How Physiological Control Techniques Work to Reduce Stress, Anxiety, Fear, and Anger

An article based on the work in Fear and Fight: A New and Better Understanding of Our Natural and Learned Responses to Threat has been submitted to various police journals in Australia, UK, and US for publication.

This is the conclusion to that article:

Understanding how techniques like controlled breathing and muscle relaxation work—via feedback loops that link physiology, cognition, and emotion—can help officers apply them with greater confidence and flexibility in the field. This knowledge transforms the technique from a rote drill into a tactical skill, one that can be used deliberately to maintain composure and performance in high-stress situations.

This is the About the Author section:

John Coles is the author of Fear and Fight: A New and Better Understanding of Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat and The Science Behind All Fighting Techniques, both currently under submission for publication. He has written 17 nationally published articles based on the content of those books. John also authored Jan de Jong: The Man, His School and His Jiu Jitsu System, and contributed to Going Global: A Primer for Australian Managers and Enterprises Wishing to Do Business Internationally. His writing on leadership has appeared in The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and leading professional blogs.

These techniques should be taught in all activities associated with preparing a person to engage in a violent encounter, sporting events, examinations of any sort, etc. An understanding of how they work leverages the performance of the techniques significantly.

Contact me for further information.

Fear and Fight - Synopsis

 I'm about to finish Fear and Fight and submit it to agents for publication. This is my first attempt at a synopsis that will accompany the submission:

Fear and Fight: A New and Better Understanding of Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat is a ground-breaking, interdisciplinary exploration of how humans and other animals respond to danger. Bridging evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, trauma studies, and lived experience, this book challenges conventional views of fear and trauma—particularly those entrenched in diagnostic frameworks like the DSM.

Drawing on a rich mix of personal insight, empirical research, clinical theory, and cultural analysis, the book traces the development of our instinctive survival responses—such as freezing, fleeing, and fighting—and examines how these are shaped, amplified, or overridden by learning, context, and socialisation. From the role of the amygdala in fast fear reactions to the deliberate cultivation of courage and hope in warfare, Fear and Fight offers a clear, accessible, and emotionally resonant narrative of what happens to mind and body under threat.

The book explains why fear sometimes emerges after the danger has passed, and why some people feel nothing in the moment of trauma—drawing on military training, domestic violence, and civilian experiences to explore how both natural and learned responses influence psychological outcomes. It challenges gendered assumptions about submission, highlights the strategic use of emotion in military contexts, and critiques the evolution of PTSD diagnosis, including the removal of DSM-IV’s Criterion A2.

Structured across multiple parts—including foundational chapters on fear responses, emotion and cognition, diagnostic categories, and applied theories in war, self-defence, and survival—the book culminates in a compelling argument: that understanding threat responses requires both biological insight and cultural literacy. Whether dissecting cinematic depictions of trauma, military stress training protocols, or real-world encounters with violence, Fear and Fight equips readers with a new lens through which to understand themselves and others.

Ultimately, this book is not only about what we fear—but how we survive.

What do you think?

Introduction: Fear and Fight: A New and Better Understanding of Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat

As I wrote in my previous post, I have completed I have completed the first complete draft of the book that I've been researching and writing for the past ten years: Fear and Fight: A New and Better Understanding of Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat.

I shared the Preface to Fear and Fight in the previous post. In this post, I share the introduction:

Fear and Fight: A New and Better Understanding of Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The same survival mechanisms that kept our forefathers alive can help keep us alive as well! However, those survival mechanisms that can help us can also work against us if we don’t understand and anticipate their presence.

—U.S. Army Field Manual 3-5.70: Survival

 Bruce Siddle is an internationally recognised authority on use-of-force training and the effects of ‘survival stress’ on combat performance. In Sharpening the Warrior’s Edge, Siddle (1995) refers to the well-known ‘fight-or-flight response’ as the ‘survival stress response’ (SSR), describing it as an automatic physiological reaction that prepares the body to either fight or flee when exposed to a threat. This reaction enhances strength, speed, endurance, and pain tolerance—traits that evolved to increase an individual’s chances of survival in life-threatening situations.

 Siddle (2005) explains that the SSR is primarily activated under two conditions: when an individual perceives an imminent deadly force threat and when there is minimal time to respond to that threat. He suggests that a person walking towards us with a knife from a distance of 500 yards (457 metres) is unlikely to activate our SSR, whereas being surprised by the same threat at a distance of 10 feet (3 metres) will almost certainly trigger it.

 I have faced a knife-wielding assailant while unarmed on two separate occasions, both of which involved the element of surprise and occurred at distances of less than 10 feet (3 metres). Yet, on both occasions, I did not experience a SSR reaction. The SSR was selected for in nature because it provided a survival advantage when one’s life was threatened. Where was my SSR when my life was threatened by a knife-wielding assailant in two situations that involved both a distance of less than 10 feet (3 metres) and the element of surprise?

 Siddle (2005) suggests that while the SSR was advantageous in our evolutionary past, it can interfere with modern survival skills such as close-quarter combat, firearms use, or evasive driving. He (Siddle 1995) refers to this as a ‘combat paradox’: the same response that once ensured our survival can now undermine it in specific combat scenarios. This raises an intriguing question: were my survival prospects if fact enhanced because I didn’t experience a SSR in these critical moments? Either way, the question remains—why didn’t I experience a SSR which is evolutionarily designed to promote an individual’s survival when my survival was directly threatened on two separate occasions? This book is the product of my search for answers to those questions.

 ‘Fight Activities’

The original intended audience for this book included individuals involved or interested in martial arts, self-defence, combat sports, security (such as security officers, bodyguards, and crowd controllers), law enforcement, and the military. But how can these diverse pursuits be referred to collectively?

