EFFECTS UNDER STRESS

We have all been there.  Driving our vehicle just like any other day when all of a sudden, we get cut off, or maybe the driver behind us is tailgating.  In our frustration, we utter “instructions” to the other drivers under our breath. This is exactly where a friend found herself a few weeks prior to me writing this blog.  Her incident, however, ended in the police getting dispatched to a possible shots fired call. Just as we have all done in the past, this friend was making her frustration known by uttering a complaint under her breath, regarding another driver’s actions.   The issue was that the other driver read her lips and began to overtake her in the adjacent lane. While the suspect vehicle was passing, she heard a loud “bang” that rattled her, causing her to sustain partial hearing loss. Afraid for her life, her stress level elevated far beyond her comfort zone.  She then frantically attempted to call the police finding that she had forgotten the United States’ universal emergency number, “911.” In her state of disarray, she yelled for a passerby to assist and thankfully the police were dispatched. During the investigation, they found the loud noise was not a gunshot, but rather a firecracker.  This incident teaches an important lesson of how stress affects our bodies and minds.

In Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman’s book, “On Combat," he tells of the difficulty individuals have dialing 911 in emergency situations. As our bodies and minds succumb to heavy stress when not accustomed, our capability to complete easy tasks can become extremely difficult.

To preserve our safety, our mind can ignorantly dispatch messages to our body to increase what it believes to be survival functions. For example drawing the blood from the extremities, closer to the heart. You may have heard of the loss of fine-motor skills when faced with excessive stress, or the loss of bowel/bladder control when faced with a life or death situation. This is because our mind believes these functions to be non-essential to life preservation. The issue is, when a police officer is not trained properly and is confronted with a life or death situation, he may lose his fine-motor skills, not allowing him to squeeze the trigger on his weapon. This also explains why we may have difficulty with the “easy” task of dialing 911.

So how do we resolve this? How can we train our minds to issue the proper instructions to our bodies in these stressful scenarios? The answer is stress inoculation.

Stress inoculation is a specific form of training that mimics possible harmful situations. This training can somewhat duplicate the stress of these situations, allowing us to train our minds to act appropriately through repetition.

CONCLUSION

Subjecting our bodies to stressful scenario-based physical and mental training will prepare our minds to provide proper instructions to our bodies. This can result in the preservation of our life, and other’s.

Proverbs 15:1

A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.