Managing Stress Arousal for Optimal Performance: A Guide to the Warrior Color Code
by Brett & Kate McKay on August 15, 2013

Think back to the last time you experienced a high amount of psychological stress. For example, after you were in a fender bender or before you had to give a big speech in front of hundreds of people.

How was your thinking? A bit scattered?

Did performing simple tasks like writing or tying your shoe become difficult because of how much your hands were shaking?

If you’re like many people, you likely experienced small cognitive and physical breakdowns due to fear and stress. Whenever we encounter stressful situations, our body is flooded with hormones that elevate our heart rate to prime us to fight or flee. Our bodies become aroused and ready for action – a good thing. But if we get too amped up, our physical and cognitive skills fall apart – a very bad, potentially dangerous thing.

Now imagine what your response would be if you were in the middle of a gunfight with a bad guy.

How do you imagine your thinking would be then? Would you even be able to think?

Would you be able to respond with like force or would you just freeze like a deer in headlights?

In life-or-death situations, be it a firefight or an emergency evacuation, it’s often the psychological stress that gets a man killed. Or more specifically, his inability to manage that stress.

In today’s post we’re going to highlight some of the research from recent years that shows what stress does to a man’s ability to perform in high-risk scenarios. Moreover, we’ll introduce a color code system developed by one of history’s best shooting experts that many warriors (soldiers, fighters, police officers, first responders, and even average joes interested in beyond average training) use to gauge their mental and physical preparedness in life-or-death situations. We’ll end the post by discussing a few of the research-backed techniques that warriors around the world are beginning to use to mitigate stress, allowing them to perform at optimal levels even in the heat of a crisis.

While much of the research and content in this post is geared towards helping you become a better sheepdog, the principles and techniques can also be used to manage stress in everyday situations, whether that be a tough challenge at home, at work, or on the playing field. Even if you don’t plan on getting in a close-quarters firefight anytime soon, you can definitely benefit from this information.

The Inverted-U Theory of Stress and Performance



The Inverted-U Hypothesis proposes that increases in stress typically are accompanied by increases in quality of performance…only up to a point, though. After you reach a certain threshold, you experience diminishing returns where rising stress actually results in deteriorating performance quality in certain tasks.

Several sports performance researchers during the 1970s and 1980s found that athletes experienced increases and decreases in different motor skills at different stress-induced heart rates. For example, when heart rates reach above 115 beats per minute (BPM), fine motor skills, like writing, begin to deteriorate. However, when heart rates are between 115 and 145 BPM, complex motor skills, like throwing a football or aiming a gun, are at their peak. Cognitive functioning is also at its peak in this range. After 145 BPM, performance for complex motor skills begins to diminish, but gross motor skills like running and lifting remain at optimal levels. When heart rates go above 175 BPM, capacity for all skilled tasks disintegrates and individuals begin to experience catastrophic cognitive and physical breakdown.

While most of the research on stress and performance has been used in the realm of sports, researchers who study combat and tactical scenarios are beginning to use the Inverted-U hypothesis to help warriors of all kinds become better fighters and responders. By knowing how stress impacts their performance in life-or-death situations, warriors are able to take steps to help mitigate its effects either through training or stress-management techniques.

Physiological vs. Psychological Stress

As we discuss arousal (in reference to stress and heart rate) and its effect on performance, it’s important to note that there’s a big difference between heart rate increase caused by physiological versus psychological stress. You likely won’t see major deterioration in cognitive and physical performance when heart rates increase due to physical exercise. For example, you’re probably not going to experience tunnel vision after you get your heart rate up from a bunch of wind sprints.

It’s typically only when your heart rate increases rapidly due to psychological stress (e.g., fear in a deadly force encounter) that you’ll experience the significant negative effects of stress arousal.

The Stress Arousal Color Code

In his seminal book, Principles of Personal Defense, gun fighting expert Jeff Cooper laid out a color code system to help warriors gauge their mindset for combat scenarios. Each color represents a person’s potential state of awareness and focus. Originally, Cooper’s color code system only used white, yellow, orange, and red.

In recent years, combat researchers, like Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and Bruce K. Siddle, added two more levels, gray and black, for reasons we’ll dig into more later on in the post. Moreover, they combined Cooper’s system with the Inverted-U chart of arousal and performance to create a framework that associates a color level with a heart rate arousal level. Below we summarize this synthesis with text and illustrations.

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