It's critical to understand your operating baseline and what you may be dealing with in terms of psychological and emotional escalation. Fear and anger are the drivers that can quickly escalate behavior and responses outside of the your control.
Fear is a valid survival default and when an LEO recognizes its usefulness in discerning contexts, it can inspire proper vigilance and maintain critical chains of thought like the CDM or OODA loop. Left unchecked, though, fear can grow into paranoia, with the help of perceptual influences. When fear drives you to believe that everyone is out to kill you, you've left the reality of your context at hand and have lost any provisional allowance for the subject and the situation.
This becomes compounded by your chemistry. There are three brain systems hard at work when our consciousness starts to transcend normal baselines. Fear is driven by the cerebral cortex, the core of the brain that looks out for the body's well being. Think of it as your century - on guard, looking out for threats to your well-being. This century operates your cortisol level, which, among other vital functions, responds to your stress level in an attempt to manage your responses, one of which is fear. Cortisol has a couple of downsides, it can interfere with short term memory and inhibits spontaneous learning, a function of the frontal lobes (I'll get to these in a minute). Cortisol levels also vary depending on the temporal context, the time of day, with peaks in the morning and valleys in the wee hours of the night.
Anger is a synaptic response driven by the limbic system. Like most intense emotions, anger acts upon physiological responses creating chemical reactions based on defensive thought processes like being offended, feeling undermined or cheated, feeling entitled or superior. Once the synaptic response is activated its creates a cognitive dissonance, something that the brain strongly feels has to be resolved immediately. The longer this process takes, the higher the chemicals spike in the brain. At the point of apex, when anger explodes, the male brain is flooded with serotonin, the same chemical response a man feels when he has an orgasm.
Men really like that feeling, and this is where anger becomes problematic. It becomes addictive. Upon this kind of conditioning, men look for opportunities to experience it again, and again. This is manifest in looking for or justifying opportunities to get angry, picking fights, posturing behind the badge and utility belt. Once intrinsically escalated, without talking one’s self down, the only way to end the escalation is to mentally ejaculate.