 What they all share is a core focus: they train individuals to fight—for different purposes, certainly, but the ability to fight remains central. For this reason, this book refers to them collectively as ‘Fight Activities.’

 ‘Fight Activities’

The initial intended audience of this book was those engaged or interested in martial arts, self-defence, combat sports, security (security officer, security bodyguard, crowd controller), law enforcement, and the military. How can those activities be referred to collectively? To answer that question, we first need to ask what those activities have in common. Those activities teach trainees to fight, to fight for a variety of reasons but to fight nonetheless. For that reason, those activities will be referred to collectively in this book as ‘Fight Activities.’

 Fear and Fight

Our principal natural response to a threat is the emotion of fear—and the action tendency of fear is flight. Fight is not an action tendency of fear, despite what many suggest when referring to fight-or-flight and stress response concepts to explain our natural reaction to threats. Fight Activities teach people how to fight—for a variety of reasons, but to fight nonetheless. They provide ways and means to overcome fear in order to fight. These methods, combined with the learned fight behaviours they instil, form our learned response to a threat.

 This book explores both our natural response—driven by fear—and our learned response, focusing on the ways Fight Activities help us manage fear in order to fight. That’s why this book is titled: Fear and Fight.

 A New and Better Understanding of Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat

The subtitle of this book reflects a desire to deepen our understanding of our natural and learned responses to threats. The process that produced this understanding is explained by the work of Gary Klein in Seeing What Others Don’t (2013), where he discusses how insights can lead to more comprehensive and useful perspectives.

 Klein defines insight as an accurate and profound understanding, suggesting that it brings forth a new understanding that did not previously exist. This new understanding is better because it is more accurate, comprehensive, and useful than prior knowledge. Throughout this book, I aim to share insights that contribute to a new and better understanding of our natural and learned responses to threats.

 One of Klein’s paths to insight is curiosity, captured in the simple yet powerful question: ‘What’s going on here?’ This question serves as a catalyst for exploration, driving individuals to seek answers. For me, this journey began with my own ‘What’s going on here?’ moment—sparked by my lack of a fight-or-flight response during two life-threatening situations. That initial question led to answers, which in turn sparked more questions and deeper insights, ultimately shaping my understanding of how we respond to threats.

 Klein emphasises that insights transform our understanding and, in many ways, change who we are. They can alter our understanding by shifting the central beliefs in the story we use to make sense of events. This ‘new understanding can give us new ideas about the kinds of actions we can take; it can redirect our attention, changing what we see; it can alter the emotions we feel; and it can affect what we desire’ (Klein 2013, p. 148). This book aspires to facilitate such transformations for readers, encouraging a shift in how they understand, think, feel, and act in relation to our responses to threats.

 A Personal Perspective: Generalised Anxiety Disorder and Panic Attacks

What makes this exploration particularly unique is my diagnosis of generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) with panic attacks, which offers me a distinctive insight into both our natural and learned responses to perceived threats. Living with GAD means that my brain often interprets harmless situations as threatening, triggering responses as though the danger were real. This allows me to experience firsthand the instinctive responses to perceived threats, with anxiety and fear being the principal reaction. At the same time, the treatment for GAD involves learning to manage these responses, closely mirroring the way military, law enforcement, and self-defence practitioners are trained to regulate fear in high-stress situations. This parallel between therapeutic interventions and combat training demonstrates how learned behaviours can modify our instinctive reactions. Through this personal lens, I have studied our responses from the inside out, gaining an intimate understanding of how we handle both real and imagined threats. My experience informs every chapter of this book, offering a unique perspective on the interplay between natural and learned responses to a threat.

 Structure of the Book

Many people refer to the fight-or-flight concept to explain our natural response to a threat. In Chapter Two, we will explore how this widely accepted concept is based on a limited and flawed understanding of human survival responses. However, an accurate understanding of fight-or-flight still forms the basis for a more comprehensive view of both our natural and learned responses to threats.

 Chapter Three shifts focus to stress, another widely cited concept for explaining our natural response to danger. Since stress theory is rooted in the fight-or-flight concept, it shares the same limitations and flaws. Furthermore, because stress theory emerged from medical and biological research emphasising its negative effects on health, it has skewed researchers’ understanding of how stress plays a role in our survival responses.

 As I sought an answer to why I did not experience a stress response when confronted by a knife-wielding assailant on two separate occasions, I discovered that stress can be understood as a process involving physiological, emotional, and behavioural components. While this did not explain my reaction, it pointed me toward a deeper exploration of the emotional aspect, which proved instrumental in developing a new and better understanding of threat responses.

 Chapter Four examines emotion. Emotion, for theorists, is more than just a feeling. It’s a multi-component response to significant threats and opportunities, evolved to give an individual a survival advantage. In this chapter, an emotion process model is presented that offers a more accurate, comprehensive, and useful way to understand threat responses. This model will be applied throughout the rest of the book to investigate our natural and learned responses to a threat.

 Fear and its close cousin, anxiety, are the focus of Chapter Five, followed by a critical analysis in Chapter Six: if fighting is instinctively tied to fear, why do Fight Activities teach methods for overcoming fear in order to fight?

 The chapters in Part II dissect the individual components of the emotion/survival process, initially focusing on fear, and explore how interventions by Fight Activities help individuals overcome fear to fight. Many of these interventions rely on reason to suppress the emotional response of fear. Chapter 14 delves into the separation of ‘passion and reason’ and its implications for self-defence and combat training.

 Part IV applies the theory developed in earlier chapters to real-world contexts, including military strategy and self-defence. These chapters serve as case studies, showcasing how understanding fear and learned behaviours can inform and improve practical applications in survival and combat settings.

