The Primary Component

I worked as a wildland firefighter for a couple of seasons, and it’s an interesting job—sometimes. There’s an unusual conflict of needs: gritty manual labor and scientific, high-level risk evaluation. You’re digging ditches in an unstable, dangerous environment.

Firefighters study extreme fire behavior and “tragedy fires”— blazes where firefighters burned to death. Even years later, the names of those fires are still etched in my mind with mythic power: Thirty- mile, Storm King, Mann Gulch. We walked in the firefighters’ shoes and imagined how things unfolded: the timetables, the wrong choices (“At 9:00 a.m., they made their second mistake when they took a break to rest and observe the fire from point C . . .”) We noted the missed warning signs. It all seemed perfectly obvious in hindsight. They let fire get below them on the hill? What a bunch of dummies.

A grizzled instructor once told me, “Fire applies the test, then the lesson.” He meant that firefighters are thrown into the unknown and forced to make decisions. Some live and some die. Later, in the cold light of day, we analyze their behavior to learn a lesson. And then we make up new rules and regulations. But the test comes first, and it is pass/fail. Life or death.

The apocalypse, whatever form it takes, will test you first; then, if you pass, you might learn something. The only guarantee I can make about the end of the world is that there will be one common factor, one “primary component.”

You.

The test will be not only physical but mental. Yes, you may need to be strong and fast and able to run far or climb high, but equally important, if not more, will be your ability to think clearly. In a crisis, your decision-making capacity is the factor that most affects your survival. You’d better make the right choices, and you won’t get a lot of time to deliberate.

You already know, to some extent, what fear can do. You’ve heard stories about guys peeing their pants or people losing control. That won’t happen to me, you say. You may think, I’m calm and collected. You may think, I’ll rise to the occasion.

You’re wrong.

When you are threatened, either consciously or subconsciously, your brain reacts by releasing a flood of chemicals. These chemicals jack up your heart rate and get you ready to rumble—the brain pre- pares the body for danger. We’ve all heard of “Fight or Flight.” It makes perfect evolutionary sense and provides a huge survival advantage. This response probably goes back to early cell specialization in the primordial ooze.

Our understanding of what happens to your body and mind when you are afraid has increased exponentially over the last few decades. In Extreme Fear, Jeff Wise writes that “the science of the fear response [is] in the midst of a golden age.” The U.S. Army commissioned the National Academy of Sciences to conduct fear research in 1984, and others have followed suit. Sports psychology, which essentially deals with similar issues—the quality of performance under stress, albeit at much lower levels—has exploded as a field in the last fifty years. Scientists, soldiers, coaches, and athletes now use the latest technology to study the brain under duress. We have a clear, detailed understanding of how the chemicals that your brain releases in response to threat affect your cognitive and physical abilities.

Gross motor skills—pushing and pulling—improve as increased levels of stress hormones and chemicals are released and your heart rate climbs. The faster your heart beats, the more adrenaline enters your system and the harder your muscles work. Great, right?

Wrong. After a certain point, the performance of all other skills— fine motor skills, complex motor skills—shuts down. Supercharging the major muscles makes it harder for you to perform delicate acts. In one study, Green Berets ran a rugged obstacle course that incorporated shooting and hand-to-hand combat, and at the end they had to arrest someone using plastic zip-tie handcuffs. The Green Berets who had pre-threaded the cuffs before the start of the course had no problem. Those who hadn’t, struggled to fit the little tabs into the slots, their hands trembling from stress and exertion. They hadn’t trained for that particular action, and their course times suffered.

Even remarkably simple fine motor skills can be affected. People under incredible stress have trouble dialing 911: they can’t see the numbers, they can’t press the buttons. A paramedic I knew said it was common for people dealing with a loved one’s emergency to get a neighbor to dial 911 for them. Think about that for a minute—stress and fear can so unnerve you that you might not even be able to operate a phone.

The flood of stress chemicals released by your brain changes your body in hundreds of ways. Even the contour of the lens in your eye changes shape. Blood flows to the major muscles and the fingers get harder to use—your body is preparing to fight and bleed. There’s the infamous loss of bladder and bowel control. You may piss your pants not because you’re a coward, but because your brain is prepping your body to fight, run, or die, and no longer cares about holding your bladder shut. Your systems run triage.

The same chemicals affect your thinking. Wise writes, “The psychological tools that we normally use to navigate the world—reasoning and planning before we act—get progressively shut down.” The part of the brain that makes you a rational human being is overridden by the older brain, the ancient survival system, the primal animal.

I had the good fortune to talk to Charles “Andy” Morgan, a psychiatry professor at Yale and research scientist at the National Center for PTSD. Andy works with Special Forces operatives, studying the effects of stress during their intense training at the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) School. This is training for people who might end up stranded behind enemy lines.

He had recently conducted a fascinating study: The participants had to copy a line drawing. They were each given a pen containing two different colors of ink, and halfway through the exercise, they were instructed to flip the pen over and draw using the second color. So he was able to track, in time, what people are drawing (the first thirty seconds in red, the second thirty seconds in blue).

“Adults copy all the big stuff first, and when they flip the pen and the color changes, they start filling in the details. Preadolescent kids start from one end and move across evenly; half the drawing is one color, the other half is in a second color. They move and think in a pure linear fashion.

“We test these adults in survival school about a half hour after they’ve been interrogated and out of the sixty-four guys, sixty of them copied the picture like prepubescent kids.” Just to be clear, these are Navy SEALs, Special Forces operators, and Air Force pilots, not a bunch of civilians on their way home from work. And overwhelm- ingly, a half hour after being under extreme stress, they were thinking like children. “The norepinephrine is affecting the neurotransmitters,” he told me.

I remembered something from my EMT days about trauma and children. Children often regress during trauma, moving backward down the developmental cognitive scale. So a terrified, injured six- year-old may act like a four-year-old; a four-year-old may stop talking and go back to preverbal communication. Andy was telling me that experienced, tough adults did the same thing.

Imagine that you’re the flight attendant in charge of evacuating a burning, smoke-filled plane. If you’ve got a planeful of reasoning adults, the evacuation goes smoothly. But now imagine you’ve got a planeful of terrified ten-year-olds who need to exit quickly and inflate life rafts. Now you see the problem if they start searching the racks for their carry-ons.

The stress chemicals are mucking up the neurotransmitters in your brain that handle perception. You may dissociate, a clinical term for experiencing distortion in your perceptions of the world around you. You may experience auditory exclusion: Police officers have reported that they thought their gun wasn’t working because they didn’t hear it. I didn’t hear my gun go off. I’ve experienced this myself— when I went elk hunting I was sufficiently nervous (or focused, take your pick) that I didn’t hear my first shot. My second shot was so loud it made my ears ring. You might experience tunnel vision: All I could see was the barrel of his gun pointed at my face, as big as a house. Colors and brightness can shift, and sometimes people under high stress report seeing things through a fish-eye lens. Or their perception of time changes. Everything was moving in slow motion.

Jeff Cooper’s color code was one of the earliest attempts to classify the changes that your mind and body experience under stress (he formulated and taught the code during the 1960s but didn’t publish it until later). Military and police still use the code today, because it’s easy to understand. Cooper was a former marine who fought in World War II and Korea and left the military to become one of the primary innovators of modern gunfighting techniques. What Cooper noticed was that at certain stress levels, marksmanship in his trainees fell off a cliff.

The color code classifies a person’s stress level as: White (you’re at home, totally relaxed, watching TV), Yellow (you’re alert, out on the street), Orange (you’re aware of possible threats, taking in your surroundings), or Red (you’re fighting). These colors correspond to both the changes in the body and a loss in reasoning ability. If you’re a sniper and you need to make a really difficult shot, you have to take deep breaths and pull yourself out of Condition Red and back into Condition Orange. Cooper tied these states to heart rate, as that was the only factor he could really measure. In reality, the correlation is not so direct, but for a simple rule of thumb it isn’t bad.

There’s a step further, a state in which people devolve into simple, desperate animals. It’s called Condition Black (named not by Cooper but by the Marine Corps), where the heart rate is over 175 beats per minute and there’s a corresponding catastrophic breakdown of performance. That’s not 175 BPM from sprinting on the treadmill, but from natural drugs tearing through your system like a bee-stung bull in a china shop. This is where you start to really dissociate, to have perceptual issues.

Condition Black is what you really want to avoid.

During Condition Black, people might start “behavioral looping,” performing the same tasks over and over again, in a frenzy. This explains the guy who gets stuck pushing on a locked fire escape door in a burning building for several precious minutes until he succumbs to smoke inhalation, and the police officer who yells at a suspect to drop the weapon, over and over, while the suspect slowly reloads his shotgun and eventually fires.

Now, looping might be a decent strategy if a wolf is chewing on your arm and you’re bashing him with a rock. Keep bashing until you die or he lets go—that’s a workable plan. But when even a small amount of critical thinking is required, sometimes people simply can’t do it. You just can’t step outside yourself long enough to see the fatal flaw in your strategy. Law enforcement officers have been found shot dead with the tendons on their fingers exploded—they were trying to pull the trigger with the safety on and got stuck in the loop. The sur-vival strategy for the caveman can be a death sentence for modern man, who depends on using fancy technology, fine motor skills, and critical thinking to survive.

The thing that separates us from animals is the prefrontal cortex, and fear and stress can completely circumvent that part of your brain. The old brain, the one we share with monkeys and fish, takes over and attempts to drive the car. Circumventing the prefrontal cortex can save you or it can kill you. This phenomenon can be explained by something called polyvagal theory. The vagus is the nerve conduit in the brain stem that controls your autonomic nervous system and therefore all those things in your body that you don’t consciously control, such as your heart rate and digestion. Polyvagal theory suggests that there is more than one vagus, and that they function in a hierarchical system. Like changing states in the Cooper color code, you go from one to the other. Let me explain: There is a point, early on, when a human embryo looks just like a fish embryo. Our lovely modern brain has ancient components, which we sometimes call the reptilian brain. The mammalian vagus is myleinated, which means it reacts quickly as a neurotransmitter, while the reptilian vagus is non- myleinated, and reacts more slowly. But the reptilian vagus can sometimes win out. Under stress, a mammal scoots, while reptiles sometimes hunker down and shut off. The mammalian system can act as a gas pedal for the heart; the reptilian system can act as a brake pedal. Imagine what happens to your car when you stomp on the gas and the brake at the same time, as hard as possible. This super-aroused state is what we’re calling Condition Black.

