Martial Arts · Teaching · Psychology

Why a Student Reacts Before Anything Happens

Better Classes And Fewer Meltdowns!

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D. · October 12, 2026

You raise a hand to show a block and a seven-year-old in the second row flinches. You haven't moved toward them. You haven't raised your voice. Nothing has happened yet, nothing is a reason to get scared, and their body has already reacted to it.

Every instructor has watched some version of that. The kid who cries before the sparring round starts. The teenager who gets defensive before you've finished the correction. The new student who freezes at the door during an enrollment conference.

Those students may be reacting more to what they predicted you were about to do than to anything you did.

That changes how you run a floor. I started as an aerospace engineer working in guidance, navigation and control, and that engineering vocabulary (feedback, estimates, error) fits the second row. The answers to this come from my vocation 2 (or 3.. or 4? I can’t keep track): engineering and psychology.

The guess comes first

Your brain doesn't wait for the evidence and then decide what's happening. It makes a guess first, and the evidence corrects it (sometimes).

You've felt this. Walk down a dark staircase, reach the bottom, and take one more step that isn't there. Nothing hit you, and the jolt is huge anyway. Your body had already predicted floor, right here, and the lurch you feel is how far off that guess was.

Or a loud party where you can't follow the conversation two feet away, and somebody across the room says your name and you hear it perfectly. Your name wasn't louder than the noise. Your brain keeps it ready at all times, so a scrap of sound is enough to trigger it. (It's also why you sometimes hear your name when nobody said it.)

The neuroscience behind this is twenty-five years old now. Rajesh Rao and Dana Ballard showed in a model of the visual cortex that the brain sends predictions down and passes only the surprises back up (Rao & Ballard, 1999). What you experience is the guess, corrected where the evidence insists. I’d add the larger the emotional content with the surprise, the bigger the effect.

Apply that to the second row. Before your hand ever moved, that student's brain had already answered the question of what happens when an adult raises a hand near me? The flinch was the answer arriving.

A feeling is a gap signal

A feeling is the gap between what a person expects and where they think they are right now. It triggers behavior and reaction.

Feelings often get disconnected from reality… we call these “irrational”. That doesn’t mean you’re globally irrational if you react more than reality calls for (we all do it) it just means that particular feeling is reacting more than that particular reality. Hunger is the gap between how fed you are and how fed you're built to be. If you’re used to eating a lot, then less food can trigger more hunger feeling than what your body actually needs (= irrational hunger). Fear is the emotional response to a threat. Irrational fear is what it feels like to estimate more danger than you feel like you’re built to handle, and that estimate can be off by a ton.

It's the same front kick drill with the same partner, and one student reads it as play while another reads it as a threat.

Every parent reads this as my kid is overreacting. I think the more descriptive way to say it is the child is reacting accurately to a guess that's wrong. That's a much easier problem to fix because we may be able to identify it.

Two dials, not one

Every student is running two separate settings, and from the outside they look the same.

The first dial is the guess itself, how much danger they expect (or they feel they can handle). A student with this dial off expects danger in a class that isn’t dangerous.

The second dial is how hard they react once the gap is there. A student with this dial up responds big to a small gap. The guess might be perfectly accurate and the reaction still comes out at full volume. It’d be like you being cold and cranking the thermostat to FULL ON HEAT!!! It’s way more reaction than the temperature called for.

Control engineers design the estimator and the controller as separate jobs, and you can tune one without touching the other (Joseph & Tou, 1961). What I've seen in over thirty years of watching kids is that people work similarly.

OK you ask, how do you tell which dial it is? Two students can melt down at the same moment for opposite reasons.

• The first student expects the worst. Their dial for what's coming is set wrong, and they react normally to a danger that only exists in their mind. The original example of you raising your hand for a block and they react…
• The second student reads the situation correctly. Their dial for how hard to react is set high, and a correct read comes out as a blow-up. They did their first sparring class and looked like they wanted to beat all the kids into the mat.

Tears look the same on both of them. The first student needs the situation to keep coming out better than they guessed. The second student needs practice turning the volume down on a reaction that's already correct.

Treat these two the same way and one of them usually gets worse. Of course, what a lot of parents do (maybe us too) is yell louder “Hey, suck it up!”, “No pain no gain!”, “There’s nothing wrong!” (note this works sometimes because if it gets the person to get more experience in the situation, the fear goes down… but it may not be the most effective way… and sometimes you can really end up sounding like a jerk).