 Finally, Part V transitions to the post-phase of violent encounters, focusing on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is explored in depth, applying the insights from this book to better understand the condition and its treatment, along with related disorders such as GAD. My own experience with GAD has provided a firsthand perspective on these mechanisms. In fact, it demonstrates that PTSD and GAD share many similarities, both as evolved survival mechanisms and in terms of their treatment.

 A Broader Audience

While this book began as an exploration for those involved in Fight Activities—martial artists, self-defence practitioners, law enforcement, and military personnel—it has grown to encompass a wider audience. The principles discussed have far-reaching applications, touching on how we all navigate fear, anxiety, and survival in both extreme and everyday situations. Whether confronting life’s unexpected challenges or simply standing up to talk in a meeting, this book offers valuable insights into mastering fear and emerging stronger. Ultimately, Fear and Fight is for anyone who faces anxiety and/or fear—whether in combat or in daily life—and seeks to gain a deeper understanding of both the natural and learned responses that guide us through these experiences.

Expanding Horizons: The Boundless Possibilities of Understanding Threat Responses

When I began exploring our natural and learned responses to threats, I had no idea just how far-reaching this journey would be. What started as an investigation into fight-or-flight and stress training for survival has grown into something much larger—a foundation that connects to multiple fields of study and areas of practical application.

As I near the completion of my book, Fear and Fight: Understanding Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat, I’m starting to see the extraordinary possibilities that extend from this work. It’s not just about understanding fear or teaching self-defence; it’s about addressing core questions that affect how we live, learn, train, heal, and adapt in the face of adversity.

The Key Premise: Natural and Learned Responses to Threats

At its core, my book explores the ways in which humans respond to threats, both instinctively and through learned behaviours. It delves into the evolutionary roots of survival mechanisms and how these responses can be shaped, trained, and even transformed.

The insights I’ve developed are rooted in diverse disciplines, including psychology, physiology, military and law enforcement training, neuroscience, and self-defence. Whether it’s understanding the appraisal process during a threat or using stress training to regulate emotions, these ideas are designed to bridge the gap between theory and real-world application.

The Ripple Effect: Applications Beyond the Book

As I’ve worked through the chapters, I’ve realised that this understanding of threat responses is just the beginning. The possibilities for applying these insights are endless:

1. Anxiety Disorders and Mental Health

The connections between threat appraisal, emotional regulation, and stress training offer a new lens for understanding and treating anxiety disorders. This includes conditions like generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), panic attacks, and PTSD.

2. Women’s Self-Defence

By addressing the myths surrounding women’s ability to fight and defend themselves, this work provides a framework for self-defence training that goes beyond the physical. It emphasises the mental and emotional aspects of fighting, countering harmful stereotypes and empowering individuals.

3. Tactical Decision-Making

Insights from military and law enforcement stress training highlight the importance of preparing for high-stakes situations. This could revolutionise not only martial arts but also other fields requiring split-second decisions under pressure.

4. Martial Arts Pedagogy

Many traditional martial arts systems focus primarily on physical techniques. By integrating mental and emotional training, we could create a more holistic approach to teaching and learning combat skills.

5. Neuroscience and the Survival Process

Exploring the neurological basis of fear, courage, and resilience opens doors to understanding the brain’s role in threat responses. This could inform both training techniques and therapeutic interventions.

6. Fear and Resilience in Children

How do children learn to face fear and build resilience? This question connects to education, parenting, and youth development, offering valuable insights into nurturing emotional strength from a young age.

7. PTSD Treatment and Evolutionary Insights

The evolutionary perspective on PTSD suggests that our responses to trauma are not simply maladaptive but rooted in survival mechanisms. This understanding could lead to innovative treatment approaches that align with our biological and psychological realities.

8. Societal Responses to Perceived Threats

On a larger scale, understanding how individuals and groups respond to threats—both real and perceived—has implications for public policy, social psychology, and community resilience.

Beyond the Present: Future Projects and Collaborations

These possibilities inspire me to think beyond my current book. Could I write a follow-up focusing solely on anxiety disorders? Or create a manual for martial arts instructors to integrate stress training into their teaching? What about exploring fear and resilience in children or addressing societal fear responses in an increasingly complex world?

The work I’ve done so far has shown me that the understanding of threat responses isn’t just a niche topic; it’s a universal one. It touches on how we face challenges, how we grow, and how we connect with others.

An Invitation to Join the Conversation

As I reflect on these possibilities, I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Do you see applications of this work in your own field or life? Are there areas I haven’t considered?

This is just the beginning of a much larger conversation. Let’s explore it together.

Why do warriors feel fear only after the threat has passed?

Recently, there have been a number of posts on Facebook from martial arts authorities that have focused on explaining emotion in relation to threats or asking questions about emotions in relation to threats in order to invite comments. The book that I am currently working on, Fear and Fight: Understanding Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat, is intended to deal with these issues in an authoritative way so I have decided to share some titbits from that book. This post concerns the issue of warriors only experiencing fear after a threat has passed.

Some of the following, including references, are taken from Fear and Fight and therefore the entire reference is not provided in this post.

Fear was selected for in nature because it conferred a survival advantage on an individual when their survival is threatened. Why then do warriors sometimes/often only experience fear after the threat has passed?

I regularly catch up with a friend who is a retired high-ranking police officer during which we often discuss material from my book. I once asked if he had experienced fear in a life-threatening situation in the line of duty. He didn't answer that question directly but instead asked a question of his own in relation to specific instances where his life was threatened in the line of duty but he didn't experience fear (overwhelming fear) until after the threat had passed. 'Why,' he asked, 'did I only experience fear which was selected for in nature because it conferred a survival advantage on an individual, after the threat had passed?' (or words to that effect).