You can freeze. There are different instances when this strategy can be successful—for example, freezing when you see a predator, since predators are often drawn to movement. Or it might be your ultimate, last-ditch survival ploy if caught in the jaws of a tiger—play dead, and maybe he will drop you. While this instinctual deep fear reaction may save your life, it can come up at the wrong time, and you can end up like the proverbial deer in the headlights.

The Cooper color code is a great tool, and an easy way to think about stress—but it’s not quite as simple as all that. For some people, a high heart rate does not indicate Condition Black, while others may start “dissociating” and reach Condition Black at a much lower heart rate.

The new science of stress brought clarity, but humans have been studying fear for eons. Soldiers have been learning how to overcome stress in battle since time began. There are some tried-and-true methods, and if you’ve ever practiced a sport, you’ve already utilized them.

Dave Grossman and Loren W. Christensen wrote in On Combat: “You do not rise to the occasion in combat, you sink to the level of your training. Do not expect the combat fairy to come bonk you with the combat wand and suddenly make you capable of doing things you never rehearsed before.”

Training is the primary way to handle stress hormones and the subsequent loss of cognitive ability. This is how the army operates, and it’s something I know from fighting. A famous boxing trainer once said, “I get my fighters to where they can’t do it wrong, even if they wanted to.” You perform a task a million times so that when the stress hormones shut down your cognition, you can do it on autopilot.

Just because you own a gun doesn’t mean you can use it. Unless you train with it, you will fuck it up. And how you train matters immensely. Some police officers working on a quicker draw (called “presentation” in gun language) train by drawing their pistol, firing two shots, and then reholstering. They spend thousands of hours at the range, working on this neuromuscular pattern. What do they do in real fights, under stress? They draw, fire two shots, and reholster while the fight is still going, while the bad guys are still shooting. The quality of your training has a huge effect on performance. If you train wrong, or at half-speed, or sloppily, then when the stress hormones override your system, you’ll perform at half-speed or sloppily—you’ll do exactly what you’ve trained to do. If you haven’t trained to do anything, guess what you’ll do? You’ll run around like a chicken with its head cut off.

Unless, of course, this ain’t your first rodeo. Stress inoculation is another way to mitigate the harmful effects of stress, and basically all it means is experience, although I like the idea getting an injection of stress to combat the infection of fear. Training is rehearsal, experience is the real thing.

The best whip against the wild horse of stress is experience; we all know that. The unknown will prey on your worst fears and can drive you into a spiral of panic. If you’d lived through it just once, you’d be far more relaxed. The unknown is the killer, the fear multiplier. Just think of the horror movie problem—once you see the monster, the movie really isn’t scary anymore.

I was in the tail end of a hurricane in Bermuda, and at its worst it was blowing maybe fifty knots, which is a capful of wind. Fifty knots is a strong gale, but not a full-force hurricane. I listened spellbound on the radio in our boat as a half-dozen pleasure yachts around us were abandoned. Sure, it was rough, a big nasty swell, very unpleasant. I’ll bet water was coming in on those yachts, everything was wet, and they were getting bounced around. But they weren’t sinking. If the people on board had just held on for six more hours, they would have been laughing at how scared they’d been. But they didn’t know any better. They hadn’t lived through it. To them, it felt like the end of the world. Those boats were eventually salvaged, meaning that they had stayed at least partially afloat; and getting into a Coast Guard helicop- ter in fifty knots is a riskier proposition than staying with a boat that isn’t sinking.

There is crossover for stress inoculation, too, although not evenly across the board. A seasoned firefighter, used to performing in high-risk environments, will probably be less stressed in, say, a kidnapping situation than a person who isn’t exposed to stress often. But it doesn’t always work—I’ve seen professional tough guys fall apart in rough seas.

There is a simple technique that can help even an untrained person overcome extreme stress in any situation, and it’s sometimes called combat breathing. Basically, the only link between the sympathetic nervous system and the autonomic is breathing. You breathe automatically, but you can also control your breathing with your thoughts, unlike your heart rate or your adrenaline levels. In incredibly stressful situations—if you can’t dial 911—you can take four deep breaths, on a four-count (breathe in for four beats, hold, breathe out for four beats), and maybe this will break the spell. But chances are, if you are in Condition Black, you’re too far gone to even think of this. That’s the whole problem with Condition Black; you don’t know you’re in it.

Imagine what might happen to you if some science fiction apocalypse actually started. If that rogue wave were actually headed for shore. How you handle the stress hormones, the dissociation, and the cognitive dissonance will be the primary component of survival, at least in the first few minutes. The best way to avoid reverting to your reptilian brain is to train. So let’s get started.