in your response the very errors that you desperately want and need to avoid.


OK, THAT'S PART ONE...AND LARGELY DEALS WITH WHAT HAPPENS TO THE UNTRAINED OR POORLY TRAINED.

HERE'S PART II OF THE SAME SECTION MINUS A LARGE PART OF BREAKDOWN OF THE ABOVE.

Especially for you Ben

These phenomena and other aspects of the stress response can prove fatal if you are unprepared for their effects, because they can interfere with your ability to function at optimum capacity or an any capacity at all. Officers who respond inadequately in high-risk encounters are believed by psychologists in many cases to "freak out," freeze up or become dangerously distracted by these occurrences. They do not expect them and do not realize that for many officers they are normal reactions to abnormal situations at moments of peak stress. If you don't hear your rounds going off, and don't understand sensory distortion, you may think your gun isn't working and stop trying to shoot...or you may continue to fire an empty weapon. You may fail to hear warnings shouted out by fellow officers or fail to see signs of danger that they pick up on. If your startle response to hearing gunfire is to look around wondering "what was that?" instead of diving for cover instantly, you may leave yourself vulnerable to attack precious seconds longer than necessary. If you experience the slow-motion effect but don't know this can happen and do not understand that your are not really slowed down you may frantically wonder, "My God, why can't I move faster?" and become so unerved that you fail to function.

SKIPPING A LARGE CHUNK HERE THAT AGAIN DETAILS MORE OF THE ABOVE


Because stress responses occur automatically many people assume that little can be done to prevent or regulate them. True, you cannot always eliminate them entirely, but with the proper techniques you can exert far more control over your reactions than you may imagine. You do not have to be a victim of your stress response.

As part of your mental conditioning you can learn to:

1. Relax your mind and body so that stress is minimized as you approach a potentially high-risk situation.

2. Control your reactions in a crisis so that the occurrence and effects of stress threats to our survival are forestalled or vastly diminished.

3. Recover your equilibrium faster after a high-intensity event, and

4. Reduce any chronic stress before it reaches a dangerous level.

One of the many experiments proving this is possible involved eight world-class pistol shooters. Each was injected with a dose of adrenalin that would have completely overloaded the average person. Yet when these shooters then engaged targets, only two shot significantly less accurately than normal. The others all had developed strategies that wer so efficient in controlling stress that they could counter even this mamm0th upheaval of their nervous systesms. Bold emphasis mine.


Your key to achieving this kind of control is breaking into the stress feedback loop. Just as the interplay between your mind and your body can aggrevate stress, so can it alos be used to combat stress if the proper signals are injected into the cycle. If either your mind or your body can be made to relax, it will message its partner that the alarm alert is no longer necessary, and a quieting effect will begin to spread by chain reaction throughout your whole system. If your body relaxes, your mind must follow and vice versa, because of the effect the signals have on each other.

A multitude of proven stress management techniques are available. These include self-hypnosis, meditation, biofeedback, aerobic exercise, progressive muscle release, deep breathing and a variety of other methods designed to induce the relaxation response.

Nick

PS: GOING TO DO PART THREE NEXT...HANG IN THERE.

CRISIS REHEARSAL

The next step beyond self-talk is an advanced form of positive reinforcement called "Crisis Rehearsal."

Here, instead of internal verbal messages, you use "mental movies" to develop appropriate reactions to street confrontations. By repeatedly imagining yourself in a crisis where you successfully defeat a threat on your life, you "pre-set" yourself to respond with the same proficiency in a real encounter. Your fantasy practicing of proper tactics, physical movements and firearm skills "programs" your nerves and muscles to respond automatically as they need to to let yo win adn lessens your susceptibility to stress interference.

Crisis Rehearsal is not idle daydreaming. It is a purposeful drill. you are instructing yourself through visual imagery. Like other aspects of mental conditioning it captializes on the mind/body partnership.

In sports, this type of mental preparation is known as playing the game in your head" and it has been polished to a fine science. This same process is used by outstanding tennis players, basketball stars, diving champions, weightlifters, boxers, skeet and trapshooters and countless others who want to correct bad habits, improve speed and strengthen their performing style. One American serviceman in Vietnam used this form of mental conditioning to practice his golf game while he was a prisoner of war. Every day he mentally played 36 holes on his favourite course. When he finally came home he performed better than ever in an actual game even though he hadn't held a club for seven years.

