Show Notes:

We are continuing our series around being on leave and how we can support ourselves in recovering well while off work. Whether we’re off work for a physical injury or a work-related mental health concern, we discussed last week that the experience of being off work can be trying and difficult. Without a plan and intention to ensure the best outcomes possible, we can be left floundering and this can either create or exacerbate things like depression, anxiety, hopelessness, and/or uncertainty and can magnify things like sleep concerns, meeting basic needs like nutrition and movement, isolating from relationships, and feeling detached from interests, hobbies and activities. Total honesty, without a plan, going off work can be a recipe for disaster – not because it needs to be, but because no one guides us through it. No one lays out for us the challenges we’re likely to face and the tricks for circumnavigating these with the least amount of friction possible. That is, until now. I hope that this series gives you tools that allow you to feel like whether you are in a time off work or considering going off or concerned that someday you may have to go off, that you will have the ability to walk that journey with awareness, foresight and capacity. I hope you’ll feel prepared for the stumbling blocks to watch for and feel equipped with tools to side step them or reduce their degree of impact, allowing you to use a time off work to focus on your actual job, which is to recover, and that you would have what you need to do that WELL.

On last week’s episode I named the most common concerns I hear about from the many clients I have served over the past many years who have been off work due to various injuries and mental health concerns. The very first challenge I called out in the episode was the difficulty we as people face with self-motivation/self-directed decisions. And that’s what we’re diving deeper today. 

I shared last week that most of us have been trained from very young to experience motivation from external sources. The amount of time we are left in a day to do self-directed things is pretty limited. We’ll be picking up some pieces from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits. Find the link to the book and his Ted Talk in the “Additional Resources” section below.

·        The Backward Myth of Motivation: Here’s the backward myth about motivation. We have been taught to believe that motivation is a magical unicorn that spontaneously shows up one day. We treat it the same as inspiration. It is this random thing that strikes and is awesome but then leaves and we sink. Here’s the backward part: motivation does not come before action. Motivation comes as the result of action. As we do a damn thing, we feel increasingly motivated to continue doing the damn thing. But it starts with the doing, not with the magical feeling of being motivated to do. And here’s the myth part: that we need motivation in order to take action. That we are somehow reliant on feeling this magical unicorn feeling as a prerequisite to taking an action. 

·        Benchmarks: You have likely always had some benchmarks that marked the course of your day. When you wake up, when you eat meals, when you do certain activities, when you go to sleep. Likely these have, to some extent, been dictated by outside factors. At one time in life your parents told you when to do these things, then an employer told you when you had to be at work and you made the other pieces fall around that. While off work, the benchmarks often quickly fall to the wayside. Sleeping in until random times, having nowhere to go and nothing specific to do any given day, not participating in regular routines like getting dressed, brushing teeth and hair and preparing for the day within certain time parameters all become tempting. 

·        Incentives: We are most likely to have successful outcomes when we experience small rewards that keep us in the game. Especially as we work to develop, implement and maintain new routines, it is important that we experience some incentives. Human brains are wired to engage with things that feel rewarding – which is part of why we tend to fall off of the bandwagon around routines and other kinds of personal growth changes pretty quickly – they feel hard and if they don’t come with some immediate and ongoing wins our brains struggle to stay in it. When off work and trying to develop an internal drive to do the things that are good for us, it takes effort and intention and just straight up work. It can be tiring and lack any sense of immediate reward or value. If we want to be able to do this well, we’re going to need to stack the deck in our own favor and this means coming up with ideas of what feel rewarding to you – big and small things – and finding ways to sprinkle these into your days and weeks. 

