Self Defense and the Adrenaline Dump

Sadly one of the most often overlooked realities of a violent altercation is the not necessarily obvious but extremely impactful “Fear based adrenal dump”. In a real life self defence situation your body will tend to naturally go into our primitive “Fight or flight” mode, part of this is what stress response experts call strong adrenaline rush, or ‘dump’.

An adrenaline dump increases your heart rate, raises your blood pressure, and is will divert blood away from areas of your brain and organs and into your muscles. This can result in an increase in strength and speed and also a short term decrease in how much pain a person feels. Extra strength and speed all sounds good from a self defense perspective doesn’t it? Unfortunately this also comes with some negative effects, for example:

1. Trembling in the hands, arms, and legs
2. A tendency to either freeze up or over react
3. Tunnel vision
4. Some difficulty thinking straight
5. Knots in the stomach/Mild shock

Trying to eliminate the adrenaline/fear impact of a real attack is not realistic. Reduction of such effects is however possible with a program that uses pressure testing in your training. Many martial arts tend to train only for perfection of technique and only rarely (if ever) pressure test their defences. Occasionally everyone in training needs to get pushed past their comfort zone if they are to effectively utilize their self defence skills in a real world situation.

One thing to realise is that in a truly pressurised situation you are highly unlikely to pull of any technique that requires and decent level of dexterity or calmness for example Aikido/Jiu Jitsu style wrist locks or knife taking techniques (EG: Kote Gaeshi). The reason for this is that subtle movement is one of the first victims of the adrenaline dump, precise positioning of hands or grips goes out the window for most people and only your gross body movement is left intact.

This being the case it is also a good idea to spend a decent amount of time on very basic punches, pushes and front kicks. These self defense techniques may be extremely simple and perhaps even seen as “boring”, but a solid grounding in the basics to the point where they “just happen” could save your life. In a real life situation you really want to keep things as simple and quick as possible.

Another reason to do pressure testing is to help enable you to judge what is appropriate response to an attack and what is going overboard. If you have decent pressure testing experience you will more readily be able to assess how dangerous and assailant is and how much force is appropriate. fear can make people overreact and perhaps worsen a situation.

It is a good idea do do some scenario training and visualisation as part of your self defence training for stressed situations in order to help reduce lag time between a situation occurring with your natural fight or flight reactions asserting themselves and the moment you consciously become in control of your reactions.

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