Everyone is under pressure. In a survival situation your under even more pressure.

Just about everyone has experienced a situation where you choked. You know what your doing. You have experience. Normally you can do the job easily. But this time you choke. You can't do anything right. Your all thumbs and it is all down hill from there. Everyone has been there.

Choking in a survival situation can make you useless.

Why is it that sometimes you choke and sometimes you don't? How can an otherwise easy task become seemingly impossible? What can you do to avoid choking under pressure, or at least lower the odds?

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/03/how_to_think_under_pressure.php

To survive you must act. To act well you must use your brain. How you drive your brain is at least as important as how you drive your gear.

I don’t recall ever choking up.

Just remain calm and do the job that needs to be done.






How can an otherwise easy task become seemingly impossible?

Get the government involved in doing it….
LOL

I have never had the problem of choking up because I concentrate on the mission and getting it from "now" to the successful conclusion.

Now is the key word

What you did yesterday doesn’t make a difference.

What you are going to do tomorrow doesn’t make a difference.

What you do right now does.

Another thing that can lead to "choking" - or at least not performing correctly - exhaution

I can remember a couple years ago, sitting at a friends place, TRYING to coil a roll of coax cable, a messing up 2-3 times in of, 5 minutes.

Didn't help that I had been up almost 60 straight hours (all 3 of us had), that in those 60 hours, the temps ranged from a LOW of about 90 to 102, and we were rushing to get some gear now and inside before a thunderstorm hit (we could hear and see it coming).

I think I got it right on the 4th or 5th try, walked inside his house, laid down on the floor, and was out like a light bulb in about 5 seconds

I think that the three biggest things are training, training, and more training. If you train and practice, you will have a lot less chance of choking up when it really counts...

+1 on training.
Also, my EMT instructor used to say: "Remember, when someone shouts 'HELP" you are the HELP, and if you want to get upset/sick about what you see, do it later, after you've done your job."

+1 on training... or is that +2

I think the topic is a bit too absolute. Failure is a part of the human factor; we overcome it by refusing to quit. You choke when you give up, otherwise you keep working the options. To quote a fictional hero of mine, I don't believe in the no-win scenario, so if I don't realize the solution right away, that just means I need to continue trying. If it doesn't work the first time, then change something and try again.

That's the way I've pretty much lived my entire life. That brings to mind one more famous hero quote, a man's gotta know his limitations. You come to believe that no matter how bad it can get, there's always gonna be something next, and it's either gonna be better, worse, or just as bad. Time don't stop for no man.

The finality of death is overrated, and what could be a worse outcome? Ergo, quote number three, "Everybody gotta die sometime, Red."

My thoughts as well- I've seen people who are amazingly well trained glitch due to other stress and exhaustion, and they try again and again until they are just making it worse. If anything, I've seen it happen at least as frequently, due to cockiness.

Training and determination make it less likely you'll "choke", or at least choke when it is convient. But no one is every going to be able to say they are 100% sure they won't freeze, hesitate, or in some other way just make the situation worse.

Just have a human failure factored into your plan.

Hey Benjammin,,, Don't forget: "Dying is easy, It's living that's hard!"

As for myself, I can only die once and I refuse to live a thousand years as a sheep.

RE Trainiing - yes, it helps, most of the time. The one I sited about coiling cable - At that point, I'd been doing it, constantly, for 20+ years. It was just that I was so tired I litterally had to THINK to walk.

That was the LAST time I tried to stay up that long - any more than about 30 hours now, you can forget

kc2ixe;

IMO, you didn't choke. You a) realized it was wrong and b) persisted until you got it right. You kept thinking, even if it was to keep you walking. Choking would have been to not coil the cable, or more importantly, leave it done incorrectly and not realize it, leaving a problem to surface later at the worst possible moment. I think it was your training and experience that, despite your exhaustion, that got you through it and got it done right.

You are right, Fatigue, Hypothermia, etc., dramatically increase the chance that someone will choke, do something stupid and get themselves or someone else hurt or killed. Training, experience and some advance prep are, I think, the best insurance. But no guarantee. We all play the odds, but nothing says we can't try to stack the odds in our favor.

