Warrior Scholar Ideal Blog: Managing Fear 003

Now that we have spoken about and briefly defined what we mean by fear. The question becomes, so, what are we going to do about it?

There’s a lot of tough people in this world, a lot of evil people as well, and let’s face it one of the greatest fears people have is the possibility of being in a confrontation of any kind. Now, there are also people who live for confrontation, YouTube and TikTok are full of millions of examples, and I can tell you one of the reasons they behave in such a manner in most cases is because they are not concerned as to whether the person, they are dealing with will kill them.

Most people know that the average person is not trying to kill them and even if they fight back, they are generally not trying to kill them. They may talk like they will, but they’re not. It’s just the reality. This is one of the reasons many systems of self-defense overlook the obvious and focus on either controlling people or winning a fight as if it is a dule of some type.

I’ve even found this mindset among people who like me are advocates of using weapons such as firearms, knives, or any type of improvised weapon. Where there are these barriers, these mental adhesions that hold people back from deducing the obvious answer and that is be willing to put the person down for good in the most ruthless manner possible.

The question is why?

It is because there are innate beliefs that are rooted in fears where we are even in an obvious situation of self-defense where we are apprehensive of taking appropriate action. Most of it is genuine nerves because there aren’t too many places in the world where you can train to deal with the adrenaline rush that comes from being in a dangerous situation.

Understandable, but another aspect is the fear of getting into trouble because you may not have the moral certainty and perfect clarity in such a situation because you haven’t developed it beforehand, so you default to your level of training. Or better yet, your level of neural programming.

Until you change the neurological response in the body you will continue to make the same type of decisions over and over. However, if you are exposed to danger enough times where you are incrementally challenged in an ever-increasing manner you will actually adapt to the new neurological level where your skill to manage in that state actually increases.

This is why people who have been exposed to a certain level of stress or danger and are able to stay in that space and resist the temptation to move away from the danger, pain, discomfort or whatever. Eventually develop a level of stoic calm that sometimes is mistaken for cockiness or overconfidence when in fact that have learned to manage their fears in that physiological state and are able focus on what needs to be done and ignore what they know is nothing but noise. Where they are able to make choices because they are able to sum up a situation at a glance.

"No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected."  --Julius Caesar

In order to move to that place, we need to understand what transpires in the body when we are under duress. Because there is a physiological aspect to it, something that I think people are misinformed about. I’ll try to keep it as simple as possible and not get too bogged down in jargon. To manage fear, you need to understand how our brain works on a basic level that causes us to respond in a certain way when under duress. How our brains process information can be broken into three parts, Conscious Mind, Analytical Mind, and the Subconscious Mind.

Information comes in through all of our senses, including what we are not consciously aware of are exposed to 3-5 million bits of information per second, but we are only capable of processing 140K – 150K per second.

So, our brains filter out what it perceives as noise. However, what it considers noise depends on the meaning or value the information has to us. This is what the filter is all about in our minds and is a part of our Analytical Mind. When we experience something, practice it, depending on our level of focus, number of exposures, and meaning we attach to it. Eventually, enters into the subconscious eventually becoming a subconscious competence. Where we respond without having to consciously think about what we are doing.

So, a key to overcoming or managing fear is to change our perceptions or understanding of our experiences by reframing what we think or the experience.

To reiterate, fear is just an intense experience triggering a physiological response based on our perception of a situation fueled by experience and belief. Where much of our fear of the unknown is not understanding the true nature of something and knowing what to do about it.

For example, I can remember in the military learning how to rappel and one of the things that they do because they know that many people have a fear of heights. During the training after they teach you how to develop a rappel seat.

They hook you up on a short wall with a slope so that you can get used to feeling the weight of your body in the rappel seat but also to give you confidence in the equipment so that you know that it takes a lot for that harness and rope to break thus convincing you that except maybe swinging into the wall but you’re not going to be killed.

The training is methodical and purposeful and professionally done so that at no time do you feel you are not in good hands with the rappel masters.

They then teach you how to do some practice bounds, how to extend your arm and break when you need to stop or slow your descent and then up you go onto the tower. With each bound you grow more confident and less apprehensive. After you do a couple of bounds all you want to do is get back up there and do it again.

Eventually at a later date you have the opportunity to do it off of a cliff or out of the helicopter, then with all of you gear or you’ll have the opportunity to fast rope which is akin to sliding down a rope just like you did when you were a kid in gym class or sliding down a pole in the playground.

The point is whatever fears you had by the time you complete all of that training the last thing you have is a fear of doing it, even in combat. Which… is the point.

You are confident but not a cocky confidence a respectful confidence because you still have to respect the fact that there is still an element of danger in what you do and that serious injury or the outside chance of death even in training is still present.

In everything we do in the military the training generally follows that progression where people are how we what the task is and then are trained to the task and incrementally exposed to the danger gradually increasing the level of difficulty and danger.

However, the same thing can be done even if you never served in the military or are in an occupation where risk and physical danger are a part of the job. This is where Miyamoto Musashi stated,

“Even if a man has no natural ability, he can be a warrior.” --Miyamoto Musashi

The point is we are all human and our bodies function the same on a physiological level where with proper training both mental and physical we can develop the stoic like nerves to manage our fears and even thrive in extremis conditions.

In the next post we will delve deeper into the physiological responses we experience under stress and provide an understanding of how to manage our emotions and actions when we experience a flood of sensory and physicochemical transformations in the body.

Thanks.

Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.

LtCol Al Ridenhour USMC (ret)

Authors, The Warrior Scholar Ideal Revisited