Before the Gun Appears

The call came in as an individual carrying a firearm inside an apartment building.

Nothing had happened yet. No shots fired. No foot pursuit. No fight. I was not running upstairs or wrestling with anyone. From the outside, and especially watching the body camera afterward, the call did not look particularly dramatic. We were outside an apartment building gathering information before eventually moving inside.

But my body was already responding to something that had not happened.

I was wearing my WHOOP, something I have used for years to better understand my own physiology, recovery, strain and stress. When I looked at the data afterward, I noticed my heart rate had initially been somewhere around 90 to 100 beats per minute. As the call developed and we prepared to enter the building, it moved into the 120s and eventually peaked between 135 and 140.

I was not doing anything physically strenuous enough to explain that change. I was anticipating. That distinction matters because it illustrates something I do not think we talk about enough in law enforcement training. The nervous system does not always wait for the threat to appear before preparing us to deal with it.

Sometimes the body gets there first. What I was seeing afterward was a real-world example of anticipatory sympathetic activation.

Anticipatory sympathetic activation is the body’s automatic physiological preparation for a threat or challenge that has not happened yet, but that the brain believes may be coming. The brain is constantly using available information, previous experience, environmental cues and uncertainty to predict what might happen next. When it determines that a situation could require immediate action, the sympathetic nervous system begins preparing the body.

Heart rate and breathing may increase; muscles prepare for movement; attention can become more focused on potential threats; and energy is mobilized for action. In police work, this can begin long before an officer actually sees a weapon or encounters violence. Simply hearing over the radio that a person may be armed can change the officer’s physiological state before arriving on scene. That does not necessarily mean fear or loss of control. It is the nervous system preparing for a possible demand. The threat does not have to be standing in front of us for the body to begin preparing for it. Sometimes the nervous system enters the fight before there is a fight.

The sympathetic nervous system is part of our autonomic nervous system. When the brain determines that something important, uncertain or potentially dangerous may be happening, the body begins preparing to meet that demand. Heart rate can increase. Breathing changes. Muscular readiness increases. Attention shifts. Energy becomes more readily available.

We usually describe this through the familiar language of fight, flight, or freeze. There is nothing wrong with that as a basic explanation, but it can make the process sound as though the body simply waits for something dangerous to happen and then reacts.

Human physiology is more complicated than that.

The brain is constantly trying to make sense of incomplete information and anticipate what might happen next. Research on anticipatory threat has demonstrated measurable cardiovascular responses simply from expecting a stressful event. In other words, the event does not necessarily have to occur for the body to begin preparing for it.

Think about what that means in police work. The radio says firearm. That is information. You have not seen the gun. You do not know whether the information is accurate. You do not know whether the person legally possesses it. You do not know their intentions. You may not even know exactly where the person is.

But one word has changed the environment. Firearm.

Your brain now has information it did not have a few seconds earlier, and it begins preparing for possibilities.

That does not mean the officer should assume that a shooting is about to happen. In fact, that distinction is critical. Physiological preparation and cognitive assumption are not the same thing. Our nervous system can prepare us for danger while our conscious decision making remains disciplined enough to continue gathering information.

That is where training and self-command become important.

Standing outside that apartment building, I had distance, daylight, other officers and relatively good visibility. Moving through the doorway changed the environment. Now there were hallways, doors, corners, limited sight lines, unknown occupants and an individual reportedly carrying a firearm somewhere inside.

Nothing violent had happened. But uncertainty had increased. My physiology reflected it.

There is solid research showing that this happens to officers during actual calls for service. Baldwin, Bennell, Andersen and their colleagues studied 64 active-duty police officers during general duty calls. What makes their research particularly useful is that they did not simply put officers through a laboratory exercise. They combined continuous heart rate monitoring with GPS information, operational police records, movement data, call priority, weapon information, arrests and use-of-force events. That allowed them to better distinguish cardiovascular changes related to physical movement from those associated with psychological stress.

Their findings are worth paying attention to. Average officer heart rate was approximately 98 beats per minute during dispatch, 105 while responding, 118 upon arrival, and 123 during the encounter, arrest, or use-of-force portion of the call. Reported or accessible weapons produced additional cardiovascular activation. Making an arrest increased it further, and drawing a firearm was associated with another increase. Importantly, these effects remained when physical movement was considered.

One example from that study should get the attention of anyone responsible for training police officers. An officer was responding to an assault in progress when dispatch advised that the suspect might have a firearm. By the time the officer arrived, before even getting out of the police vehicle, the officer’s heart rate had reached 170 beats per minute.

The officer had not run anywhere. The confrontation had not started. The body was already preparing. That is anticipatory sympathetic activation.

But there was another part of my own incident that became even more interesting when I placed the physiological data next to the body camera footage. At or near the point when my heart rate reached its highest level, I was communicating with the individual we were dealing with.

If someone looked only at the heart rate graph and saw a police officer approaching 140 beats per minute on a call involving a firearm, they might assume that officer was frightened, agitated, yelling, or beginning to lose control.

Then watch the video.

That is not what the interaction looked like.

My voice remained controlled. I spoke to the individual rather than at him. I was giving directions, gathering information and trying to obtain compliance without unnecessarily escalating the situation. At the same time, I was tactically aware of why we were there and prepared for the possibility that a firearm could become part of the encounter.

Internally, my sympathetic nervous system was highly activated. Externally, I was still communicating with another human being. Those two realities can exist at the same time. That may be one of the most important lessons I took from looking at this incident afterward. Composure is not the absence of physiological activation. Composure is what you are capable of doing while that activation is occurring.

My heart could be approaching 140 beats per minute while my voice remained measured. I could be aware that this individual might possess a firearm without immediately treating every movement as an attack. I could prepare for the possibility of violence while still giving another human being an opportunity to listen, communicate and comply.

That is not passivity. That is control. And that is where training becomes visible.

Over the years, I have had enough exposure to stressful situations to become familiar with what pressure feels like. Training and experience certainly matter, and repeated exposure can help us become more comfortable operating in uncertainty. But none of it removes the human element. I still have a nervous system, and it still responds when the information in front of me suggests something dangerous may be coming. I do not see that as something to overcome or as evidence that experience has failed me. If anything, experience has taught me to respect that response, recognize it when it happens and continue doing the work without allowing it to take control. The goal was never to become unaffected. The goal was to become more capable while affected.

There is a major difference between being physiologically activated and being psychologically out of control. The sympathetic nervous system is not a character flaw. It is not cowardice. It is a biological system designed to mobilize us when the environment demands action.

Years of training and experience have not taught my nervous system to stop responding to potential danger. What those experiences have helped develop is the ability to function while that response is occurring. That distinction matters.

The gun and the conversation are not competing ideas. Tactical readiness and human connection can exist together. I can maintain awareness of someone’s hands, understand my surroundings, think about positioning and potential threats, and still speak respectfully to the person standing in front of me. In fact, when circumstances allow it, communication is part of the tactics.

There is an old mindset in parts of our profession that sometimes confuses aggression with command presence. They are not the same thing.

Being louder does not automatically make someone more tactically sound. Escalating your tone does not prove that you are in control. Sometimes the most capable person in the room is the one whose nervous system is screaming that something dangerous may happen while their outward behavior remains deliberate.

That is self-command.

This is also where I think tactical culture sometimes gets the physiology conversation wrong. Elevated heart rate is often treated as evidence that someone is scared, overwhelmed, or losing control.

That is too simplistic.

The research does not support the idea that a particular heart rate automatically equals a particular level of performance. Baldwin and colleagues specifically caution that heart rate is only one indicator of physiological arousal and cannot, by itself, explain why an individual officer behaved a certain way or predict performance with certainty.

A more recent study makes the picture even more interesting. Marlatte, Di Nota and Andersen examined 57 police officers completing realistic scenarios involving people experiencing mental health crises. Researchers monitored physiological arousal before, during and after the encounters while examining perception, situational understanding, decision making, procedural behavior and memory.

The findings were nuanced. Physiological arousal did not simply make officers perform worse across the board. Greater arousal was associated with better performance in some areas while potentially impairing others, including aspects of spatial processing and subsequent memory.

That is a much more useful conversation than saying, “Once your heart rate reaches this number, you lose this ability.” Human beings do not operate according to a universal heart rate chart.

A heart rate of 140 in one officer does not necessarily represent the same internal state or performance capacity as 140 in another. Fitness, experience, sleep, fatigue, recovery, previous stress exposure, training, emotional state, physical exertion, stimulants and individual differences all matter.

The number is information. It is not the whole story. That is why pairing physiological information with body camera footage can be so valuable for training. The WHOOP graph told me what my cardiovascular system was doing. The body camera showed what I was doing with it. Neither tells the entire story alone.

Put them together and the lesson becomes more interesting.

At or near the highest physiological activation of the encounter, I was communicating. I was not allowing the information about a firearm to dictate every interaction. I remained prepared for the possibility of violence while attempting to prevent the situation from unnecessarily moving in that direction.

That does not mean I was perfectly calm. It means I remained capable. There is a difference between being calm and being under control.

That difference is one reason I have become so interested in human performance and stress physiology. We spend enormous amounts of time in law enforcement teaching officers what to do, but sometimes we spend far less time teaching them about the human being who actually has to do it.

We teach the draw. We teach movement. We teach cover. We teach room clearing. We teach handcuffing. We teach medical skills. We teach radio procedures. We teach use of force.

All of those skills matter.

But every one of those skills has to pass through a nervous system.

The officer who performs perfectly on the range in a controlled environment may eventually have to perform that same skill at three in the morning after being awake for hours, hearing screaming, receiving incomplete information over the radio, watching another officer move through their peripheral vision and trying to determine whether the object in someone’s hand actually represents a lethal threat.

Knowing the technique is only part of readiness.

Being able to access it under pressure is another.

That is why realistic training matters. Not because we need to terrify people in training or prove how tough instructors are. Stress without purpose is not sophisticated training. Creating chaos for the sake of chaos does not automatically produce better officers. The stress has to serve the learning objective.

Officers need opportunities to experience physiological activation while still being required to observe, think, communicate and make decisions. They need to recognize when attention begins narrowing. They need to understand how breathing, positioning, communication, time, distance and tactical options can influence both the situation and their own internal state.

They also need repetitions.

Research supports the idea that physiological regulation can be trained. Andersen and colleagues studied 57 frontline officers using an intervention that incorporated heart rate variability biofeedback and physiological regulation during stressful lethal-force decision-making scenarios. Following the intervention, officers demonstrated reductions in lethal force errors along with reductions in the extent and duration of autonomic arousal. Those improvements remained evident through 12 months, while findings at 18 months began moving back toward preintervention levels.

That last part should matter to every training unit. Regulation is perishable. We understand that with firearms. We understand it with defensive tactics. We understand it with medical skills. Why would nervous system regulation be any different?

You do not attend one class on breathing, learn the term heart rate variability, and suddenly become permanently capable of regulating yourself during critical incidents.

It requires practice. It requires exposure. It requires awareness.

And it requires enough humility to understand that years on the job do not make us immune to our own biology.

Experience certainly matters. Pattern recognition matters. Competence matters. The officer who has handled hundreds of volatile calls may process uncertainty differently than someone experiencing it for the first time.

But experience alone is not enough.

There is a difference between accumulating time and deliberately developing capability.

The nervous system does not care what is on your collar. It does not care how many schools you have attended or how many operations you have been on. When the brain determines that something important may be about to happen, the body begins preparing.

The question becomes whether experience and training have given us enough self-awareness to recognize what is happening without becoming controlled by it. That is where this becomes more than a physiology discussion for me. It becomes a conversation about self-command.

Self-command does not mean becoming emotionless. It does not mean suppressing fear. It does not mean standing in a dangerous situation pretending that your heart is not pounding. It means being aware of your internal state while remaining responsible for your external behavior. My heart can be pounding and I can still think. My sympathetic nervous system can be activated and I can still communicate. I can recognize that someone may be armed without deciding that everyone I encounter is a threat.

I can prepare myself for violence without creating violence where none exists. That is the balance. Prediction can protect us, but prediction can also influence what we expect to see. If dispatch tells us there is a man with a gun, that information matters tactically. We should not ignore it. But we also cannot allow the expectation of a gun to become more powerful than the evidence in front of us.

The nervous system prepares for possibilities. The professional still has to evaluate reality. That distinction may be one of the most important products of good training. I want an officer capable of moving toward danger when necessary. I also want that officer disciplined enough to slow down when time allows it, gather information, communicate, reassess and change the plan when new information changes the problem.

That is not hesitation. That is control.

The body camera from this call reinforced something else for me. Body cameras show a tremendous amount, but they cannot show everything. The camera shows the hallway. It shows the doorway. It records the words. It captures movement. It shows what the officer did. It cannot show the complete physiological environment in which those decisions were being made.

Watching a video afterward in a quiet room is fundamentally different from occupying the body of the person who was there. That does not mean physiology excuses bad decisions. I would argue the opposite. Understanding physiology should increase accountability.

If we know stress can influence attention, perception, spatial processing, memory and decision making, then we have an obligation to prepare officers for those effects. We cannot teach people about the limitations of human performance and then use those limitations as an excuse when something goes wrong.

Understanding the limitation creates a responsibility to train for it. That responsibility also continues after the incident. We spend a lot of time talking about getting officers ready for the fight. We should spend more time teaching them how to recognize when the fight is over.

The same system that mobilizes an officer does not necessarily return immediately to baseline when the scene becomes safe. Research outside policing has demonstrated that anticipation alone can produce robust cardiovascular responses and that recovery from anticipatory threat is itself a measurable physiological process.

That matters when one call ends and another is waiting. There may be no reset. The officer clears one incident, gets back into the cruiser, and the radio sends them somewhere else. The body may still be carrying the previous call while the mind is already trying to process the next one.

Do that repeatedly for a shift. Then for a week. Then for years. This is why recovery cannot simply be treated as something soft that happens when the real work is finished. Recovery is part of readiness. Sleep matters. Physical fitness matters. Breathing and autonomic regulation matter. Nutrition matters. Training matters. Knowing your own baseline matters.

None of these things make someone bulletproof. None guarantee perfect decisions. They simply increase our ability to recognize what is happening internally and maintain capability when pressure arrives.

For me, that is what the WHOOP graph from this call represents. It is not a graph showing that I was afraid. It is not a graph proving that I performed perfectly. It is information. The body camera showed what was happening outside of me. The physiological data gave me a glimpse of what was happening inside. The part that interests me most is not that my heart rate reached around 140 beats per minute.

It is what I was still capable of doing when it did. I could communicate. I could listen. I could give directions. I could recognize compliance.

I could remain prepared for a firearm without allowing the possibility of that firearm to completely define the person standing in front of me. That is where physiology, training, experience and self-command meet.

The call ultimately did not become the violent encounter my nervous system was preparing for.

Most calls do not. That is part of this profession.

We prepare for possibilities that never materialize. We walk toward doors without knowing what is behind them. We respond to domestic calls where someone reportedly has a firearm. We approach vehicles without knowing who is sitting inside. We search buildings with incomplete information. We stand outside houses listening to radio traffic while trying to build a picture from fragments.

Sometimes one sentence from dispatch changes everything. The event has not happened. The body is already preparing. That is anticipatory sympathetic activation.

The goal should never be to create officers who feel nothing. I do not want that officer.

I want the officer who feels the activation and understands it. The officer who recognizes what the body is doing without allowing the body to make every decision. The officer who can prepare for violence without assuming violence. The officer who remains capable of seeing what is actually happening instead of only seeing what was expected to happen.

The goal is not the absence of stress. The goal is capability within it. Not emotional numbness. But self-command.

The nervous system does not wait for the gun to appear. It prepares for the possibility of the gun. Our responsibility is to train the human being carrying that nervous system. Because sometimes the most important part of a critical incident begins before anything actually happens.

References

Stress Activity Mapping: Physiological Responses During General Duty Police Encounters, by S. Baldwin, C. Bennell, J. P. Andersen, T. Semple and B. Jenkins (Frontiers in Psychology, 2019, Vol. 10, Article 2216).

Reducing Lethal Force Errors by Modulating Police Physiology, by J. P. Andersen, P. M. Di Nota, B. Beston, E. C. Boychuk, H. Gustafsberg, S. Poplawski and J. Arpaia (Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 2018, Vol. 60, No. 10, 867-874).

Physiological Stress Differentially Impacts Cognitive Performance During and Memory Following Simulated Police Encounters With Persons Experiencing a Mental Health Crisis, by H. Marlatte, P. M. Di Nota and J. P. Andersen (Frontiers in Psychology, 2025, Vol. 16, Article 1549752).

Cardiovascular and Affective Recovery From Anticipatory Threat, by C. E. Waugh, S. Panage, W. B. Mendes and I. H. Gotlib (Biological Psychology, 2010, Vol. 84, No. 2, 169-175).

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Ayman Kafel is a patrol sergeant, combat veteran, and founder of Project Sapient, with more than 20 years of operational experience. He served in Iraq as a U.S. Army soldier and translator and has worked in law enforcement roles including SWAT, DEA task force work, and plainclothes interdiction; he also holds a master’s degree in counterterrorism. For The Havok Journal, he writes from that background on law enforcement, service, training, stress, resilience, and national security, often focusing on the physical and psychological demands of high-stress work. Follow Project Sapient on Instagram, YouTube, and all podcast platforms for engaging content. He can be reached at ayman@projectsapient.com.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.