Understanding fear and how it effects us is so very important to any thing that we do. Fear can arise out of a variety of factors. I know there have been times when I let my fear of embarrassing myself get to me so bad that I in fact did embarrass myself because I was so nervous to speak in front of an audience. If you have taken any my classes you may not notice that I have an innate fear of public speaking. But then again I am in my realm of expertise; I have been teaching martial arts since I was 16, and workplace violence issues for at least 8 years. I am pretty confident in this subject matter. However, ask me to stand up before a room of 100 people and talk about statistical variance analysis and I am going to have considerable trouble and become quite red faced. So enough about me, look at the girl in the picture - while her face is partially concealed its fairly apparent that she is reacting to fear.As Gavin de Becker so eloquently put it;"Men fear that women will laugh at them, women fear that men will kill them". His statement speaks to the primal issues that surround us as humans; both male and female. Irregardless of our gender and our primal fear there is still an automatic bodily function at work here. This is because fear is a chain reaction in the brain that starts with a stressful stimulus and ends with the release of chemicals that cause a racing heart, fast breathing and energized muscles, among other things, also known as the fight-or-flight response. We know that from previous blog entries that there is more than just fight or flight - we can also have posturing and submission. Specifically though there is the fear stimulus, this is what our brain processes - in the picture the girl is reacting to the man's telegraphed punch/ or threatened punch. We then know that her heart rate is up and she is reacting either by cowering (a submission response) or putting her hands up to protect herself (a learned response).
Darren Laur in his excellent research article The Anatomy of Fear breaks down what happens as fear manifests in the brain's amygdala and how it is sympathetic to the heart rate. As the heart rate goes up the ability to respond to the fear stimuli becomes worse. See below:
- At 115 beats per minute (bpm) most people will lose fine complex motor skills such as finger dexterity, eye/hand co-ordination, multi-tasking becomes difficult.
- At 145 bpm, most people will lose complex motor skills & experience auditory exclusion (they quit hearing).
- At 175 bpm, it is not uncommon for a person to have difficulty remembering what took place & visual tracking becomes difficult.
- At 185-220 bpm, most people will go into a state of "hypervigilance," also commonly known as the "deer in the headlights" or "brain fart mode." It is not uncommon for a person to continue doing things that are not effective (known as a feedback loop)
So how do we keep our heart in the 115-145 bpm range? We do this with what I call stress training. Thats when we put the Redman suit on and you actually experience fighting a man off of you. Although there is more to this than just the Redman Suit we also use some of Darren's research in our training program as well. Here's a few points from his article that we do:
- Training for combat "must" be gross motor based. Why? Because we know that during combat, SSR will negatively effect fine/complex motor skill performance no matter how well trained! We stay away from techniques that require fine motor skills.
- For any skill taught, there must always be a plan "B" abort strategy conditioned as well. We must not be teaching multiple defences (responses) to a specific type of attack (stimulus). The reason for this is HICKS LAW! We don't teach more than one technique for a stimuli and fortunately everything we do builds on itself. This isn't a martial art where you are trying to develop a vast toolbox of interesting techniques.
- Hicks Law basically states the following: the average reaction time given one stimulus one response is about _ second. If we now teach a student a second technique (response) to the same attack (stimulus) we WILL increase a person’s reaction time by 58%. On the street we want to DECREASE reaction time, not increase it. If we teach multiple defences to one specific attack, the brain will take time deciding which option to use. This increased reaction time could mean the difference between life and death.
- Instructors should always teach a new technique in slow motion. Why? It allows the student’s brain time to observe the technique and begin the "soft wiring process" which becomes "hard wired" through physical and mental training in conjunction with repetition, as long as it is gross motor skilled.
- All physical skills should be chunked or partitioned into progressive steps, rather than taught all at once. We do this too, consider the Rape Escape Position and its defenses against choking, hitting, and rape.
- Once the skill sets are learned, they must now be applied in dynamic training in order to make the stimulus/response training as real as possible. Again, the more the real the training, the better-prepared one becomes for the reality of the street.
While we do alot of the right things, there is still more that we can do - but we just don't have time for this in a 3 hour course. Plus, your mind needs time to digest what you have learned. Practicing a technique helps you become more proficient with it. Also, we need to put time into realistic scenarios (i.e. in the parking lot, in a small room, while walking past someone, and in areas that are poorly lighted). While the Fight Like A Girl class is intended to make you as comfortable and relaxed so that you can learn, real life is usually quite the opposite. To this end as the weather warms up I'll begin offering some advanced scenario classes for my prior students. I hope to be able to address some of these SSRs in the context with which they may find you and hopefully give you the confidence to escape.
Stay Safe!
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