GLOC

You've probably noticed that everytime a car accelerates you feel something "pushing" you into your seat. This is a result of the intertia your body feels in relation to the accelerating car. When the space shuttle takes off, this "push" equates itself to three times your weight (or 3G). When a modern fighter jet performs aerobatic maneuvers, it can create a "push" force of over nine times your weight (or 9G).

The effects of this extra weight on the human body are wide reaching. Since your weight has increased, the heart has to work harder to pump blood, and the diaphraghm has to work harder to insure that you keep on breathing. Blood is slowly drawn away from your brain so that, at higher G-levels, you can lose consciousness because of the lack of blood. The stress on the body becomes so high that the brain shuts down in an attempt to save itself.

This effect is known as G-LOC: G-induced Loss Of Consciousness.

During the past Fall Rally weekend, myself and a friend of mine underwent G-LOC. No, we weren't in a a fighter plane, plummeting to the ground at a blazing rate of speed. No, our G-LOC's were of the internal type, where the external stresses caused our minds to "shut down", and we fought ourselves for control.

I don't know if you've ever been in that type of situation; where something or someone makes you so mad, or so depressed that rational side of things just shuts down and you're reacting on instinct. The battle to regain control then becomes key, because to remain in that state affects the ability of people to react to the real world. Some people never recover, and they end up drifting in limbo for the rest of their lives.

In this case, it was interesting on how we attempted to recover from this shutdown. In real G-LOC situations, a pilot or an astronaut has a G-suit which "squeezes" the blood back into the brain. In our situations, some quiet time alone, and some prayer helped bring G-levels back down, helped things recenter themselves.

I guess, in this case, it's simply a lesson that you can fight a brain shutdown; that the response doesn't have to be a mind blackout. Blind lashing out at whatever is bothering you isn't the answer. It may feel good in the short term, but it isn't the answer. Confrontational attitudes and ideas don't work. Those just insure that the plane you're flying plows into the ground at Mach 3. There isn't much left after that type of impact.

G-LOC is dangerous, but it can be mastered. Just like those pilots who push the edge and come back to tell the tale, when we get pushed to the edge, we should make sure that we come back and tell our tales.