Is this a common experience for warriors?

In a book that is promoted as representing a definitive collection of the most current theory, research, and practice in the area of combat and operational stress management (Combat Stress Injury: Theory, Research and Management, edited by C.E. Figley and W.P. Nash), William Nash, a former U.S. Navy psychologist who served in Iraq, provides the following description of warfighters’ combat action experience:

Before a planned combat action, most warfighters experience a period of uneasiness and agitation because of the unknowns they face and because, before the action begins, there is little they can do to actively master their stress. With the commencement of combat, however, the pre-action dread dissipates quickly, especially for veterans of combat. Most warriors then quickly get into a groove – a period of exceptionally low perceived stress, during which their thinking is clear, perceptions are sharp, and emotions are calm. The ‘in the groove’ period may last the duration of a combat action, if it isn’t too long or too overwhelmingly stressful. Once the action ends, however, perceived stress shoots back up as warfighters emerge from their emotional and physical numbness and review in their minds and perceive in their bodies all the dangers and horrors they may have experienced. The veteran warfighter quickly masters this rebound stress, however, and perceived stress returns to baseline. (2007a, 47)

Nash explains that many definitions for the word 'stress' has been offered but none has encompassed all the usages of the term even in the scientific community. I refer to this as 'the ambiguous concept of stress,' and as Hans Selye, the 'father' of the stress concept, famously said, 'Everybody knows what stress is, but nobody really knows.' In the case of the warfighters' combat action experience described above, stress is anxiety-fear.

The warfighters’ combat action experience can best be understood by dividing the experience into three temporal phases: before, during, and after a combat action experience. In emotion terms, the pre-event phase can be described in terms of anxiety (future anticipated threat) and the during-event phase in terms of fear (real or perceived imminent threat). In chapter four in Fear and Fight, we see that emotion is evolutionarily designed to promote homeostasis: ‘For example, running from a source of threat reduces the threat and tends to reestablish the condition that existed before the threat occurred’ (Plutchik 2001a, 120). The reestablishment of the condition that existed before the threat occurred describes the post phase of a threat event. This is our principal natural response to a threat, however, anxiety-fear-return to homeostasis phases do not describe the warfighters’ combat action experience as described by Nash above (although he did implicitly refer to the pre-event emotion of anxiety with his reference to uneasiness, agitation, and dread pre-action).

In terms of emotion phases, the principal natural response to a threat is anxiety-fear-no fear; the warfighters’ emotional response to a threat described above is anxiety-no fear (during phase)-fear (post phase)-no fear (return to homeostasis). What’s going on here? 

In the chapter on PTSD in Fear and Fight, I refer to Friedman et al and Friedman:

[Friedman et al] make specific reference to military personnel: ‘Trained military personnel may not experience fear, helplessness, or horror during or immediately following a trauma because of their training. They may only experience emotions after being removed from the war zone, which could be many months later’ (2011a, 756). Friedman expands the identified personnel who may not experience an emotional response at the time of a traumatic event to include, ‘military, police, and firefighter personnel who often report that they felt nothing, but that their professional training “kicked in”’ (2013, 551).

Warfighters experiencing no fear during the event/combat action phase is explained by Friedman et al and Friedman in terms of their training (see above), however, why do warfighters experience fear after the threat has past given that fear was selected for in nature because it conferred a survival advantage on an individual when their survival is threatened? 

The answer to that question lies within the learning aspect of PTSD discussed in Fear and Fight. In summary, a major feature of PTSD is the re-experiencing phenomena. When proposing his evolutionary theory of PTSD, Cantor suggests that the ‘re-experiencing phenomena of PTSD represent higher order memory and learning experiences. … Simply put, if ancestral individuals have had seriously threatening experiences, their long-term survival might be promoted if their lessons were not forgotten (re-experiencing symptoms)’ (2005, 123-124). Before Cantor there was Silove who suggests the same thing when exploring whether PTSD is an ‘overlearned survival response’:

automatic repetition of trauma memories once the survivor has withdrawn from the situation of danger ensures that memory traces signifying life threat are maintained in a highly active state and that they are rapidly retrieved when cues signifying the salient danger are encountered. Although the repetition of traumatic memories by the rehearsal mechanism triggers subjective distress in the survivor during the acute phase after trauma exposure, from an evolutionary perspective, the priority of survival learning overshadows the organism’s need for emotional stability. (1998, 186-187)

According to this view, the re-experiencing symptoms of PTSD are nature’s way of instilling and/or reinforcing the lesson that the traumatic event was dangerous and should be avoided in the future. 

In answer to my retired police officer friend's question, while his training produced a no-fear response during the life-threat event, nature still wanted him to learn the lesson that what he did was dangerous and it should that it should be avoided in the future (Don’t do it again!). Nature teaches this lesson in this case through fear being experienced after the threat has passed. It is still a survival response as it’s evolutionarily designed to avoid such life-threats in the future.

PS: My friend was happy to learn that this was a warfighter's combat action experience when I shared Nash's extract with him. While the previous sentence was designed to add levity, it does also show that knowledge about our natural and learned responses to a threat does alleviate stress, distress, confusion, etc, and which is why 'stress exposure training' that is used to better prepare military personnel for operational deployment, and most treatments for PTSD commence with a psychoeducation phase.

'Junkie Jihadis'

Long story short, I was discussing the subject matter of my book (Fear and Fight: A New and Better Understanding of Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat) with a friend who served with the Australian Defence Force (ADF) in Afghanistan and referred to Colonel John M. House's, 'Soldiers must overcome their fear of death and injury in order to act and survive on the battlefield' (Why War? Why an Army? 2008). I said that this applies to equally to ADF personnel and  the Taliban militants they were fighting in Afghanistan. The ostensible explanation for how ADF personnel overcome their fear of death and injury on the battlefield is though courage, however, how do the Taliban militants do the same? My ADF friend immediately shot back with Taliban militants fight under the influence of drugs. 'What's going on here?'