Where the settings came from

Nobody is born with these dials set. They get learned, and most of the important ones get learned young.

A child who grew up somewhere unpredictable learned to treat every surprise as important, because where they grew up, surprises were important. A child who learned that small problems turned into big ones learned to react hard and early, because that was the right call there.

Timothy Behrens and colleagues showed that people speed up how fast they learn when the world gets unstable (Behrens et al., 2007). Michael Browning and colleagues then found that anxious adults have a harder time making that adjustment (Browning et al., 2015). Both studies were done with adults, not children in a karate class, so treat what follows as a working frame for the mat rather than a finding about your students. It matches what I've watched for a long time.

What they learned made sense where they learned it, and they're still using it in a different place. Anchor that in. It wasn’t irrational when it got embedded in their system. That embedded program doesn’t fit the situation. When a worried parent asks, tell them: "Your child learned this somewhere else. It's not your fault, and it's fixable."

Why explaining it doesn't fix it

Most instructors try to talk a student out of the reaction. "There's nothing to be scared of." It usually doesn't work. (again, it will sometimes, if that motivates the student to experience that it’s safe, but it may not often work… and how would you know in advance).

The part of the student that heard you and agreed is not the part running the estimate of danger (guess), and a setting learned over seven years doesn't change because of one good sentence from the instructor. Aaron Beck built cognitive therapy on the idea that stored beliefs drive how we feel (Beck & Haigh, 2014). In my experience insight alone usually doesn't change the reaction, and repeated experience that comes out differently than the student predicted does.

You're already doing that experiment every class.

Every time the second-row student braces for something bad and it comes out fine, their guess moves a little, and over enough classes the flinch often fades without one lecture about bravery.

1. Make the class predictable before you make it hard. Same opening, same order, same signal before contact. A student who can predict the next five minutes has a lot less to guess about. Especially in the beginner classes!
2. Say what's coming before it comes. "I'm going to raise my hand to show the block. Nothing touches you." That takes away the surprise before it happens.
3. Count the reps that come out fine. It takes a run of good experiences to move a dial, and one usually isn't enough. AND lots of reps till it becomes easier.

By the way, these will help you with teaching everybody!

What to say on the floor

When a student reacts before anything has happened, what you say first can add to the guess or correct it.

DON'T say: "Calm down, nothing even happened." To the student, something did happen. You just told them their own body (brain) is wrong, and they'll believe their body.

SAY: "You thought that was going to hurt. Watch, I'll do it slow." Then do it slow, and let the evidence come out better than the guess.

For a student whose read is correct and whose volume is high, you're working on the second dial, and that one is a skill.

DON'T say: "You're overreacting."

SAY: "You saw that right. Now let's practice answering it at half volume." Then give them a breath and one more try, and praise the smaller reaction.

You're not alone if you've been treating this as attitude, because from the front of the class it looks a LOT like defiance or weakness. (The longer version of the two dials is in my essay What You Predict Is What You Defend at mastermoody.com.)

This week

This week: check out your students and see which three react before anything happens. For each one, write down which dial you think is off: the guess or the volume. Then give each of them the same predictable opening and the same warning before contact for the next six classes.

Count how many flinches you see in class one and how many you see in class six. If that number drops, you're on the right track... and if you want help reading what you're seeing, you can always reach out to us.

Common questions

Why do some students react before anything has happened?

The brain predicts what's about to happen and reacts to the prediction. A student who flinches or cries before contact is responding to an expectation learned somewhere else, not to anything the instructor has done yet.

Is a student who overreacts being defiant?

Usually not. Either the student's expectation is set for a more dangerous environment than your school, or the expectation is accurate and the reaction comes out bigger than the situation needs. Those are different problems with different fixes. Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) is only in about 3% of youth (though some studies have it higher) (Canino et al., 2010).

Why doesn't it work to tell a student there's nothing to fear?

Agreement with an explanation doesn't change a learned expectation. What changes it is repeated experience that comes out better than predicted, which a predictable class structure does every session.

What can an instructor do in class to reduce these reactions?

Keep the class structure predictable, announce contact and demonstrations before they happen, and give the same student many repetitions that come out fine. Track the number of reactions over several classes to see the change. This is good teaching advice either way. Save unpredictable for higher ranks…

Does this research apply to children?

The core studies on how people adjust learning to an unstable world were done with adults. The model is a useful working frame for the mat, and instructors can test it with their own students by counting reactions over time.