Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [45]
After watching the tapes, Laur realized it made more sense to train around the flinch, instead of against it. Shooting instructors have learned the same lesson. Above roughly 145 bpm, most people’s movements become symmetrical: whatever one hand does, so does the other. If they are startled, that automatic fist-tightening response will happen in both hands, and they will almost certainly fire their guns at anything in front of them. Today, many police officers are trained to never keep their fingers on their gun triggers. That way, the flinch has fewer consequences.
Combat Lamaze
On 9/11, Manuel Chea, a systems administrator on the forty-ninth floor of Tower 1, did everything right. As soon as the building stopped swaying, he jumped up from his cubicle and ran to the closest stairwell. It was an automatic reaction. As he left, he noticed that some of his colleagues were collecting things to take with them. “I was probably the fastest one to leave,” he says. An hour later, he was outside.
When I asked him why he had moved so swiftly, Chea offered several theories. He knew where the stairway was because he used it all the time to go to the cafeteria. He was familiar with the escape route, a huge advantage. Also, he had experience with fire. The previous year, his house in Queens, New York, had burned to the ground. He had escaped, blinded by smoke. As a child in Peru, he had been in a serious earthquake. Then, later, he’d been in several smaller quakes in Los Angeles. He was basically a disaster expert.
Most of us, I think it’s fair to say, have no obvious way to train for life-or-death situations that may never happen. Other than fire drills, which are usually not very realistic anyway, there aren’t many opportunities to get to know your disaster personality in a safe environment. There should be disaster amusement parks filled with simulation rides. Ride in a funnel cloud! Feel the g-forces of an earthquake! Survive a tsunami! And sign this waiver!
But for now, there are simpler ways to train the fear response. One of the most surprising tactics, taught in all seriousness to some of the scariest, gun-wielding men in the world, is breathing. Over and over again, when I ask combat trainers how people can master their fear, this is what they talk about. Of course, they call it “combat breathing” or “tactical breathing” when they teach it to Green Berets and FBI agents. But it’s the same basic concept taught in yoga and Lamaze classes. One version taught to police works like this: breathe in for four counts; hold for four counts; breathe out for four counts; hold for four; start again. That’s it.
Keith Nelson Borders was shot ten times in six shoot-outs as a police officer in Oklahoma and then Nevada from 1994 to 2005. Every time he got shot, he breathed deeply and methodically, and he swears by the strategy. “It keeps you very calm. You don’t start to hyperventilate or panic. Everything just kind of goes in slow motion for you,” says Nelson, who is now retired at age forty due to injuries. “You say, OK, here’s what’s going on, I can handle this. I got shot in the head, and I’m still alive, things are working, so it’s not that bad.”
How could something so simple be so powerful? The breath is one of the few actions that reside in both our somatic nervous system (which we can consciously control) and our autonomic system (which includes our heartbeat and other actions we cannot easily access). So the breath is a bridge between the two, as combat instructor Dave Grossman explains. By consciously slowing down the breath, we can de-escalate the primal fear response that otherwise takes over.
Charles Humes, a police officer in Toledo, Ohio, has devised a clever way to combine breathing with realistic training. As a young officer, he found he lost control of his body and mind in high-speed