How Stupid Will You Get?

Wait! Don’t get mad! I’m saying this because I love you 🙂

One of the things that many people don’t realize about being in a life-threatening situation is that your mental capacity will drop instantly to about 50% of normal.  Whatever skills you’ve trained with you’ll lose 1/2 of them instantly.  In fact, you may experience several physiological effects from your encounter:

• Loss of fine motor skills. This means any finely tuned actions even as simple as buttoning a button or dialing 911 becomes difficult when your adrenaline is pumping and your hands are trembling.
• Tunnel vision.  You lose peripheral vision and your focus is 100% on the attacker.  This can be bad if he/she is not alone and you don’t see the 2nd attacker coming at you.
• Time distortion.  What seems like an eternity actually was only seconds passing (or vice versa).
• Memory loss.  Seriously.

Don’t believe me?  A few months ago I had a Registered Nurse in one of my classes, and as we were talking about this very topic she shared a story with the class.  She’s been an RN for many years and has performed CPR on literally hundreds of patients, but the one time it was her own son laying on the ground needing CPR she completely blanked out on what to do and in fact panicked and ran to the front door of her house and screamed into the street for help.  You’d think that after all of her training and practice her muscle memory would have just kicked in but it did not.  (and yes, her son is fine now)

What can you do about it? Not a whole lot, these are PHYSIOLOGICAL reactions by the body that are inherent in our DNA.  Some things you can do:

• Train train train and hope that if you’re ever in a dangerous situation that some little bit of that memory kicks in and goes to work.
• Don’t have defense tools that have lots of “hoops” to jump through to activate (like superfluous safety switches on your stun gun, or a tiny pin you have to put in to activate it, or if you carry a firearm carrying it with no round in the chamber and a safety engaged locked in a locked zipper of your purse).
• Have your tools in your hand or quickly accessible.  If it’s in the bottom or your purse or inside your briefcase, you won’t have time to get it.
• Make sure you are looking around and scanning, actually turning your head, to break the tunnel vision
• Don’t make a statement to law enforcement until you’re with your attorney and be SUPER careful of what you say to the 911 operator.  Sometimes your emotions are still rampant and you’re not 100% sure of what even just happened.

I hope you understand my headline now, and I hope that you never need to use these skills.

Stay Safe,

Andy