Mental rehearsal is a method of making desirable patterns automatic and habitual. In all, more than 75 scientific investigations have supported its value in sports training.

You can adopt this technique to improve your game on the street, where the outcome of competition is infinitely more important than on any sports field. And it can work for you the same way it works for athletes:

1 Mental rehearsal helps you "overlearn" tactics and techniques so they become second nature to you.

2. by familiarizing you with the look and feel of crisis situations, it defuses the impact of the stress-shock phenomena, and

3. It imprints learned responses patterns on your system so that under pressure they guide your physical actions instantly and successfully without conscious thought.

In short, this powerful psycho-physiological tool will allow you to turn what yu would most like to do when your life is in jeopardy into what you will most likely do.

SKIPPING MORE DETAILS...

FROM LATER IN THE BOOK....'


"A defensive driver constantly observes his surroundings, identifies and evalutates potential threats, formulates an effective response and prepares to execute that response. If a threat materializes, he is primed to act, with minimal lag time.
After a period of defensive driving the driver will begin to recognize recurring threat patterns and standardized responses to them. It is at that point that his reactions are almost fully cconditioned and reflexive.

Bold emphasis mine


Similarly, a defensive officer will constantly evaluate his surroundings for threats (potential as well as real) formulate a basic response and prepare mentally to execute it. Initially, conscious thought is required to set the pattern of observation, evaluation, formulation and response in the mind. Eventually, the action of evaluation becomes unconscious and continuous, and the response reflexive.


Alright, enough, my fingers are worn to the bone. That's the type of stress I'm talking about and just a few of the methods we have also adopted to deal with it and the importance of why.

Tactical edge seminars by the way were taught all over the country here and formulated a large part of the officer survival training that goes on to this day.

(and all this time you thought I just made this shite up That is why, by the way, I denigrate sports training. If you're constantly running rehearsals through your head of shooting in on somone for a double leg scoop what will your REACTION be on the street? based on the above of course.

Nick

Nick Hughes wrote:One American serviceman in Vietnam used this form of mental conditioning to practice his golf game while he was a prisoner of war. Every day he mentally played 36 holes on his favourite course. When he finally came home he performed better than ever in an actual game even though he hadn't held a club for seven years.

This stuff really works. I don't have any experience of it in conflict, but have used it to very good effect in surfing, and I think there are some parallels. I've surfed for 30+ years, but have spent less and less time in the water as the years have passed. 'Fantasy surfing' has improved my performance way beyond what it should have been given the limited hours spent actually doing it. Surfing moves are very difficult to learn step by step as you can't make the ocean move in slow motion. Everything is practiced under the pressure of getting dumped on by the wave. When it all comes together it feels purely instinctive. I've been astonished by the fact that after a couple of days spent dreaming about pulling off a perfect new move I've been able to pull it off for real without ever having 'practised' it in the water.

Yep, and it's exactly why kata works WHEN IT'S DONE CORRECTLY. If you just go through the motions, like most do, you're doing n'owt but dancing.

If on the other hand you're doing this visualization process of tearing large groups of people to pieces it works when you have to do so later for real.

Of course people who have trouble dealing with large groups of people tend to say they don't work...so they've got that going for them.

Nick

Hi Nick.

I must say, that was an impressive amount of text!

I remember expressing earlier on your forum somethink like - reading about what you manage in your encounters, makes me question just how much of one’s performance is in one’s head…

I agree with you that through visualisation and imagination, one can work wonders with one's performance! The mind has ways of learning skills, both mental and physical that most only dream about. I’ve used it in various ways throughout the years and I know they work. I was happy to see it being used at the NBI and International last year. I’m also happy to see that you bring it up.

I don’t think one can stress enough the importance of being prepared, physically and mentally.

Physically – we can train our bodies, develop strength, endurance, etc. We can train strikes and techniques in practical ways alone or with others.

Mentally – we can train by learning about what to expect and develop techniques that can help to deal with the stress that’ll affect the body and mind at a traumatic/stressful event.