·        Make it easy: James talks about making new habits easy for ourselves. He gives an example of wanting to develop a habit of playing guitar. In this example he suggests that you leave your guitar in the middle of your living room, making it something you are more likely to stumble upon several times in a day. If we take this idea and extrapolate it, really he’s talking about removing friction. It’s about reducing the barriers to doing the damn thing, and elevating our chances of being successful

·        Limit the numbing: Too often I hear things like video games and TV to be the answer to this question. I also hear about alcohol, smoking, and other substance dependence use as means to pass the time. While these things can have some value here and there, these are not activities that should be occupying the vast majority of our time when we’re off work. Now, let me say that I totally get why they are the go-to things. They are easy, they can feel rewarding, we tie them to our impressions of relaxation and that feels good for a bit. They are accessible, and given the kind of work you do they are also delightfully mind-numbing, which is often the thing we crave when our brains have felt overstimulated from the work and just want to disconnect from life. Again, in small doses a lot of this is fair and fine – but when we have a lot of time on our hands, these pieces do not tend to help us, they tend to sink us. 

·        Find Productive/Meaningful Interests: Productivity and a sense of being contributory and meaningfully engaged in our own lives and our family’s life is actually a significant human need. We crave feeling a sense of purpose, clarity of expectations, and a path from where we are to where we want to be. Work likely filled this for you and without that thing we go to every day, we can struggle to identify other areas that can bring this out in us. So, we get a bit lackadaisical and veer towards activities that ask little of us, but also give little back to us. 

This is actually one of the reasons I so strongly encourage you guys to work at developing interests and activities that bring you a sense of meaning outside of your work even when you’re working – because these are the things that can float you if you are ever off work. It’s so much easier to just keep doing or do more of things you already have in place. It is so much harder to explore and consider what you might do when you are in the thick of it and needing access to something that brings a sense of purpose and meaning quickly. Having hobbies and interests can give us something to focus on that can be not only a great way to fill the time off work, but can actu...

Show Notes:

Today we are kicking off a new month with a new series and we’re focusing on how to survive and support sanity while off work. This is a topic that I have become very familiar with thanks to my extensive work as part of the WorkSafeBC provider network for almost a decade, as well as my work with clients through ICBC and other long term disability groups. I have walked alongside so many clients who have struggled with the experience of being off work, and I know that some of you listening may have taken leaves from work in the past, are on a leave right now, or are considering taking a leave. I know that many are struggling to stay at work right now given the ongoing degree of pressure and demand along with short staffing and high exposure, so this topic feels particularly relevant right now. I’m going to try to make this series applicable to any off work experiences – whether that’s for a mental health concern, or a physical injury, or even a maternity leave. You know I love practical, so my goal is to make this as practical and useful as possible. We’re going to call out the stumbling blocks that commonly show up when people are off work, especially when it’s for an extended period of time, and we’re going to talk about what to focus on and prioritize in an effort to keep your sanity and use the time off to recover well. 

Our focus for this episode is to call out the common challenges facing those who are off work. I have seen these be fairly consistent regardless of the type of injury or reason for being off work, although certainly exacerbated by mental health concerns or injuries that restrict motivation or limit access to supports. 

·        Self-motivation or internal-motivation. The truth is, our culture and society have been shaped to drive external motivation. We have been trained from really young to be up at a certain time to get to school, where an adult directs our time and attention, and tells us when we get to eat and play and even go to the bathroom. We come home to adults who tend to direct our steps – put your shoes away, do your homework, eat your dinner, get ready for bed… Our experience of self-directed time through a significant part of our lives is really contained to a handful of hours spread throughout the day where we get to make some autonomous choices based on our interests. Even as adults, our time is directed by when I need to be at work, the expectations of my workplace which are externally determined and directed, and the obligations of home and adult life impose some amount of demand on our “off time” which continues to restrict our self-determined time to a pretty limited span. So, to be off work tends to shine a light on how we have failed to train ourselves to choose, direct and motivate our own time. Without an imposed routine carved out FOR us by work schedules and adult life demands, we can be left feeling like we’re floundering. 

·        Everything takes longer than expected. The reality is that the process of working with insurance providers is SLOW. Sometimes painfully slow. The layers of bureaucracy are heavily present and people are often surprised by the delays and the complexities in decision making and access to needed assessments, services and supports. Many people find that the pace further degrades their symptoms, leaving them suffering and lacking the support they need when they need it most. The truth is this is the nature of the beast, and only so much can be done about it. There are shortages in health and limited specialists and that is just the tip of the iceberg. The key here is knowing that the pace is slow. If you can walk in knowing that this is likely to be the case, it will hopefully shape more reasonable expectations. Talking with others you know about their experiences can help shape your expectations and help you get a sense of what “normal” looks like where you live. I will also say that this is a really good reason to be somewhat pro-active about the decision to go off work if it is for mental health related concerns. Often those struggling with depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress, and so on, wait and waffle in the uncertainty of whether they really NEED to go off for some time before making the decision when things feel REALLY bad. Believe me, I get that it’s not an easy decision to make, but if we leave it until we are at our very lowest low and then the process takes time and ADDS stress, it is going to feel further harmful rather than helpful. If we can give ourselves permission to put the process in motion a little sooner, we may not be in such dire straights and desperation for support from a system that has difficulty meeting that degree of need quickly enough. Many of those I work with reflect this and share that they wish they had gone off sooner – both in terms of having a bit more left in the tank to face the challenges of the system when going off, as well as having a little less cumulative impact to work through to come out the other side. 

·        Confusion, uncertainty and fear of the big bad insurance company. The reality is that entering this kind of system puts a lot of power into the hands of people who don’t know you – and that can be terrifying. I’m not going to sugar coat it, this is absolutely a legitimate feeling and concern. Decisions around diagnoses, approved limitations and restrictions and determinations around return to work can be huge, life-altering decisions – and in this process many of these are out of your hands. The system is broken in a lot of different places, and so there are often challenges with clear communication, clarity of expectations, and a sense of next steps. This would be hard for anyone, regardless of the type of injury, but for those off for mental health related concerns or injuries impacting cognitive function such as head injuries, this can feel completely overwhelming. I see this a lot in my work – a client who is wrestling with severe anxiety or posttraumatic stress being left waiting with little information or communication is a situation that is going to obviously lead to worsened symptoms. The nature of the process can, in its own right, undermine the wellness of the person who is supposed to be focused on recovery. 

I wish I had some quick-fix tips to make this particular piece easier. I don’t, unfortunately, but I can offer a couple of reflections. My experience working in insurance-affiliated care for a little over a decade is that I have seen more humanity in decisions than I expected to. I have connected with many claim managers who have shown tremendous empathy, who have worked diligently to advocate for workers, and I have even seen some bend the rules to benefit workers who really need that bit of extra support. I wish I could say this is a universal expectation you can have, but while it may not be universal I have seen it be far more common than I think most people expect when they are dealing with an insurance company. I have also seen a lot of growth in understanding within these companies. More and more of them are implementing mental health departments with staff getting specialized training in understanding and working to support people through mental health work-related concerns. As this has expanded I have seen the result of this being better care for those experiencing mental health related injuries. I have also seen greater understanding of what healing and recovery look like. For example, back in the day, it was somewhat frowned on for workers who were off work to participate in hobbies and activities – because if you can do that, why can’t you go to work?! But over the last several years, and I think through education ...

Show Notes:
Today I am delighted to be joined once again by TC Randall. He brings his wealth of wisdom as an emergency room nurse of 14 years, as well as his experiences of having gone off work with PTSD, all of which he details in his fantastic book, The View From The Wrong Side of The Day that you can check out here. Today we are talking about the impact of first response and front line work on our daily living activities. Hear us chat about...
- The impact of the adrenaline highs and lows on our capacity to engage in life outside of work
- Developing awareness, recognizing our own limits and keeping boundaries to protect ourselves
- Finding outlets and thinking back to what we used to connect with. Using close approximations to develop interests and outlets.
- How we tell stories shapes our reality; using empathy to contextualize people and balance the negative skew
- Acknowledging the systemic limitations that keep us stuck and the need to be rebels on the inside

Episode Challenge:

Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. 

Additional Resources:

 Check out TC's book here.
Check out the book recommendation TC offered during this episode (We're All Perfectly Fine, by Jillian Horton), here.

Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!

Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at [email protected]. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Show Notes:

I am joined again today by an amazing guest who I am thrilled to get to explore the topic of "being normal" with our kiddos alongside. Child and Family Therapist, Registered Clinical Counsellor, Heather Toews is with me today. Heather has worked as a social worker doing child protection work, experienced her own burnout, transitioned to supporting adoptive families, and then transitioned to counselling with Child & Youth Mental Health as well as in private practice. Heather works from an attachment focus and has bravely ventured into creating a course to support parents who are striving to care for a child who has experienced trauma. I would invite you to check out the Trauma Attuned Parent Program if you, someone you know, or populations you work with, are caring for a child impacted by traumatic lived experiences. Her course is phenomenal and has been used by group homes for staff training as well as many families working to develop the skills to be therapeutic intervenors in the lives of their children. She has created two versions of this program, a standard version as well as a specialized version tailored to the unique needs of Foster & Adoptive families. Her work is beautiful and passion-filled and I am so grateful to know her. 

Today Heath and I are talking about the challenges facing First Responders & Front Line Workers in "being normal" in their relationships with their kiddos. We highlight the challenges in coming down of the day, the tendencies to be revved up or numbed out, the impacts to our kids and our relationships with our kids over time, and tools to try to get this in check so we can develop healthful, attached and attuned relationships with our mini-me's. 

In this episode we talk about:

• Common challenges faced by front line parents
• What happens when hyper-vigilance leads our parenting choices
• The tendency to numb and the complications to "present parenting" 
• Finding value in the mundane (this is where the magic is - we promise!!)
• The good, bad and ugly of how our work impacts our families
• The need to focus on small windows of connection
• Considerations around child-led and parent-led play

Check out Heather's Trauma Attuned Parent Program here. I honestly can't say enough about this program. I find myself recommending it as a fantastic adjunct to therapy to support parents in being able to be real change-makers and meaningful support providers to their kids while working through the process and healing alongside their child. Every play therapist who knows me has heard me preach about this program, because it equips parents to not just "try" or "do the best they can" to help their kids, but to actually show up in evidence-based therapeutic ways to intervene meaningfully, and I hope you will go check it out!

Check out my previous episode with Heather (S1E29 - "Front Line Families & Parenting") here, where we talk about creating rituals of disconnection and some other really practical tools to work at being more present at home and with our kids.

Episode Challenge:

What are some parent-led play ideas that would fit for you with your kiddo(s)? If you're kids are older, what are conversation topics or activities you can engage in together? Can you commit to working at being present for 10-30 minutes alongside them doing this activity a couple of times each week?

Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. 

Additional Resources:

Check out Heather's Trauma Attuned Parent Program here. If you are a parent of a child who has been impacted by trauma, I would highly recommend this. Also, if you work with populations where this resource might be of value, I would invite you to research it (feel free to follow up and ask questions) and recommend it to those you serve. Touch base with me at [email protected] and I can put you in touch with Heather.

Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!

Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at [email protected]. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Show Notes:

I am honoured to be joined by my friend and colleague, Chelsea Beyer. Chelsea is a Registered Clinical Counsellor, PhD Candidate, and university instructor in the Department of Psychology. She is trained as a sex therapist, and works with people who are struggling with a range of mental health and relational challenges, and has been practicing in the Lower Mainland for five years. Her Doctoral research focuses on the intersection of women’s embodiment and sexual satisfaction. The heart of her clinical work and research is the desire to help people feel more at home in their own bodies. 

Today Chelsea is joining me in a conversation working to highlight the challenges facing First Responders & Front Line Workers in "being normal" in their intimate partner relationships. We are diving into everything from the daily monotony of life together over time, to arguing over what matters to us, to talking about our needs and values, to finding what we need for spicy sex. We would highly encourage couples to listen to this one together. 

In this episode we talk about:

• The physiology of stress and trauma and the ways this impacts our ability to do relationship (hyper-arousal and hypo-arousal)
• The difficulty of finding empathy for the silly monotonous things in life when what I've done today is SO big
• The need to acknowledge what we're bringing to the table 
• Identifying our internal and external context and using this language to facilitate connection
• Recognizing needs to facilitate moving toward closeness and intimacy, including sex

Chelsea also shares about a great research and author, Emily Nagoski. Check out the books we talk about in this episode:

Come As You Are (book) here on Indigo.
The Come As You Are Workbook (companion workbook) here on Indigo.
Burnout (book) here on Indigo.

Episode Challenge:

Listen to this episode alongside your partner. Be open to hearing their thoughts on how your work shapes your relationship, and talk about ways to apply some of the pieces raised in this episode that seem most pertinent to YOUR relationship.

Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. 

Additional Resources:

Check out the books we talk about in this episode:

Come As You Are (book) here on Indigo.
The Come As You Are Workbook (companion workbook) here on Indigo.
Burnout (book) here on Indigo.

Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!

Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at [email protected]. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Show Notes:

It is always one of the fun joys of this podcasting thing that I get to invite on some of the people I love most in the world to talk with all of you. Meredith Luipasco is a pediatric nurse working in southern Alberta. She is also married to a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, and is the daughter of a paramedic and a nurse. She GETS the first responder thing. She has also been one of my best friends since the first grade. As we walk this Being *Normal* series, we wanted to dive into the ways in which front line work changes our ability to be "normal" in friendships and some of the ways both Meredith and I have learned to cultivate some normal within the not-normal of the work. Through this conversation there are some really valuable pieces that emerged, including things like:

• Valuing how our experiences shape us, and that we're coming from different places that inform us differently
• Managing our own self-importance and being careful about comparative suffering
• Protecting our own energy
• Naming our needs & "taking the cake" as Meredith so eloquently puts it
• Honouring that our needs change over time
• Identifying needs and looking for "close approximations" to find some fulfillment even if it's not the most ideal version all the time
• Communicating clearly, honestly and vulnerably with people in our lives
• Being flexible and adaptable to evolving life circumstances, needs and abilities

Episode Challenge:

Invest in your wellness and sustainability – for you and for those who care about you. Use coupon code BTBP100Off to get access to my Beating the Breaking Point resilience training program. This reduced rate is available until 11:59pm on Thursday March 10th. Click here to jump right to the registration page.

Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. 

Additional Resources:

Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point resilience program, including our no-risk money-back guarantee. If you are ready to take your resilience to the next level, register now using code BTBP100OFF now.

Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!

Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at [email protected]. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Today we are really pulling back the curtain on first response and front line work and naming the elephant in the room. You guys, I hate to be the one to tell you, but what you do is NOT normal. Ok, maybe that wasn’t totally revelatory… 

Back in the fall I put out a request on social media and to those who follow me by subscribing to my email list, and I asked for you to tell me what you wanted to hear about on the show as I put together my plans for 2022 topics and interviews. And this topic was chosen by YOU. So today, as requested, I am launching this new series that I’m calling “Being Normal”. Over the coming weeks we are going to talk about the impacts the work has on our ability to be normal outside of the work in our friendships, in our intimate partnership relationships, in our relationships with our kiddos, and in our daily living activities. Not only will you be hearing from me, but I have lined up some fantastic guests to join me to share their experiences, wisdom and insights as we work at finding some normal in the very not-normal of the work you do.

For today we are setting the stage for this awesome series and really working to name the ways in which the work is not normal, and…here’s the harder part to swallow: Not only is your work NOT normal, but the longer YOU spend IN it, the more difficult it becomes to feel and be normal in your life outside the work AND the more uncomfortable you likely feel in spaces that are relatively normal. 

So – before we dive too far in today let me preface all of this by saying that I know normal is a word that comes with some judgements. When I use it for the purpose of our discussions throughout this series, I intend it to mean typical to the average adult person in everyday living and interactions. For instance, when someone sees something dangerous, crisis-related or chaotic unfolding before their eyes, the typical human response is wired to go AWAY from that scenario. Human beings are wired to limit exposure to risk, threat and potential for harm for the purpose of survival – that is how we’re built and would be reflective of the average response. Part of what is NOT normal about your work is that you are trained and eventually re-wired to run TOWARD the danger, crisis or chaos. Not only that, over time that re-wiring can become increasingly hardwired in to not only run toward danger, crisis or chaos but to actually feel more comfortable IN danger, crisis and chaos, leading us to seek out or even create situations that satiate this craving. Can we just acknowledge that that’s NOT normal? This is actually a piece I talk quite a bit about and work to breakdown in my Beating the Breaking Point resilience training program where we talk about the adrenaline rollercoaster and the way it changes our brain’s pathways and responses over time. Neuro-physiologically you are changed by the work, we could map it, and normal-people jobs don’t generally have this kind of functional impact on their actual neuro-biology. 

