The so-called Flinch, Fight, Flight and Freeze responses are the common reactions to a sudden, unexpected or perceived threat to our personal safety. We have evolved these reactions to keep ourselves from harm.
However, it is possible that these responses may have a negative effect when we consider the increasing level of violence and aggression in today’s society. Let’s think about each in turn:
Alone, the Flinch response can only ever buy you a brief moment of safety. Most people will flinch away from any initial attack, losing balance and turning their head away, and thus any subsequent attacks can now utilise this loss of position. No serious assailant throws just one attack.
Freezing is probably the most dangerous response of all. Your utterly static position leaves you at the complete mercy of your attacker.
Sadly, these two reactions are extremely common in the untrained person, a fact which attackers use to their advantage. This leaves the Fight response, and the Flight response.
Flight is the safest and easiest of these two options, but in many cases this option is not always available. This could be due to the environment, multiple assailants, the tactics employed by your attacker(s), an injury which prevents you from escaping, or simply your job: Police and professional Security personnel do not have the option of running away.
So this leaves the Fight response: If you come out kicking & punching wildly, you may gain a valuable advantage against your opponent, although success will be largely down to surprise, luck, and perhaps a lack of ability in your attacker. The chances of a similar outcome against a trained attacker, or a group of attackers is not as likely. However with correct tuition you can learn to channel the fight response so as to make a positive outcome more probable, both physically and mentally.
With regular training we can utilise our natural responses as an aid to our defence. The flinch response is used positively in our training – when the hands come up to protect the head, this is our natural Pre-Fight position. We can further assist ourselves by becoming more familiar with consistent attacks from a training partner. The flinch response happens when we are either scared, or expecting pain. Becoming more comfortable with being attacked and possibly injured during a confrontation is far from normal, unless you train.
To become an effective martial artist or fighter requires a re-tuning of these natural biological responses. The more we place ourselves in the firing line (in the form of realistic delivery from our training partners) the more comfortable we get with fists, kicks and even weapons coming towards us. This enables us to defend, control or defuse the situation more positively and effectively, without having to overcome our own natural reactions.
Constant training and gradual progression allows us to experience a vast array of varying attacks, from multiple training partners of different sizes, speeds, strengths and abilities. The better our training partner is, the more competent & relaxed we become when faced with the need to defend ourselves.
There is no substitute for consistently training hard. The knowledge gained allows us to react positively with a clear mind when threatened, instead of allowing the untrained Flinch, Fight, Flight or Freeze reactions to take over. Which option would you prefer to rely on when your safety is on the line?
It’s probably worth reminding ourselves why this happens. There’s a bit of the brain attached to the spine called the thalamus that interprets stimuli such as sights and sounds. The thalamus sends these stimuli in two directions, one to the conscious brain which makes good decisions (well, sometimes) very slowly, and one to the amygdalae. The amygdalae are extremely important for two reasons: they lay down pathways in the brain, and they decide which pathway to trigger. And they are very quick – it is the amygdalae that cause you to pull your finger out of the fire.
Fairly early in life, we program ourselves (not consciously, although it is a learned behaviour) to respond to threats by flinching, freezing, fighting or fleeing. These responses are well below conscious thought and are almost impossible to change.
The ‘almost’ is the key point here: through practice in the dojo we can cause the amygdalae to burn new pathways, which means that when the stimuli occur in the street or in the pub, we follow the new training-based pathway rather than the old, panic-based one. When you are truly well-wired, a genuine attack is met by a counter even before the conscious brain has realised something is happening.
The amygdalae are the enemy of the martial artist in another way in that they trigger fear / rage / hate / anger reactions. These do not lead to good decisions, either in the dojo or outside it! So if someone attacks you without warning, the initial reaction will be instinctive and training-based, but then running away or beating the living sh-t out of him should be a rational decision, not an emotional one.