Fight Flight or Freeze
These are the responses that occur during an attack when adrenaline dump occurs as a response. The first two occur as a survival reaction ingrained into our central brain functions....the third is a result of our higher development of our brain the cortex which gets in the way of survival and starts to process the attack and ask "why is this happening?"...That hesitation has cost many a police officer's life in the line of duty as well as good law abiding citizens who try to reason the situation looking for an alternative reaction or solution to violence. Unfortunately freezing and thinking about what is going on will get you killed or severely injured. Once someone has violated your space and trust they no longer have any right to have you consider their well being. You must run or fight ,or fight to run and survive....Training techniques is only going to get you half way there. To train for a surprise attack you have to train the mind and body to react without thinking or looking for a technique.Your reaction must be as natural as the startle reaction and your attacks if you can't run should depend on large gross motor actions not fine motor techniques which will be difficult to perform under adrenaline dump. Our garumas are excellent in this regard as reactions to a frontal attack.Step off the line and project uke without getting tangled with uke so you can escape, because you do not know if there is another attacker ready to pounce on you..I would like to know what methods of training instructors use to instill that reaction to overcome the thinking or reasoning neocortex that will cause us to hesitate and not act????
randori offers a nice solution here -- as you get toward intermediate and advanced stages of randori play you are (or should be) offered a contiuous range of invitations to get caught up in your own mental /physical process (a koan of sorts) and if your playing with the right people (this part does require that your partner be a keen-eyed old hand who has already internalized this lesson -seek out the ones who are both patient, kind, and merciless) you will ideally get contiuous feedback of getting "got" everytime your head gets busy or you become goal oriented--( this is a tough place beacuse all "strategies" fail here-- even the most cherished defensive ones--which can be some the hardest to shake loose from your system)-- over time (often it seems like forever) the humbling experience will force you to you learn to adopt a specialized mindset that is monitoring the relavant variables without getting caught up in driving the system -- a sort of engaged detachment that allows for fluid, free functioning reactive reflex while not being caught up in conscious design --
this "zen mind place" is the same effeicnt internalized place your keen-eyed partner has been zapping you with for so long -- spooky place but you really do get there if you "get got" enough (this is the secret-- you get there from ukemi not from waza-- if you inhabit your waza you can get stuck forever)
-- once you inhabit this mental territoriy as your default state in play you become pretty immunized from the "freeze" response even on subtle levels ( alas your patient , merciless keen-eyed partner always seems to keep luring you in with subtler and subtlerploys) -- eventually the playing field gets flatter and you move on to new and interesting horizons in randori
One of the physiological responses that occurs when 'fight or flight' kicks in is that you lose your peripheral vision and focus in on what is in front of you. In Aikido we are training an alternative, and one of the methods is to consciously retain our peripheral vision. We gaze at and through the opponents naseon. Not only is this his center (I can put a jo right under it and always hit suigetsu) but it cultivates the use of peripheral vision to track the hands and feet. The center of our vision is slow and optimized for detail; the peripheral vision is much faster and can track a knife or opponent with fast hands, whereas you lose them if you look at them.
This habitual maintenance of peripheral vision has a biofeedback effect. Since peripheral vision is lost in Fight or Flight state, maintaining it suppresses that state. We remain calm because we have been training in physiological conditions that are incompatible with fear and competition.
Nick and I recently had a conversation about the internal training aspects of our art that would help offset the adrenaline dump. Meditation with the eyes slightly relaxed and half closed so that you develop the ability to go to a place of low tension despite the visual input coming into our cortex. It is known that the foveal vision is tied to the sympathetic system and the adrenaline response while the peripheral vision is in tune with the parasympathetic system which allows more relaxation and is tied to the limbic or reptilian brain and hence much faster responding and reaction than the foveal response...So developing a soft focus that uses the peripheral vision is what will help us control our adrenaline response as well as sharpen our reaction time....Walking meditation is very useful for this and Nick teaches this at the school which is a wonderful and useful aspect to our internal training in Aikido...