The term 'junkie jihadis' is taken from an article written by Lukasz Kamienski titled, ‘Junkie jihadis and the narcotic ways of war.’ Kamienski is also author of Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War (2016). Kamienski would appear to support my ADF friend's assertion that Taliban militants/jihadis fight under the influence of drugs, however, the question, among many others, becomes, why?

One of the strategic uses of emotion to counter fear in war that Liaras and Petersen identify is the creation of anger. Sun Tzu also identifies this strategy in his The Art of War written some 2500 years ago when he explains to get soldiers to fight they need to be angered. Anger is the emotion of courage according to Biswas-Diener in Courage Quotient: How Science Can Make You Braver. Turning fear into anger in order to fight is also the principal strategy taught in women's self-defence.

Why would the Taliban militants/jihadis need to turn fear into anger in order to fight? Do they, in fact, need to overcome the fear of death and injury in order to act and survive on the battlefield? After all, do they not have enough reason to be angry, to hate (which is an anger-emotion family member)? America and their allies invaded their country, killing their comrades, friends, family, and fellow countrymen, destroying their homes, and occupying their country for two decades. This in addition to their religious beliefs behind their jihadism.

The question then becomes, if they do not need drugs to overcome their fear of death and injury in order to act and survive on the battlefield because anger and hate has replaced fear, why are they taking those drugs. And when I say drugs, I am referring to stimulants that are used to enhance combat performance (see Kamienski's Shooting Up). Not depressants or hallucinogenics, but stimulants. In their case 'captagon' which is an amphetamine based psychactive substance.

Warfighting - Required Reading for all Self-Defence Activities

Warfighting is the U.S. Marines basic philosophical manual that provides the authoritative basis of how they fight and how they prepare to fight. The first chapter in Warfighting concerns the nature of war and the human dimension. The material in that chapter is applicable to all violent encounters and all who prepare themselves or others to engage in a violent encounter by fighting. It should be mandatory reading for all of those people.

Since war is a violent enterprise, danger is ever present. Since war is a human phenomenon, fear, the human reaction to danger, has a significant impact on the conduct of war.

The same is true of all violent encounters. 'Fight Activities,' such as the military, law enforcement, martial arts, self-defence, and combat sports, teach fight. As I explain in Fear and Fight: Understanding Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat, fear impinges upon a person's readiness and ability to engage in and succeed in a fight. This is why the Warfighting manual instructs, 

Leaders must study fear, understand it, and be prepared to cope with it.

It's not just Marine leaders that must study fear, understand it, and be prepared to cope with it. It is anyone who is involved in preparing themselves or others to engage in a violent encounter. If you do not study fear, understand it, and be prepared to cope with it, you are not teaching effective fight behaviour. You are not teaching effective self-defence.

Chemical Soldiers and Mushin no Shin

I was talking to a friend who served in Afghanistan about my work concerning fear, how it impinges upon a person's readiness and ability to engage in and succeed in a fight, and the military's efforts in overcoming or counter fear in order to fight and fight effectively.

Colonel John M. House wrote in his Why War? Why an Army? that soldiers need to overcome the fear of death and injury in order to act and survive on the battlefield. How do our troops do that in Afghanistan? How do their adversary, the Taliban, do the same?

When I discussed my work and those questions with the abovementioned friend, he said that the Taliban fought under the influence of drugs.

This set of a 'What's going on here?' reaction in me which research psychologist Gary Klein explains in Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights is the curiosity pathway to gaining insight.

There were many questions posed by this reaction, however, at around the same time I was prescribed sertraline for my generalised anxiety disorder. Sertraline is one of the most highly prescribed medications to reduce anxiety, fear, and panic.

Fear (anxiety and panic) impinge upon a person's readiness and ability to engage in and succeed in a fight. Sertraline is reqularly prescribed to reduce anxiety, fear, and panic. Why aren't the Army providing sertraline or similar medication to their troops to enhance their fighting performance? If the Army are not prescribing sertraline for their troops who can live and die based on their level of anxiety, fear, and panic, why are we being prescribed this medication?

Briefly looking at this issue, I came across the work of Dr. Richard Gabriel (Colonel, U.S. Army Ret.): https://www.perfectkiller.com/gabriel-afterword.shtml

Gabriel explains that the next frontier in warfare is not technological but biochemical:

But what modern armies have in mind far surpasses anything tried in the past. Biology and chemistry have combined in the modern age to produce the science of biochemistry. Armed with this new knowledge, the military research establishments of the United States, Russia, and Israel have set for themselves the task of abolishing fear in the soldier to make him a more efficient killing machine. The next revolution in military power will occur not in weapons technology, but in biochemistry that will make it possible for soldiers to better endure the conditions of modern war. If the search is successful, and it almost inevitably will be, the fear of killing and death will be banished and with it will go man's humanity and his soul. The chemical soldier will become a terrifying reality.

It's a thought provoking read. The holy grail of military research is biochemicals that eliminate fear, anxiety, and panic, producing 'chemical soldiers' as Gabriel describes them. Without anxiety and fear war will become wars of attrition. We need anxiety and fear to retain our humanity.

What does Gabriel's work then say about the samurai's mushin no shin, mind of no mind, where warriors are trained to fight without fear or anger? The war of attrition based on mushin no shin, no fear, is dramatically portrayed in the final battle scene of The Last Samurai. Are the Japanese atrocities during WWII attributable to the successful training of mushin no shin?