But Nick, I must disagree with this:

OK, THAT'S PART ONE...AND LARGELY DEALS WITH WHAT HAPPENS TO THE UNTRAINED OR POORLY TRAINED.

I think that it happens to most, if not everybody to a certain extent. With the proficiently trained individuals their internal systems just become accustomed to such events and react more automatically without the individual needing to do much about it consciously. But you can't react without a trigger!? One can set those triggers differently though. I believe that's what you're saying too...

Mental rehearsal is a method of making desirable patterns automatic and habitual.

To properly do that, I believe one has to acknowledge and understand that the things mentioned early in your post are normal reactions to such an event. One shouldn't fear it but use it to trigger other reactions. What is needed to learn is how to recognize it and then develop techniques so it doesn’t reflect poorly on performance as it could be counter productive or even dangerous to the very purpose of the initial reaction. Maybe I’m just looking at it from another perspective, and we’re both talking about the same thing but I just wanted to write my take on it… I hope you don’t mind?

I believe that “kata” can work just fine done with the proper mindset. I myself have quite recently started to do visualisation drills everyday as part of my recovery, weaved in with meditation, thanks to good advice. They work wonders. While doing them I can imagine myself working through different states of emotions. To be able to process and understand a state/emotion/reaction (in order to channel it into proper action) I believe one needs to be able to stay in it, kind of taste it and then one can say – Oh, was that all? And then throw it away! It can however take quite a bit of hard, tedious work I’ve also noticed. Maybe one can see this parallell to the thread of “the natural athlete” (in another section above) as I think we’re not all as efficient at dealing with physical skills or mental ones, but I certainly believe that it’s a skill that can be enhanced and needs to be taught!

It’s natural for the brain to think while using images and visualisation is a great asset for learning efficient motor skills as well as mental ones …


Lynx

Linx,

Don't forget when I typed that I left out large portions of the text that weren't relevant to what I'd been discussing with Manchester Ben. I think if you read the whole thing (you're welcome to by the way, when you make it over here) it will make more sense.

Very good book by and for cops written by some guys who put it on the line every day.

There's some amazing stuff in there too...one photo is of a pair of handcuffs that some crazy fucker bit off his wrists....you can even see the teethmarks and the metal is torn like putty.

Nick

I've had long discussions about the value of Kata in the past . My own experience is of Tai Chi, pretty much one long Kata.

I did it for three years in a class that taught it purely as a health thing with no combative applications. But I could see that move x could be a block, or a throw , or a strike. In particular I saw one move "Ward off" could be a useful neckthrow against a waist high tackle.

Each time I practiced my form I would do it as a Kata , complete with imagining bad guys who I would defeat using the applications I could see. But never once were these moves practiced against an actual person, or even at full speed. But they did become firmly ingrained ito my subconscious.

I was amazed months later when in the process of an arrest that turned into a scrap, the bad guy tried to tackle me at waist height . Without thought I carried out that very neckthrow . The guy all but somersaulted in front of me and landed right on his arse completely bewildered.

I've had a handful of experiences like that that convince me that Kata or any mental rehearsal done right can be of great benefit, from fighting to passing my response driving test.

I firmly believe that this is best augmented with actual physically doing the action itself in context ( eg training with an actual person) but mental rehearsal alone can be very effective.

Outstanding post Nick.

I'll dive into the book when I come flying over the great puddle of water... Don't know what kind of a well mannered guest that'll dive into a book when they come to visit , but I'm all for learning...

And Nick - It's Lynx, not Linx! Don't tease the !

Lynx

Don't know what kind of a well mannered guest that'll dive into a book when they come to visit

Just ask Slackbladder

No, seriously Slacky's like me...he likes a book and I encouraged him to read as many of mine as he could while he was here.

My next house is going to have a library so I can stick them somewhere.

(Actually Slack is unaware that there are about 30 more boxes full in my attic and I've sold 20 boxes full to the local used book store a while back)

Alright nylix...I'll try and spell it right next time

N

Actually Slack is unaware that there are about 30 more boxes full in my attic

You, sir, are a rotter.

Ok, won't mind my manners then!
Always nice with a good read and a nice cup of tea, or coffee.

LYNX