You don't thrive on stress...it makes you suck
It is a common sentiment in the modern world that people feel like they thrive is stressful situations. This very idea is often cited as the reason people take up dangerous occupations or adventure sports. The reality is that no one actually thrives on stress. The reality is that it is often the camaraderie with those around you that draws you into dangerous situations, but that is a topic for another article. Here we want to look at why stress makes us suck in adventure sports.
NASA Research has shown decision-making under stress to become less systematic and more hurried, and that fewer alternative choices are considered when making decisions. This happens for a variety of physiological reasons most notably due to the chemical cocktail your body blows your system up in a stressful situation. The problems associated with this become compounded when you are in a team environment and team members experience stress at different levels with effects manifesting in very different ways.
NASA researchers found that “under acute stress team members search for and share less information, tend to neglect social and interpersonal cues, and often confuse their roles and responsibilities. Stress hinders team performance, including decision-making, primarily by disrupting communication and coordination.” They further found in an accident study that 30 of the 212 errors involved inadequate or improper communication.
Your physiological response to danger and stress like increased heart rate, shallow breathing, and adrenaline causes a variety of problems for people experiencing acute stress. Inexperience, cognitive overload, tunnel Vision, fatigue and Loss of fine motor skills are all both effects of stress while simultaneously causing stress. This creates a vicious cycle in which basic tasks become more difficult under stress leading to what we call the whitewall. If you haven’t checked out our article on the white wall you can read it here.
Lack Of Communication’s Vs. Situational Awareness
To be successful teams must communicate data and parse that data into relevant information. Confusion of roles and failure to share data as seen in the NASA study creates an environment primed for accidents to occur. This environment revolves heavily around a lack of situational awareness among team members. In her 1995 Study, Mica Endsley found that several key factors in data interpretation led to accidents. The following actions by team members were found to be the cause of the corresponding percentage of accidents:
Failure to observe or monitor data - 35.1%
Data not available - 13.0 %
Data hard to detect or discriminate - 11.1%
Misperception of data - 8.7%
Forgetting data - 8.4%
Lack of, or incomplete, mental model - 6.9%
From these results, there is a strong correlation if not outright cause of many accidents due to confusion in roles. In whitewater, if your crew is just sitting there letting you guide without monitoring any data (i.e. looking downstream and staying engaged), they could easily be thrown out of the boat by a wall of water or the boat impacting a rock. Similarly, if you are guiding a raft and are engaged in trying to pull someone in, and you don’t see a big horizon line coming up then you may be setting yourself up for an accident.
Overcoming The Stress Response
In the scenario above the team’s roles are confused as the guide is taking the responsibility to rescue the swimmer and failing to navigate. The rest of the team may be facing a stress response where they are not feeding data to the guide (hey, bro horizon line coming up!), not engaging in the rescue (You guide, Ill get him in!), or may be frozen in the white wall unable to make a meaningful contribution.
When these abnormal situations come up the stress response begins, but it is critical to create a training plan for how you react to the scenario. NASA came up with a training scheme called Heedful Training based on the concept of Heedful Interrelating. “Heedful interrelating occurs when all team members make deliberate efforts to reconsider the effects of their actions on current goals.”
The first key to this kind of training occurs when an abnormal situation occurs. You as the individual team member have to stop and ask yourself: How does what I am currently doing effect the team? Once you know this answer the next question is: What can I do that is whining the scope of my role to help resolve this situation? This kind of training requires you to know the scope of your role inside and out to understand how to positively effect the outcome of the situation.
One of the other key parts of this training model is understanding how to effectively deal with stress. Stress management is a skill and you can train specifically on that skill to help you more efficiently cope with those situations. One method such as the 4-4-4 technique or some of the techniques we outlined here can be a good start. Other tips for managing stress during abnormal situations are:
Focus on being competent in it everything you’re touching – if you’re not feeling competent you need to train more on that specific skill.
Practice under stress.
Don’t just kick down the door – preplan everything you’re doing from rigging, to paddling, to navigating.
