“I’ll work it out”: How our strength can hurt us
You need to be strong willed, self-sufficient, and resilient to be a police officer, firefighter, paramedic – any first responder, ready to respond to one call after another.
When you’re on scene of someone else’s tragedy, you need to be calm, cool, and collected to perform under pressure and take care of the situation. Then your tour is over, and you go on with your life, repeating this pattern shift after shift.
As a first responder, you know that stress occurs, but do you manage it or just assume you’re ok because you’re strong-willed and capable? Are you always telling others – and yourself - “I can handle it”?
But is that enough?
How do you keep your sanity, peace of mind, and enjoyment of life in the face of stressors from the job and the rest of your life?
So often, we at Eximo hear from clients that want to be like they used to be. Happy, loving their job, active with their family and friends, and engaged in their lives. What happened to these strong-willed people that they’ve lost those things? Why do they find their mind racing with intrusive thoughts they can’t shake? Or find themselves disinterested in the parts of life they once enjoyed?
Stress injuries
One very common reason is unrelenting stress injuries. We understand that working out creates micro-tears in our muscles, then recovery allows them to heal stronger and better. That’s why we don’t do max bench presses every day nonstop, because the breakdown will continue causing loss of strength and endangering us of injury. Your mind is the same way with stress. While our brain is designed to experience high levels of stressors, it is not designed for unrelenting stress over time without recovery.
As a first responder, you’ve probably been trained to prepare for the worst possible scenario, to understand that there are no routine calls, that any of them can go bad quickly and you must be ready. This trains the brain to assume that any call may endanger your life and safety or require all your skills to be sharp and perfect (even out of a dead sleep). It doesn’t have to be a critical call, even a “routine” noise complaint or minor injury will then trigger a tiny amount of this response. This is how hypervigilance is developed.
Hypervigilance
Like a meerkat popping its head up to scan for danger, your fight/flight center goes on alert each time you respond to a call. The limbic system of your brain releases small (or large) amounts of stress hormones and chemicals such as adrenaline and cortisol. Little by little this builds up over time just like the micro-tears in muscles. The brain needs to recover and repair to become stronger and more resilient, too.
Imagine wearing a backpack getting filled with rocks from each stress stimulus. “Yeah, but the calls are rarely serious,” you might think. OK, so you slowly fill it with small pebbles and the occasional big rock. Either way, you’re carrying all this extra weight getting heavier and heavier as the days and years pass. Before you know it, you’ve got a huge load weighing you down until the day the pack can’t hold anymore, breaks open, and you have no choice but to face the reality of years of building stress.
That backpack can be full of hypervigilance, sleep deprivation, financial concerns, marital issues, family problems, parental concerns, moral injury, and more. Yes, you must be a strong human being to do this work, but you’re still a human being with a human brain that has physiological limits. Ignoring the issues, stuffing them down, and trying to just keep pushing only makes it all worse. Add a culture of stigma to this along with unhealthy coping mechanisms like drinking or isolating, and the next thing you know, your best efforts are not helping anymore.
What can you do?
What can you do to keep the backpack from weighing you down? Prioritize your mental health. On an airplane they tell you put your mask on first before helping others, because if you pass out you can’t be of any help. On the job, you take care to follow SOPs — you don’t run on the fireground because if you trip and get hurt, you not only can’t help the situation, but might become another problem.
With a little bit of regular focus on yourself, you can start to recognize if things are not how you want them to be and pivot toward a happier, more fulfilling life.
Start small with five minutes of daily meditation sitting upright, undisturbed, and focusing on your breath. As the thoughts come, let them go and come back to the feeling of your breath. Try meditation apps like Headspace, Calm, or Insight Timer.
Spend time in nature, even if it’s just going to a nearby park or open area to play with the kids or dogs.
Exercise regularly. It doesn’t have to be an Ironman or CrossFit level of effort. Just get the energy in your body moving.
Talk to someone about what you’re experiencing, whether it’s a partner, friend, family, a counselor, or a trusted co-worker. You may be surprised to find that others are dealing with the same stuff and appreciate a chance to talk about it, too.
If you are struggling or just can’t shake the feeling of not being ok, check out our resources page or contact us and we can help find support or solutions for you.
It likely took years or decades of small steps to get to not feeling ok. Give yourself some time and compassion, and trust that small steps can also get you to where you want to be.