Gabriel makes another interesting point in the context of my book in that the 'brave pill' will render military concepts such as bravery and courage obsolete when bravery and courage are conceived of as acting in spite of fear.

Needless to say, this has added another chapter to my book, Fear and Fight: Understanding Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat.

An easy way to overvome fear in order to fight :)

I am currently working on the conclusion to Fear and Fight: Understanding Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat. An interesting question has arisen.

Colonel John M. House explains that soldiers must overcome their fear of death and injury in order to act and survive on the battlefield (Why War? Why an Army?). The way I describe it in my book (this week) is that fear impinges upon a person's readiness and ability to engage in and succeed in a fight. The same is true of all violent encounters.

I explain in the book that ironically, I had my first panic attack and was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder and panic disorder while researching and writing that book on the mechanism responsible for those disorders. While distressing and debilitating, this condition has enabled me to study our inherited survival mechanism from the inside out, which in turn enabled me to study our learned responses to a threat because they are often designed to thwart nature's survival efforts.

I have recently been prescribed sertraline. Sertraline is used to treat depression, panic attacks, OCD, PTSD, and anxiety disorders. It may decrease fear, anxiety, unwanted thoughts, and the number of panic attacks. In 2016, it was the most prescribed psychiatric medication in the United States with over 37 million prescriptions.

Soldiers must overcome their fear (and anxiety) of death and injury in order to act and survive on the battlefield. Fear and anxiety impinges upon a person's readiness and ability to engage in and succeed in a fight. If sertraline reduces or eliminates anxiety, fear, and panic, and is safe, why aren't soldiers and others such as front-line police officers given sertraline in order to counter fear and anxiety? Its legal, it just needs a prescription which I am sure is not an issue for the government. It'd be far easier and a lot cheaper than training such as stress exposure training that is designed to less negative reactions (anxiety and fear) under high stress conditions (combat) that impinge upon performance (fighting).

Women enroll in women's self-defence classes in order to reduce their anxiety and fear of being attacked. A big part of their training is overcoming fear in order to fight. Why not provide sertraline to manage that issue? No need to be threatened in training in order to learn to deal with fear.

Martial arts are supposed to teach ways to overcome or counter fear in order to fight. Sertraline would appear to take care of that problem.

A book on the short history of emotion suggests that these magic pills gets rid of Stoic and Buddhist teachings and discipline in terms of managing emotions, and of course you have to question the usefulness of psychotherapy given this magic pill deals with these issues. :)

It is an intriguing question. :) ... more so for me because if soldiers are not provided with sertraline given their line of work, why am I being prescribed sertraline to deal with my anxiety and panic disorders?

Holistic Martial Arts

I'm working on a chapter on stress training which is being increasingly used by the military and law enforcement to better prepare their personnel for operational deployment.

The first phase of stress exposure training and stress inoculation training is information provision which includes indoctrination where the usefulness of stress training is demonstrated to the trainee.

This can be achieved by explaining the relationship between stress training and learning to fight.

McCaughey explains that learning to fight involves the coordination of thinking, feeling, and acting. She also explain how most self-defence empahsise the physical but not the emotional and thinking. Various papers on stress training for the military say the same thing of traditional military training.

Stress training distinguishes between training and stress training. The way I explain the difference is that training is learning to fire a gun at a target whereas stress training is learning to fire a gun at a target that is firing at you.

Training = physical. Stress training = mental + emotional. Training + stress training = physical + mental + emotional.

This is an attempt at adopting a holistic approach to preparing a person to engage in a violent encounter.

The fighting trilogy also explains our natural response to a threat. The objective of our natural response to a threat is survival. The objective of 'Fight Activities' is to fight. To fight for a variety of reasons, including survival, but to fight nonetheless. They have to develop ways and means to counter our natural response to a threat. The target there is primarily the mental and emotional elements in the fight trilogy.

LeDoux refers to that as the conflict between evolutionary and cultural agendas. The evolutionary agenda is survival. The cultural agenda of Fight Activities is fight. They develop ways and means to resolve this conflict in agendas in their favour.

All Fight Activities training, including martial arts training, is at its heart a fight between our natural and learned responses to a threat.

Systemic Approach to Defensive and Offensive Aggression

Getting toward the completion of Fear and Fight: Understanding Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat. The conclusion ties up the reading experience for the reader and helps them  think about the bigger implications of the book content, the next steps that they can take, and the lessons that they can learn from what they’ve read. I use systems theory to accomplish those objectives.


A system is a set of related components that work together in a particular environment to perform whatever functions are required to achieve the system’s objective. There are four basic elements to a system: input, throughput (process), output, and feedback. 

Our natural response to a threat is a system whose objective is survival - the 'survival system.' The survival system is comprised of cognition (appraisal), feeling, physiological arousal, impulses to action, and over behaviour components that are interconnected via feedback loops and which work together to achieve the objective of the system - survival.

McCaughey (Real Knockouts, 1997) explains that learning to fight involves the coordination of thinking, feeling, and acting. McCaughey is describing a 'fight system.' The fight system contains the same components as the survival system, however, the objective is to fight. To fight for a variety of reasons but to fight nonetheless. At the very least, the components of the fight system cannot work against the behaviour component (fight) if the objective of the fight system is to be realised.


An Australian female university student who is a taekwondo black belt with many years experience was sexually assaulted on campus. She explains that she was capable of defending herself because of her extensive martial arts training, however, at the time of the assault she was ‘paralysed with fear.’ An American female judoka who had studied judo for self-defence two hours a day, five days a week, for 2 1/2 years was sexually assaulted, however, ‘she found herself dangerously unprepared for what happened during the actual attack.’ She explains how she had plenty of opportunities to strike back but she did not even scream. ‘Instead, she froze.’ These female martial artists were let down by a systemic failing in their training.

