SEAL Survival Guide (8 page)

 Look for odd behavior or things that seem out of place.

 Determine where you’d go if you had to seek immediate cover from an explosion or gunshots.

 Find the two closest exits.

 Determine whether someone is following you or taking an unusual interest in you.

Imagine this scenario: You see a guy at a shopping mall wearing a heavy coat, holding a cigarette with two inches of ash on the end of it, and he’s not inhaling. He continues to look over his right shoulder at another guy fifty feet away with a similar heavy coat. It is 90 degrees outside. If you practice even the slightest measure of situational awareness, this scene should set off alarms in your head. In terms of honing your situational awareness, you may find it helpful to think of yourself as trying to note variances against the baseline, or what is normal.

Composure Under Pressure

Medical experts tell us that daily stress should be minimized. They advise us to find ways to reduce it to achieve better health. However, the stress we experience when confronted with a serious and very real
life-threatening situation is something entirely different. Physiologically, a part of the brain called the hypothalamus triggers the release of stress-response hormones, including adrenaline, into the bloodstream. Another stress-response hormone is the steroid-like cortisol, which is produced in the cortex of the adrenal glands. This hormone increases energy and metabolic efficiency and helps regulate blood pressure.

Simultaneously, blood is being diverted away from the brain and skin to the muscles to maximize the chances of survival. Your brain now virtually has “tunnel vision,” focusing on nothing but doing what it must to survive. You hear stories about people in desperate situations with superhuman strength. That is all attributable to the body’s stress response.

This is where all the physical and mental preparation pays off. The body is helping by releasing hormones, and if we know how to utilize this natural stress response, we can remain calm under pressure and rise to the occasion during any life-threatening situation. You will simply fall back to the level of preparation and training you have achieved.

Although heightened stress levels are a natural reaction to emergency situations, it is very important to manage these levels. If they are allowed to elevate too rapidly, your body will quickly go from a ready-to-respond mode to a worthless state called “lockup.”

Combat Breathing

One of the best stress-managing skills is called
combat breathing.
This is simply a four-second inhalation followed by a four-second exhalation. In addition to properly regulating the body’s oxygen and CO
2
levels, it will also decrease the heart rate and help clear the mind. And because it is such a basic technique that requires only breathing and counting, it will reduce stress and sharpen focus.

Checklists

Another formula for training your mind to respond quickly is to reduce actions to a
checklist.
Under great stress the mind works best when it has a step-by-step plan for action. Checklists catch mistakes, and it’s easier to remember what to do when information is broken down into one-line ideas and organized in a way that’s conducive to immediate recall. Before missions, I used a series of checklists that I went over multiple times. Airline pilots do the same thing before each flight, even if it seems redundant. You will best survive all the scenarios discussed in this book when you remember to utilize this checklist format.

Here are the basics of a checklist for dealing with many of the survival topics I will discuss in this book, when time is something you don’t have the luxury of, but action must immediately be taken.