Actually, I didn't persist - I looked at one of the other crew and said - I can't get it right - want to take over? He did, and went and folded some chairs, and draged some gear cases into the shelter, so they would not get wet

Actually, I think "dead" is the easy part. From what I've seen, dying can be downright agonizing. I ain't afraid of being dead, it's the getting there that has me a bit worried. For all our technological advances, caode blue response still seems too much like mideval torture to me. My last great hope in life will be that I get to die in my sleep, never having known the pain of the transition, or maybe in the act of sacrifice, but not having to go through rescusitation.

Back in the 80s I knew of a guy that was rescucitated 14 times. The EMTs nicknamed him "Rescuci-Tucker" because he was as good as the practice dummy "Rescuci-Annie" for them. He would feel an attack coming on and be able to let someone know in time to get a response before succombing (always had the attacks in a public setting). He'd wake up in the ambulance and start pulling off all the ekg and iv stuff and head home. Of course, the last attack he had he wasn't in a public setting, so he didn't make it.

Anyways, I would prefer to get from point a to point b as quickly and easily as possible. I do not want my last, feeble moments here on earth to be spent laying on a table cold and naked with people sticking needles in my arms and chest and then being electrocuted a half dozen times while hearing the lamentations of my loved ones in the background. I am considering having "DNR" tatooed across my chest in big bold letters.

It wouldn't take much lobbying to make me a pro-euthanasia supporter. I don't know if that sounds chicken-sh*t or practical, but I will freely admit some of the ways I've seen good people die under the best of circumstances scares the heck outta me.

I reckon there's no getting around that, though. It is as much a part of life as being born. I just wish there was a more certain method of transaction.

"...make me a pro-euthanasia supporter..."

Having watched two loved ones pull the plug and starve to death under a doctors care, one taking 13 long painful days, I have been such a supporter for years. I want to be able to call Dr. Jack when the time comes. My wife has promised me a clean shot, right between the eyes, but I fear that she might suffer a bit from that...

Most of what we seem to consdier choking is us freezing and failing to act, even when we know we need to act. Sometimes, it may because the pressure has caused it so the person cannot decide what to do. I think most of us choke doing some things and not others. How to keep your brain working to think and make decent decisions and to get yourself to act is to me the issue.

For some, when you know there is pressure, when you know the task, you need to be able to both relax and concentrate. For example, say playing baseball with a big game on the line. A batter can deal with the presure by relaxing and concentrating, in the right balance.

For others, repeated exposure to pressure situations conditions us to better deal with it. I think that is what most military training is geared toward. Crank up the pressure in training, and the person will later be able to handle pressure easier. You can do the same thing by training yourself. Create situations and get through them.

Thinking "What if . . . ?," helps. What do you do if a certain pipe breaks in your house? What do you do when the power goes out? What do you do on a ship when the hyraulic cyclinders controlling the rudder blow out all of a sudden. What if when things are great prepare the mind for many what ifs, even those you have not thought of. It can help if you and someone else train each other to do this. One person asks, what if, and the other answers.

Training your mind is also done by simple knowledge. If you know what to do when this piece of equipment breaks, if you know how to get it back on line ASAFP, then when you need to it's easier. If you know what to do with a certain type of injury or scenario, it helps. The closer you know it by rote, the easier to access under pressure. I play golf and have looked at some of the mental aspects of the game. If you can get rid of your conscious mind, as you mkae a gold shot, you'll play great. The conscious mind gets in teh way when you swing, putt, chip, etc., and it makes your shots bad. The unconscious mind is the most efficient and accurate part of our mind. How many of us think about all things our muscles do when we walk? Not many, we simple think, walk, and our brains do it without us being conscious of all the directions our brains are giving. Know things so well that your conscious brain needs to think little, and then get it out of the way, and you won't choke.

And as far as dying, as OBG and benjammin we speaking, I want to go out in a horrific pitch pole of a sailboat that sends me flying and hurts no one else, when I am about 90.