INSIGHTS REPORT 4 – MARCH 2019
Fight or Flight in the Red Zone? Fight or flight mode is a common description used in ‘Red Zone’ training – to help people understand how they react to fear and stress. When an emergency occurs and someone is drowning, every millisecond counts! Knowing how your brain or your staff’s brains react under pressure could make the vital difference to how people react and deal with the situation.
When you prepare for crisis situations you want to provide an environment where people can easily reduce the stall time. It can be very simple techniques but if you understand the psychology then you can develop those techniques fairly easily to actually make a difference. 2
What is the Red Zone?
People react in a variety of ways in emergency situations - not all are predictable in advance. Psychologist John Leach, a specialist in human responses to emergency situations, developed his “10/80/10 rule of survival” after examining a variety of crises and human reactions to them. 1
Fear and stress levels can be categorised using five heartbeat-per-minute (bpm) zones. The ‘red zone’ is the action phase where the heart is beating at 115-145 bpm. 3
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10 percent of people facing an emergency control their fears and act rationally
What is High Fidelity Training?
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80% find themselves stunned and relatively unprepared to respond
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10 percent become hysterical, and unable to cope with the situation at hand.
This explains why in emergencies some people often fail to do things they’ve been taught, and which under normal circumstances might seem obvious. Most survival experts agree that the only reliable way to shortcut this kind of impaired thinking is by preparing for an emergency in advance – not in a comfortable office but in a simulated environment. Your brain can only hold so much information at a given time and process that information at a certain rate. When every millisecond counts, the appropriate response must be prepared for in the cognitive database.
Find out more about the zones. 4
Practice makes actions automatic, without [the need for] detailed thinking. 5 Many emergency responders are using patient simulation as a learning technique and competency-based assessment method. High-fidelity patient simulation (HPS) refers to the use of computerised mannequins that simulate real-life scenarios.
Who uses it? Defence forces, fire fighters, hospital staff and paramedics, all use high fidelity training. Evaluations of this type of training have proved its effectiveness by placing people in ‘real life’ situations and requiring them to respond.
We need to give lifeguards the opportunity to work in Fight or Flight mode in training so that they learn what it feels like, what effect that has on their ability and how to work through it. [Gary Johnson] Recreation Aotearoa Insights Report – Fight, Flight or Freeze in the Red Zone
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