Page 59 - Coespu Magazine 2018-2

Emotions and Surviving

Stress influences numerous psychological and physiological processes, and its effects have practical
implications in a variety of professions and real-world activities. In the medical/surgical profession, the
stress of working under intense time pressure, often in a fatigued state, while performing complex life
or death procedures has been found to delay task
completion, degrade economy of motion, and
increase errors, all of which may significantly
compromise patient safety. In law enforcement
professions, such as police, intense anxiety in
response to physical attacks or threats of injury
by an assailant increases avoidance behavior,
reduces the ability to inhibit stimulus-driven
processing, decreases shooting accuracy, and
degrades performance.
Likewise, in military operations, exposure to
multiple stressors including sleep deprivation,
hunger, dehydration, environmental challenges
(heat/cold), psychological strain (fear, anxiety),
and exercise-induced fatigue significantly
challenge the coping capacities of even the most
stress-resistant individuals. As a result, critical
cognitive and biological functions important for
warfighter health and operational performance
are significantly degraded.
One environment that provides a unique
opportunity to study the impact of severe acute
stress and simultaneously assess a wide array of
psychological, physiological, and biochemical
markers is military Survival, Evasion, Resistance,
and Escape (SERE) school. Training in SERE
school is required for all military personnel at high risk of capture.
During the first phase, the academic portion of SERE school, students receive several days of
classroom training in survival, evasion, resistance, and escape techniques. Then they participate in a
survival and evasion field exercise where they are required to navigate through several miles of
unfamiliar hostile territory, locate water, hunt and trap small animals, build small shelters, and locate
food while evading “enemy forces.”
This is particularly challenging since it requires students to deal with hunger, uncertainty, fatigue, and
discouragement in a real-world environment. In the final phase of the course, students are “captured”
by simulated hostile forces, transported to a mock POW camp, and subjected to highly stressful mock
interrogations.
This last phase is ultimately the most physically and psychologically demanding, aspect of the training
The timing of each phase can vary across different SERE schools and from class-to-class within a
single school, but the same phases, in the same sequence, are included in each.
In training for SERE courses, for the participants is important to know how is it structured our brain,
and to be able to manage the primary and secondary emotional processes because in the subocortical
parts there are the keys of surviving.
I remember always to my student that we are animals and w have subcortical region in our brain that

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