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There is - experience in critical situations of similar nature. Experience makes it less severe and more manageable. Couple personal examples. I did teakwondo
by rasz_pl 12y ago
There is - experience in critical situations of similar nature. Experience makes it less severe and more manageable. Couple personal examples.
I did teakwondo and kickboxing. When I was starting Teakwondo (~16 year old) first sparrings were dominated by fear and anxiety. I didnt know how to act, what to expect, I was physically shaking. Fast forward few months and I was in control, anxiety turned into excitement, fear into caution. My body and mind learned to use that sudden adrenaline injection to my advantage. Two years later I moved to kickboxing. Its very different sport, more violent, faster and can be significantly more painful in the ring, nonetheless my experience from teakwondo translated perfectly. Since then I had couple of dangerous situations on the street (drunk idiots, football fans etc) and again I was in control of my body and reactions, my previous experience of being punched repeatedly in the face inside the ring helped me stay calm :)
Second example is virtual. Eve Online is a space themed MMO. Everything you own in the game has to be earned or paid for with real money, and all losses are persistent and final. Someone kills your ship worth two months of heavy missioning? its GONE forever. This design choice makes Eve Online the only computer game inducing real fight-or-flight reaction that I know of(outside tournaments/leagues). Losses can be as small as 10 minutes of your time (couple of cents), and as severe as $1000 blink mission ship you spend whole last year to build. First PVP fights in Eve were exactly the same as my first sparring 10 years before :) heart pounding, hands shaking, sphincter gripped tight etc :) and mistakes ending in expensive wrecks. It took some time and experience to fully take control of the situation.
Can write something about bike riding(crashing), but it will be the same story again :)
I wonder if pilots with military background, trained in battle sims in high pressure situations, are significantly better at handling emergency. My own experience makes me think definitely yes.
- JulianMorrison 12y agoThis is kinda exactly what I was NOT meaning. You're talking about ways of handling the "known unknowns" - trainable scenarios. The article already talked about that. I'm talking about taking the whole issue off the board, including the "unknown unknowns", that you can't train for except in the most general way, by shutting the fight-or-flight mechanism down completely.
- rasz_pl 12y agoOh, stopping chemical reaction somehow? Sure, you can do that today with beta blockers. On the other hand that adrenaline injection is a good thing, imo its better to learn to cope with it than fight it.
- athenot 12y agoMotorcycle riders have the same issue. On a sportbike, if you enter a turn and your radius is not tight enough you will exit pavement before the road/track straightens. Human instinct is to slow down, but on a bike this will have the effect of widening your turn radius—totally counterproductive. To tighten the turn radius, you need to accelerate and lean in (which you can do unless you're already dragging a knee).
- codyb 12y agoI'm sure there are a million examples but I find snowboarding very similar. If you're going too fast the instinct is to lean back but that makes it extremely hard to turn into the mountain, but if you lean forward you can take the weight off the back foot and whip it over to turn into the mountain and weave some of the speed off. Or when you're on ice and you really want to turn but just have to keep going straight until you hit a patch where you'll get some grip from the mountain cover.
- erobbins 12y agoyeah, I learned this very quickly when I started skiing.. lean back when you feel like you're going too fast and it's out of control time. I overcame that instinct very quickly!