Can't reproduce your self-defense skills under stress? Here's why!
Under the effect of stress, emotion and adrenaline, you will lose a large part of your physical and mental means. Despite this unfavorable context, and with your remaining means, you will have to reproduce a technique as well carried out as possible, energetic, and with relevant timing.
It is likely that under stress your technical execution will be of lower quality. And if you execute your technique incorrectly, there will be a penalty. During a grading technical exam, you can miss your belt. In a full contact fight, you can be knocked out. In a real situation, the end can be dramatic.
In order to be able to reproduce a technique learned in class in a stressful situation, it must have been transformed into an automatic reflex. Thus, when a stimulus appears, the automatic reflex is triggered, without conscious intervention on your part, compensating for your loss of means.
According to the Larousse dictionary, an automatism is a "completion of psychomotor acts beyond the control of the subject's will."1
One of the goals of self-defense is to create automatic reflexes that will allow you to react "instinctively" in the event of verbal or physical aggression. These automatic reflexes are comparable to what are called reflexes, with the difference that reflexes are natural, therefore innate, and automatic reflexes are conditioned, therefore learned by repetition.
Indeed, repeating a movement allows the nervous system, the body and the human brain to integrate it. An automatic reflex is created in a situation, or at least in an environment reproducing as much as possible the situation for which the automatic reflex is relevant.
Thus, to restore techniques correctly executed under stress, you must create automatic reflexes, under similar circumstances.2
A future article, already written, will concern that topic.