On the most difficult adventure of my life I learned a lot about dealing with stress and adrenaline. That trip was deep in the wilderness, but it turns out that many of these lessons apply directly to many aspects of life, including jiu-jitsu.
That’s why I thought I’d share one of the more important sections of my book, Perseverance, Life and Death in the Subarctic that addresses this topic with you today…
Being able to do something in a tranquil environment is very different from being able to perform that same skill in a stressful situation. And the more stress you’re under, the greater the risk you’ll choke and forget everything you’ve ever learned.
We might live in big cities, drive cars, and have digital arguments with virtual friends, but we essentially have the same brains as our stone age ancestors who painted caves in Southeast Asia 40,000 years ago. Our neurology and physiology are primed to help us with stressful gross motor activities like chasing woolly mammoths and fleeing saber-toothed tigers.
The fight-or-flight reflex is always lurking just below the surface. When things get sufficiently stressful, our hormonal system dumps enormous amounts of adrenaline into our bloodstream, and — BOOM — suddenly we’re ready for action.
That adrenaline serves a purpose: it elevates your heart rate, makes you much stronger, more pain tolerant, and able to ignore injury. If you ever have to lift a car off a child, you don’t want to be calm. Instead, you want to be mad, scared, enraged—whatever it takes to get into that adrenaline-soaked state of high arousal to lift the damn car with your bare hands.
But that superhuman strength comes at a cost; as adrenaline floods your system, you lose a significant amount of fine motor control and higher brain function.
Essentially you’ll take whatever IQ you started with and cut it in half.
If Thrag the caveman was about to get trampled by an angry mastodon, he didn’t need to dial 911, stay calm, or talk about the mastodon’s feelings. He just needed to run faster, jump farther, and climb higher.
He needed gross motor solutions to gross motor problems. Thrag probably spent more time in dangerous situations than we do today in our pampered, cosseted, cubicled lives. So, ironically, he had more experience dealing with (and staying intelligent during) those highly adrenalized moments.
We rarely need to deal with stampeding mastodons today. And when things get stressful at work, it’s generally frowned upon to use your newly found super-strength to flip desks and throw computers out the window.
Instead, most stressful situations in our modern lives require thinking, communicating, and fine motor skills. To meet deadlines, you should sit more and type faster.
You can use progressively increasing exposure to stress to become better at performing under pressure in any field, from paddling to firefighting to being an air traffic controller.
For example, to become comfortable paddling high-consequence rapids in the tundra, you first need to become comfortable in relatively safe whitewater.
Start by honing your technical and adrenaline management skills in easier whitewater, on warmer rivers, close to a road, with full safety measures in place.
Then gradually increase the level of challenge and keep trying to harness those adrenaline surges to your advantage.
If you train enough and persist in pushing your boundaries, you’ll inoculate yourself to stress so that you’ll swing into action during high-pressure emergencies instead of freezing.
Finally, acting as if you’re calm even when stressed out can keep other people calm and prevent a runaway panic reaction within the group. This is another cultivated skill; anyone can be calm while reclining on the beach, but the real virtue is being calm when everything is going to hell.
The best captain I ever had in the fire department was always calm during big emergencies. Regardless of how stressed he was inside, his mannerisms and tonality suggested he was about to fall asleep.
This calmness was contagious among all the responders at the incident; “Things can’t be that bad if the captain is talking low and slow…”
Perseverance, Life and Death in the Subarctic
This best-selling book is available in hardcover, Kindle and audiobook formats and contains lots of lessons applicable to overcoming difficulties in all areas of life.
Grab it anywhere you get your books, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Indigo, and more.
Thanks for checking it out!
Stephan