Today’s
offering will start with a quote from American literature and a word or two as
to what that might have to do with our own combat training, then proceed into
the physiology of how your body reacts with ZERO training in the shadow of physical
confrontation; we will ponder how those evolved reactions are the height of wisdom—and how they can go horribly wrong.
Next, we
have a look at a piece of fascinating research in exercise physiology from the
domain of competitive running and offer the mighty interesting implications of
how it is most likely a vitally useful attribute to hack our own combat-training
and increase our own ability to bear anticipatory stress and to wield mid-conflict
stress with greater aplomb.
We’ll end
with two prescriptions for Anticipatory
Stress Hacking: The Scheduled Red-Line and The Derring-Do List.
Quite the
menu, huh? Let’s get started.
First, the
American literature reference, the following is from Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Here we have
our protagonist agonizing over whether or not he has “the stuff” to face battle.
Is he a hero, or is he a coward?
There we
have the anticipatory perils of conflict/fight training in a nutshell. You may
have logged all the gym hours in the world, shined on the parade ground, gone
through all the “warrior dance” motions that can be made, but…as first hand
accounts of battle, fights in the ring, the cage, the street from time
immemorial, your training and what you “presume” you will do, or what you “hope”
you will do, do not always match the preparatory deed or desired intention.
Now why is
that?
After all,
we all want to be heroes and heroines, at the very least none of us want to be labeled
cowards.
There is
that wide fearsome gulf between what we do with good intentions in the gym and
what we wonder “might” happen when our fans meet with excrement.
This
dichotomy of “will we or won’t we” is rooted in our physiology and the early
days of this species where we were living as face-to-face tribal members with
skin-in-the-game allegiance to one another and not some abstract noun
connection of flag, deity du jour, or
country.
First the physiology:
You Are the Offspring of Survivors [Excerpted
from my book No Second Chance.]
“We prey animals, who must rely on our
intellect for our survival, have some extraordinary automatic support from our
bodies. Millions of years of evolution have allowed for some astonishing
adaptations that are in place to aid in our responses to threat. Every human
prey animal who has ever survived a physical threat was able to pass along
whatever attributes he or she possessed to assist in that survival. Those who
did not survive did not pass along their particular characteristics good, bad,
or indifferent. It is in light of this fact that we can say with all surety
that we are all the offspring of successful survivors.
The
amazing thing about these inherited gifts is that we have to do nothing to access them--they lie
encoded within us ready to do their job at a moment’s notice. As soon as a
perceived threat appears on the horizon our blood pressure and heart rate
elevates to accelerate the speed of blood flow that vital musculature needs to
launch into action. Along with this increase in blood pressure and heart rate a
coagulation agent is released into the blood, thickening it slightly in case of
injury. Respiration spikes to increase the oxygen content of the blood that is
fueling the muscles.
Our
pupils dilate to increase visual acuity so that we may take in more detail,
this automatic dilation also aids in increasing visual perception in low light
environments. In many cases the visual
centers slip the system into tachypsychia in which we process information at a
greater rate and thus action seems to move at a slower speed increasing our
reaction time to visual stimuli.
Our
digestive system shuts down to divert all necessary resources (blood and
oxygen) to the necessary musculature. The body knows that digestion is a major
consumer of energy and we need all the energy we can muster in times of threat.
This accounts for the feeling of nausea during times of stress as the body must
decide if the stomach is too full for immediate action. If it is deemed too
full, voiding the contents may occur but this must not be interpreted as
unsightly weakness but as another astonishing adaptation evolved to aid our
survival.
A
mixture of hormones is secreted into our blood, among them adrenaline and
endorphins. The adrenaline to increase reaction time and boost energy, the
endorphins to dull pain in the event of injury and allow for greater focus.
(We’ve all experienced the jittery post-adrenaline dump feeling after a
surprising event of some import--a car wreck, let’s say--this jitteriness is a
body at rest at odds with the adrenaline that calls for action). Carbohydrates
(our first energy source) are dumped into the system for immediate use
providing us with a turbo-boost of fuel.
We
should take a moment to marvel at such beneficial adaptations that are in place
for no other reason than to assist us in times of threat. We should be deeply
appreciative of these inherited gifts that our ancestors passed along to make
sure that we, like them, survive whatever is put in front of us. And that by
using these inherited gifts as a foundation for our intellect we are, in those
moments, superhuman. I mean “super” in the true sense of the word. When the
attributes described above are functioning, the body is performing at above
normal levels; that is the very definition of super.
We
should take comfort in the fact that we have super-normal abilities available
to us with zero conscious action on our part and add this comforting reality to
our “knowledge is power” dictum. We may never know the where, the when, or even
the if of an attack but the twin weapons of evolutionary biology and inculcated
preparedness start stacking the odds back into our plus column. With luck on
our side we can utilize these gifts, if need be, and be good ancestors to
future survivors.”
With our
physiology in mind, we are adapted to do one of two things in the face of conflict:
Fight or Flee.
The body
is going through the same “Red Badge of Courage” questioning that your mind is.
But
knowing the internal conflict goes deeper than “I hope I’m not a coward” does not explain why some of us “lock up,”
why some of us “turn tail and run,” or how we might actually hack this evolved
system to better our odds of “courage” to lighten the load of this anticipatory
stress.
In Part 2,
we’ll dive deeper into this area and touch on some fascinating science that
points to solutions.
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