Stress Control:
the Optimal Mindset
for Saving Your Life

The ultimate Stress Control is finding the Optimal Mindset to empower fighting for your life.

Animal Role Modeling
To intimidate their enemies as well as empower their own stress control, warriors throughout history imitated fierce animals by wearing animal-like costumes and imitating their behavior.

Wolf-man (or werewolf) legends originated in 16th century Europe when primitive woodsmen gained an intimidating ferocity by imitating wolves during nighttime robberies of people traveling through their woodlands. If ever trapped and facing musket fire, the “wolf-man” reverted to human behavior and begged for mercy. (Folklore distorted this into men becoming wolves during a full moon and reverting to human form after being shot with a silver bullet.)

Martial artists often empower stress control by imitating cats (nature’s best fighters) as well as scorpions, praying mantises, and monkeys. A small monkey can leap on a man ten times his size, clinging to his head while shredding his face and blinding him in just a few seconds. (You’ll learn a very similar Clinch-Attack in Fighting Strategies.)

Superb role models include tomcats (they either flee, or attack an adversary’s eyes then flee), and dogs. Have you ever seen two dogs erupt into a fight? They’re ferocious! Simply imitate the ferocity of the meanest dog you’ve ever seen.

"The roars of two posturing beasts are exhibited by men in battle. For centuries the war cries of soldiers have made their opponents’ blood run cold. Soldiers have always instinctively sought to daunt the enemy through nonviolent means prior to physical conflict, while encouraging one another and impressing themselves with their own ferocity and simultaneously providing a very effective means of drowning the disagreeable yell of the enemy.”
Excerpted from “On Killing” by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

Just before battle, the notoriously terrifying Irish Celts would shed all clothing other than battle gear, work themselves into a frenzy called war spasm then – all but foaming at the mouth – run naked and howling at their enemy. Foes would often flee from such madness. Many other tribes worldwide also had empowering/intimidating stress control rituals, such as the Huns of Asia, the Berserkers of Scandinavia, the Zulu of Africa, and the Maori of New Zealand.

"In dealing with people on the street today, if you instill in their minds that you are crazier than they are, nobody will ever mess with you. Nobody fools with crazy people. Nobody wants to mess with somebody who's nutty, unstable, whatever. That's the same all over. I know a guy who's cultivated a twitch just for the street." ... "Usually, the criminal has a tremendous instinct of who to pick on. Street guys are expert at singling out the weak. If you want to be safe on the street, make eye contact – stare at them directly. They won't mess with you."
Quotes from Chicago police officers interviewed by author Connie Fletcher in "What Cops Know."

I’d amend that to “nobody messes with hostile crazy people.” The feeble crazies, more vulnerable, are oftentimes victimized. Personally, I’ve often relied on displaying an overt hostility to deter predators – they prefer soft targets. See Subway Encounter in Posturing for an example.

To Save Your Life, Use a Psychopath's Tool Before He Uses it on You

"Boys School taught me that if you could generate insanely overreactive violence, then no one would mess with you. So I learned to portray violence. That’s how I thought of it. It was just an act meant to fool people into not messing with me. Except that you had to actually be violent in order to give a convincing performance." And it was only a performance, Wallace says. "It’s an odd and dubious distinction, but I had no hatred or malice in me. I learned that fear in such places is trump. There was rarely any middle ground: You either instilled fear or you lived in it. So I learned to instill it. But it was a device, not a natural tendency." The mantra, he writes, was this: "Don’t try to talk your way out, don’t think, just strike fast and hard and don’t stop until you win or die."
Excerpted from an interview with killer Donald Ray Wallace, Jr. in the Evansville Courier-Gazette (IN) – 16 January 2005

The ultimate stress control empowerment is Psycho Psyching: feigning madness. To repeat an example from Posturing: Threatened with rape, Marla faked a nervous breakdown. Nonsensically sobbing “I killed my baby, I killed my baby,” she grew frantically manic and actually scared her attacker away. He’s lucky. She was about to burst into a frenzied gouging of his eyes then run off howling. It’s extremely unlikely any predator would chase such a demon.

When sensing danger, pretend you're mentally deranged – it's easy, especially when your stress control survival instinct is going all out to protect you from an imminent threat. Fake a facial twitch, act loony, or loudly argue with yourself. Nobody wants to tangle with a crazy person – even a little one. So be maniacal.

Psycho Psyching has three potent benefits for you. First, it intimidates an attacker. After all, a total lunatic is fearless and stops at nothing – truly a force to be avoided if at all possible. Second, acting crazy is an easy role to fake – professional actors consider lunacy to be the easiest role of all – and you can pull off an Oscar-caliber performance when your life is on the line. Third, a shrieking, ferocious, raging fury is absolutely the most effective stress control strategy to empower a fight for your life using the tools in Fighting Options (see below). To maximize your chances of surviving a deadly attack: act maniacally fierce and you will, in reality, BE maniacally fierce.

Also see Improvised Weapons.

Fear Control & Crime Prevention Tips

Enhancing Your Options

For convenience, learn self-defense online:

KRAV MAGA, a practical self-defense system used by many police forces worldwide, teaches you to defend yourself, enhances your survival instinct, and can be applied under extreme stress. It's not flashy, just very effective. I highly recommend it. The Krav Maga TV - Online Training videos are especially convenient to learn at home when your schedule allows or if you don't live near a training center.

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