McCaughey refers to an instructor who remarked that the biggest problem with self-defence courses is an overemphasis on the physical without the mental and emotional:

‘There are people who don’t quite understand what they are doing when they teach … and I think part of it is that instructors don’t offer what I call a balance – mental and emotional aspect of human beings combined with physical skills …’ (1997, 110)

The same may be said of most martial arts.


The first step in remedying this deficiency in martial arts training and that of any activity associated with preparing a person to engage in a violent encounter is in understanding our natural response to a threat.

Many people use the fight-or-flight concept to explain our natural response to a threat. Unfortunately, most of those that do have a limited and flawed understanding of the concept and the concept itself is limited and flawed.

Many people also use the stress concept to explain our natural response to a threat. They often follow Bruce Siddle's efforts in Sharpening the Warrior's Sword, whether they know it or not. The stress concept was derived from the fight-or-flight concept and therefore all of the limitations and flaws associated with the fight-or-flight concept in explaining our natural response to a threat are inherent in the stress concept when used for the same purpose. Those limitations and flaws are compounded as stress research focused on the deleterious effects of 'stress' on health, thus further limiting and skewing their interest in our inherited survival mechanism.

A complete and comprehensive explanation of our natural response to a threat is provided in Fear and Fight. It also enables us to better understand our learned responses to a threat because they are all interventions in the survival system.

Police: Head, Heart, & 'Graduation Day'

Legendary Australian singer-songwriter John Schumann has penned a new anthem, this time dedicated to our nation’s police.

Schumann is most famous for his song written for Vietnam veterans, I Was Only 19.

He released a new track, Graduation Day, a look into the lives of the men and women who hold ‘the thin blue line’.

Graduation Day comes off the back of a landmark Beyond Blue report that showed extremely disturbing levels of mental illness among emergency services personnel.

Proceeds from the song are being directed to the National Police Foundation to assist police officers and their families who are in need.

It is a brilliant song, however, a part of the chorus struck a cord with me given my research and writing of a book about understanding our natural and learned responses to a threat. A chapter in that book looks at the separation between passion and reason, emotion and cognition, feeling and thinking, heart and head.

Chorus #1: 'Head says run, heart says stay.'

Chorus #2: 'Heart says go, head says stay.'

Chorus #3: 'Head says run, heart says stay.'

The essence of courage is commonly described as being the use of willpower to overcome fear.

Fear is the principal emotion that is evoked in response to a perceived threat and its action tendency is flight.

'Heart says go' = perceived threat > fear (heart) > flight (go). 'Head says stay' = reason/intellect/cognition (head) > stay = courage.

I can understand the heart-head explanation of the second chorus, but what of the first and third where the head and heart are telling the officer to do the opposite? Did Schumann make a mistake in these choruses, or is he trying to say something more?

When I discussed this with my partner, she rounded on me asking why I had to over analyse/over think things and ruin a brilliant song.

I raised the issue with my 15yo stepdaughter the next morning as I drove her to school. She didn't round on me and actually gave me the answer. It is true that children often see to the heart of things and are not influenced by preconceptions.

She used an example of an injured child to explain the first chorus ... which is exactly the scenario being sung about before the first chorus. I will take some credit because I often share my work with her as I drive her too and from her various activities.

The officer cradles the body of a young boy who died in a car crash (injuries are not accidents; injury science mantra; chapter in book #1, The Science Behind All Fighting Techniques). It is a horrible, confronting, traumatic scene and his head is telling him to leave but his compassion tells him to stay. It's a similar scenario for the third chorus. The second chorus is singing about the courage shown by officers in response to life-threat.

It is a brilliant piece of song writing. An understanding of this nuance illustrates the brilliance, AND, it illustrates the emotional minefield (mindfield) that police officers have to traverse. Heart often being stimulated and head being used to control the urges of the heart.

Listen to the song with a great appreciation of both the song writing and the work our police officers engage in which often have a toll on both mind and body.

Women's Self-Defence Teachings and Natural Survival Behaviours

This post is an extension of the last post on WSD teaching help-seeking behaviour. Help-seeking behaviour is an instinctive behavioural response to a threat. So why does WSD teach help-seeking behaviour in response to a sexual assault threat?

One of the possible answer to that question which was proposed in the previous post was that instinctive help-seeking behaviour is an instinctive behavioural response associated with fear. WSD teaches to turn fear into anger in order to fight to avoid rape. Fight being an instinctive behaviour associated with anger. Turning fear into anger may mean that help-seeking behaviour is no longer unconsciously considered or enacted (instinctive) and now needs to be consciously considered to be enacted.

The main action tendency of fear is flight. Adopting the strategic use of the creation of anger in order to counter fear during a sexual assault, does that mean that WSD also needs to teach consciously considering and enacting flight in addition to help-seeking behaviour?

Why Doesn't Women's Self-Defence Teach Courage?

I'm currently working on the first draft of the last chapter in my book, Fear and Fight: Understanding Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat. That chapter uses the previous chapter's information on stress training and the discussion on our natural and learned responses to a threat to explore certain aspects of women's self-defence.

The first thing that always needs to be understood by 'Fight Activities' is why they teach to overcome fear. Fear was selected for in nature because it conferred a survival advantage on an individual. Why then do Fight Activities teach ways and means to overcome fear. It's because survival is not the principal objective of those Fight Activities.

To survive is to live in spite of danger or hardship. The quintessential laws of nature are: survival, survival, survival.Nature is prepared to tolerate rape in order to survive. WSD is not. Survival is promoted by fear, therefore, WSD teaches ways and means to overcome fear in order to avoid rape.

The principal strategy taught by WSD to overcome fear is to turn fear into anger. The action tendency of anger is fight. The automatic physiological reaction associated with anger prepares the body to fight and anger decreases our inhibition to aggress.

The principal strategy taught be the military in order to overcome fear and act on the battlefield is courage. To act in spite of fear. I have found it very interesting that the literature on WSD, including feminist literature, does not mention courage as a means for women to overcome fear if attacked in order to fight.

WSD teaches to turn fear into anger. It uses ways and means, including forms of exposure, to develop confidence which reduces or negates fear. It uses overlearning so that fight behaviour becomes the instinctive behavioural response to a threat. But there is no mention of courage; of acting in spite of fear.

Shame and the threat of shame are major ways and means used by the military to overcome fear in order to fight. That tends to lead to anger which, as said above, promotes fight behaviour. WSD do not tend to use the strategic use of shame or the threat of shame in order to overcome fear if attacked in order to fight. Shame is described as a possible outcome of a successful rape and a predictor of PTSD, but it's not used to promote defensive fight behaviour as is the case with the military.

I just find it interesting to compare the different approaches to overcome fear in order to fight.

Fight-of-Flight - Get It Right

I am currently working on Fear and Fight: Understanding Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat. Chapter #2 concerns fight-or-flight.

The fight-or-flight concept is often used to explain our natural response to a threat. Many who refer to fight-or-flight for that purpose often explain that fear motivates instinctive fight or flight behaviours which an automatic physiological reaction prepares the body to enact.

If fear motivates instinctive fight behaviour, why do 'Fight Activities' such as martial arts, self-defence, combat sports, security, law enforcement, and the military, teach ways and means to overcome fear in order to fight?

Those who refer to the fight-or-flight concept to explain our natural response to a threat ought to at least refer to the title of Walter Cannon's book published in 1915 where he introduced the concept of fight-or-flight. The title is: Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage, first published in 1915.

Cannon is referring to two emotions - fear and anger. He associated fear with flight and anger with fight.

An accurate understanding of the fight-or-flight concept already suggests a 'strategic use of emotion to counter fear in war' - turn fear into anger in order to turn flight into fight.

Sun Tzu adopts this strategy in The Art of War. He states that rousing anger in your soldiers is necessary in order to get them to fight. This is recognised in the US military in a manual where anger is described as being the emotion of courage.

Cannon explains nature's strategic use of emotion to survive:

The cornering of an animal when in the headlong flight of fear may suddenly turn the fury and the flight to a fighting in which all strength of desperation is displayed. (1915, 275)

The initial natural response to a threat is flight and the 'risky business' of fighting is only engaged in if flight is obstructed - flee when you can, fight if you must.

A stimulus is appraised as a threat which elicits a subjective feeling we call 'fear' that motivates instinctive flight behaviour which an automatic physiological reaction prepares the body to enact. If flight is obstructed, the subjective feeling turns to anger which motivates instinctive fight behaviour that an automatic physiological reaction prepares the body to enact. In both cases, as in all cases with emotion, the emotion is being experienced in pursuit of a goal. In this case the goal of fear and anger is survival.


There is a duality associated with 'fear as a weapon' that Sun Tzu recognised in The Art of War. He advises to always provide your enemy with an honourable exit otherwise they will fight to the death. On the other hand, he advises to take away all means of retreat for you soldiers so that they will fight.

How do you turn fear into anger in order to turn flight into fight? That becomes the question when emotion is used strategically in order to counter fear in war and turn flight into fight.

Did I not learn to fear knife-wielding assailants?

I'm in the editing phase of the first draft of Fear and Fight: Understanding Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat.

Conventional wisdom suggests that our natural responses to a threat is a fight-or-flight, stress (Siddle's survival stress), fear response. I did not experience either when I was confronted by a knife-wielding assailant on two separate occasions. These natural responses to a threat were selected for in nature because they conferred a survival advantage on an individual. Where was my fight-or-flight/stress/fear response when my survival was threatened on two separate occasions. That is the question that drove Fear and Fight.

Our natural responses to a threat are based on an unconscious evaluation or appraisal of a stimulus. A lot of my work is driven by Robert Plutchik's psychoevolutionary theory of emotion. He proposes n emotion process model with 'inferred cognition' being on of the components at the front end. Plutchik proposes 10 postulates about cognition in relation to psychoevolutionary theory of emotion. Postulate #6 is:

In higher animals, most cognitions depend on learning and can be modified by experience.

 Humans have very few innate fears. What innate fears we do have relate to stimuli experienced in our evolutionary past. Knife-wielding attackers were not a stimuli in our evolutionary past environment. Is the answer to my question that I'd never learned to be scared of knife-wielding attackers?

Many authors discussing fear in battle suggest that its normal to be scared in battle. After all, our survival is threatened in battle. They suggest only a fool would not be afraid. But how does that fear come about? Are they suggesting the intellect makes a conscious determination that the people firing at me can kill me and this becomes the internal stimulus for the emotion/amygdala which responds with fear?

Are we afraid in battle because we've been socialised; taught fear. Stories of injury and death, seeing the injured and dead, the injured and dying - is that what teaches us to be afraid?

I can imagine the Australian Aboriginals when they first came into contact with the white British pointing their long sticks at them would not have been afraid. They were not holding them as if they were going to throw them and they didn't have pointy tips. After the first loud bang and puff of smoke and seeing their comrades fall injured or dead, I'm sure they quickly learned to fear these white men with funny sticks.

Do we have a natural response to expressive anger-aggression by another? This may be why I didn't experience fear because both of my assailants were quite calm and measured.

This work that I'm undertaking provides plenty of food for thought.