Originally Posted by
jetfire
I can't footstomp this hard enough, because it's so so true and it's so misunderstood. For ages we've had this completely incorrect idea in the "firearms community" that the stress of a gunfight was somehow different than the stress of any other life or death situation, or in fact basically any stressful situation. I have a friend who is deathly afraid of public speaking, and her list of symptoms before any public speaking were exactly the same as KevH described as being unique to combat.
What we have learned over the years from actual science is that your body has one stress response, and that's to dump the aforementioned "oh shit hormones" into your system. What does vary is how much of a hormone dump your brain does, and that's controlled by your familiarity with that stressful situation. That's why you're super nervous for your first blind date, but after 4 months on Tinder it barely raises your blood pressure. Your brain goes "this is familiar, I can deal with it."
This is why scenario based training (when done well) has proven to be effective at helping people manage stress in life or death situations. It's also tangentially why competition shooting can be an effective stress training trick for people who may not have access to FATS, MILO, or quality force on force training. The brain doesn't like the stress of losing a match, and associates "stressed out while holding a gun in my hand," helping build coping mechanisms for if you need to use a gun in a different kind of stressful situation.
As a last aside, this is also why I roll my eyes when tactibros have people run 50m sprints or do pushups to "induce stress." Physical strain and psychological stress aren't the same thing, my dude. But enjoy flipping sandbags or whatever.