Hey, so we're going to talk about the sympathetic nervous system and how that affects your ability to function.
Sympathetic Nervous System
So, really good scene here from Saving Private Ryan, where they're in a firefight, they're storming the beach at Normandy. The sympathetic nervous system kicks off, right, because you're being shot at, people are dying around you. So, what your sympathetic nervous system is — that's your fight or flight response.
Physical effects and symptoms
So, you're going to see an increase in heart rate, increase in blood pressure. And a lot of times people start kind of getting tunnel vision, which you'll see here. He's kind of looking around and things don't seem real. Time can seem to slow down and you're just very, very ramped up at this time. So as your heart rate increases, your pupils will dilate.
You'll get a blood pressure increase. Your respiratory rate goes up. And what this does is it makes fine motor skills much harder to do. So anything like putting an IV in, putting a tourniquet on, any kind of procedures that you may have to do are going to be much more difficult. But here you can kind of see with Tom Hanks, things kind of slow down.
He's trying to figure out what's going on, and what you see is a little bit of that tunnel vision effect where things kind of slow down. You're not super aware of your surroundings. And so he's trying to kind of get it back together. But obviously you can see by the gore and the firefight around him, that's really getting him ramped up.
That's your body's natural response to really kind of ramp things up and get ready to fight. Right now you can see his hands are kind of shaking. That's those fine motor skills. He's starting to get a little bit of situational awareness, gather himself together. And here you really see him starting to focus on what needs to happen.
So his hearing now comes back. You can tell he's kind of out of sorts and now he's going to get himself together and kind of spring into action. So with training, you've got to build up to that sympathetic nervous system response where you do get into fight or flight. Very important that you go in a stepwise fashion before then.
Training and preparation
So you want to take baby steps up to that point to build that confidence. And then full mission profile training, right? You want to recreate those events as closely as possible because the more times you're able to go through this and practice and endure through this, the better off you're going to be and the quicker you're going to get to that action phase.
Where you can start putting actions into motion. So really the way I look at it is, there's two main effects when you're providing casualty care in a stressful situation. One effect is on your brain, right? So you're gonna get tunnel vision, you tend to focus on one thing and not see the big overall picture of what's going on around you.
The other part is the physical reaction and what that does to your fine motor skills. So basically it makes your muscle movements much harder to do. A lot of times you'll be shaking. So those fine motor movements, it's just really hard to control your fingers and get them to do exactly what you want them to do.
Overcoming Stress Reaction
- Safety. Protect yourself.
- Breathing techniques
- Gain situational awareness
- Rely on your high quality training
- Vocalize what is going on and your plan
So, how do you break through out of this? Well, one is training. The other one is when you're in that situation, you want to take a second and you want to try to control your breathing. Now, your sympathetic nervous system is really going to speed up your breathing. And so what you want to do is try to overcome that.
So, slow, deeper breaths. You can breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. Take a second. Gather your thoughts. Get your breathing under control. And then execute what you need to do from that point on.
