Train like you want to react in an emergency, because it could save your (and other people’s) life.
Train like you want to react – an example
When a bad guy charged the prepper, the prepper pulled out his handgun with no time to spare. The prepper’s handgun model was a great choice, a highly reliable model loaded with personal defense ammo. The prepper draws a bead on the aggressor and pulls the trigger.
Quite the shame he didn’t remember to flip the safety off, isn’t it?
How it feels to forget to chamber a round or removed a safety before firing on the range. How it looks if it happens under stress is a much uglier picture. Thanks Emoji one* for the image.
Lack of training can correctly can get you dead
So am I the only person who’s ever pulled a trigger, only to realize I still had the safety on? Or hadn’t chambered a round? Didn’t think so. It’s only happened to me on the range, where the only cost is a bit of embarrassment, for two reasons: 1) Thankfully, I’ve never had the need to point a weapon at a human being, and 2) I practice like I’ll have to react. (The usual expression is ‘practice like you play’, and while the concept is sound, there’s nothing Play in my world about pointing a weapon at a person.)
When you’re under stress in a complex, fast moving environment (divers call it being ‘task loaded’), you simply don’t have the mental ability to focus on each detail. Your stress response doesn’t help, as it tends to focus your attention very tightly on a small number of features of the situation is deems most relevant. W
hat happens to any other details? They’re ignored or delegated to lower levels of consciousness.
That’s why you train, and where practice comes in. Practice will, quite literally, train (or wire as some say) the less conscious areas of your brain to react in the manner in which you’ve trained. Salty and I talk about it in this podcast:
The physiology of Playing like you Practiced
It’s a core concept in neurophysiology: Neurons that fire together, wire together. It means that when a particular group of brain cells is used at almost the same time, they strengthen the connections among themselves, making it easier to activate those neurons as a group the next time. This re-wiring of your brain circuits to favor doing complex muscular tasks the same way as you did them before is referred to as ‘developing procedural (or muscle) memory”.
Once procedural memory is developed, all your conscious self has to do is set the process in motion. The circuit will be activated and the action will be completed without further attention. The action will also be much faster and more accurate than if the conscious brain had to oversee every step of the action, as it does with unfamiliar tasks.
The brain cells are already there, but when you use them together they wire themselves into a working circuit. Thanks for the image (1)
How to make the best use of procedural memory
If you want your fast reactions to do things in a particular way, you have to practice them that way. Of course you can’t really practice the high stress situation of being charged by a violent aggressor, but you can sure practice how you’d want to respond:
- Safety first, always. During training, even if the gun’s unloaded, you always treat it as if it were. Stay aware of where your muzzle is pointing always, and point it in safe directions (such as up and down being generally safer than sweeping laterally across a space). Consciously train yourself to never put the finger on the trigger until you’ve got the target in front of the muzzle, etc. You should know this stuff if you handle handguns at all.
- You think the first one’s too obvious? Listen to Salty’s story of when he was working as a reporter, and a riot broke out. One of the cops, weapon drawn, shoved it into Salty’s ribs completely unintentionally as he squeezed past the barricade toward the rioters. Moreover, the guy’s finger was on his trigger. I’m lucky to not be a widow; and that was a professional who had zero intent to threaten my guy. So safe habits are point two as well.
- Handle the gun as you expect to operate it. For example, I keep my personal defense handgun loaded, but without a round in the chamber. When I practice at the range, I practice drawing from the holster and chambering a round with the muzzle pointed safely, then lining up on the target vertically (so I don’t sweep the ‘room’ with my muzzle), and put finger on trigger only when the sights get lined up. On guns with safeties, flipping the safety off just before the shot and back on before I do anything besides shoot with it is also part of the drill.
What about things that can’t be practiced?
There are two approaches for the things that can’t be practiced:
- Practice the parts you can so that your subconscious self can carry out its parts well without supervision from the overburdened conscious self. For example, if the draw/chamber/bring to bear actions have well developed procedural memory, there will be more mental bandwith left over for deciding what to do.
- Visualize. I know it sounds hokey, but brain imaging shows it works: If you imagine yourself doing a particular set of actions, it activates some of the same neural pathways as are used to actually do it — causing the neurons of those pathways to wire together into a circuit. It’s not as good as live practice because you don’t get feedback on what’s working, but it’s still quite useful. This means a step by step procedural visualization though; not simply daydreaming about your Rambo Moment. I’ve used this one myself; visualizing how to handle a sliding car before it happened, and thus escaping unscathed.
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The pattern of brain activity during visualization is extremely similar to the pattern when doing the task – showing how visualization helps develop procedural memory. Thanks John Graner (2) for the image.
Also, eat like you’ll eat
On a related note… Salty and I don’t have kids, but we sure hear a lot from parents about how picky of eaters their kids are. Some adults also are very particular. How are they going to feel when their usual diet is replaced with your food preps? More importantly, how are they going to eat when that’s what’s available?
Sure, “If they get hungry enough, they’ll eat it.” Do you want them to get that hungry? That low on fuel? Do you want the drama and the stress? Do you want the abdominal distress and disturbed bathroom habits that often accompany big changes in diet? If not, you’ve got two choices (not mutually exclusive):
- Prep with foods you and your family will be fine with eating.
- Get everyone in the family used to eating whatever preps you’ve got. For kids, making it part of an adventure might be a worthy tactic. I bring up kids a lot because they’re genetically programmed to not like new foods. It commonly takes a dozen or more tastes of a food before a kid will like it. That’s why offering prep foods, and cajoling or bribing the kid to try just a little of it each time, may be necessary to get them to like a food.
In short, you’re going to react under stress as you’re used to reacting. You’re just wired that way. Rising to the occasion includes having the pieces in place so you are not asking yourself to rise impossibly far. Practice like you want to play. Train, train some more then train again.
*Emoji One [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
(1) By Soon-Beom HongAndrew ZaleskyLuca CocchiAlex FornitoEun-Jung ChoiHo-Hyun KimJeong-Eun SuhChang-Dai KimJae-Won KimSoon-Hyung Yi [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
(2) By John Graner, Neuroimaging Department, National Intrepid Center of Excellence, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, 8901 Wisconsin Avenue, Bethesda, MD 20889, USA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons