The trick is to prevent excess adrenaline from flowing. This could potentially save your life and lives of others.
Good luck doing that though. Your body produces it naturally as physical threats occur. You're either able to function during an adrenaline dump or you are not able to function.
Your best bet is to engage in 'stress innoculation' through training. That way you're somewhat used being able to function in front of people with the threat of failing miserably as an incentive to work it out. The more you do that the less likely you are to fail if/when the real deal happens.
You can't really much about encounters except to be adequately prepared for them. Not just in having a bunch of weapons and gear, but in having training, skills AND the weapons/tools/gear. The situation that you're dealing with might not even be a violent attack by someone or several people looking to do you harm. It might be some other form of emergency.
You can increase your odds by ....
• Maintaining a decent level of physical fitness.
• Keeping aware of what's going on around you. You can't avoid situations or respond to them if you have your head in your phone.
• Training at reputable schools ('
hands on', retention, edged and impact weapons, pistol courses, vehicle courses, low light, shotgun or carbine etc).
• Consistently carrying. Owning a pistol doesn't do you much good if it's at home when you need it. Carrying a flashlight, a knife, an extra mag, having a first aid kit and a tool kit in your vehicle might also be a very good idea.
• Knowing some first aid. Taking a CPR, first aid course or becoming an EMT at the local college (it doesn't really take that long) or through an online course. Be a first responder to your own incident while waiting for Police-Fire-EMS. (As an example I've been in EMS since 1997 and our CPR save rates go way up with bystander CPR. Just waiting for us to respond without doing anything on your own isn't always going to have a good outcome).
• Not putting yourself into bad situations to begin with and/or by not going dangerous places. We respond to bars and dope houses a lot more than we do to churches. We respond to domestic situations gone bad where one party stays in the relationship long past the point of getting bad signals more than houses where people are in happy marriages.
• Keeping you vehicle well maintained and by having the tools and skills to change a tire or getting it running again if it breaks down.
You can't really control much of what happens in violent situations. You can't control how many people attack you and what weapons they bring to the party. Many times you can't control where it occurs.
What you can control is you and your state of readiness.
This semi-rant started with a sentence on adrenaline though. So I'll end with that, if you're used to being able to perform tasks in semi-stressful situations your ability to respond and control how you function when you get that adrenaline dumping into your bloodstream is going to increase.