In preparation for today’s episode, I spent some time brainstorming a list of things that are not normal about the work you do, and that result in creating some not-normal problems for you in your daily life outside of the work. Fun, right? My guess is that you might think of some others, and feel free to shoot me a message because I might circle back to them in another episode. 

Let’s start with the parts of your job that are not normal:

1.      If you work shift-work, shift-work is NOT normal. There is not a human on earth who is wired to engage in rotating shifts flipping between days and nights on 12 hour shifts for a 4 day 4 off set. It’s not a thing. I get that emergencies happen 24 hours a day and that staffing needs to fairly distribute hours and all that jazz…but that doesn’t mean anyone is built to withstand the demand of it – particularly long term. The physical fuck-up that comes from this has consequences – we talked about some of that during our episode with sleep specialist Dr. Glenn Landry on Season 2 Episode 12 – and those are not consequences that the average joe-citizen faces. Circadian rhythm disorders can lead to significant health concerns, as well as mental health impacts. 

2.      Dark humor is NOT normal. I will be the first to say that dark humor is a requirement for survival in the work you do and there is no shame for using it. That said, it’s also important to identify that it’s not normal. Humour has always been a method of coping for humanity, regardless of what it’s connected to, but humour grounded in human suffering isn’t generally used by people in everyday life. We’ve likely all had those moments of exposing a dark humour moment in a room with people who don’t get it and having that moment of shocked silence – that’s a solid reflection of how not-normal this is. 

3.      Running toward the danger rather than away is NOT normal. Like I already mentioned, human beings are wired first and foremost for survival. We have a deeply rooted genetic code that comes with generational learning that has trained us to go away from scary, intense, risky situations to keep ourselves safe above all else. Now, this one tends to be a bit of a combination of two factors: personal pre-work training factors, and then professional training factors. We need to acknowledge that some people enter the work BECAUSE they already feel wired to run toward the danger. Often this comes from personal experiences with intensity and potentially trauma that have trained us in our personal lives to frame a role that feels more secure, valuable or otherwise capable in high-risk, high-stress situations. To be totally honest, in my work I have found a disproportionate number of my first response and front line work clients have histories of childhood abuse, neglect, or trauma that led them to feel passionately about helping while simultaneously uniquely equipped to be in danger, stress and chaos because it has been all-too-familiar for so very long. Now this isn’t everyone’s story, but it is a story I hear a LOT. For others, as well as for those who come into the work training with some degree of comfort in the risk, the training does the rest. The training forces our brains to re-wire and teaches us to shut down or shush our normal human responses in order to choose to go toward the risk. While this is what allows you to be awesome at what you do, I’m also going to tell you that it comes with a cost. 

4.      Being a part of everyone’s worst day is NOT normal. I can’t think of any other industry where every interaction is someone’s worst day. Where nearly every interaction has some degree of life or death. That’s NOT normal! Most other professions have measurable wins that show up on a semi-consistent basis that people can anchor to and feel reflective of their effort. There’s something they can point to and feel good about. Walking into situations knowing that this is someone’s worst day, over and over and over again, and experiencing the wins as few and far between and difficult to measure is not normal. 

5.      Living a constant cliff-hanger is NOT normal. The adrenaline response of being on a call or dealing with a situation is one thing, but the worst is not knowing what happens once your part to play is done. As the dispatcher you may not know what happens once you’re off the call, the fire fighter doesn’t know what happens once the ambulance pulls away, the medics don’t know what happens once they release to the hospital staff, the emerg staff don’t know what happens once they stabilize and send off to whichever unit…each int...

Show Notes:

On today’s episode we are wrapping up our Trigger Happy series by talking about trigger prevention. Let me be really clear that when I say trigger prevention, I do NOT mean AVOIDANCE. Preventing triggers is an active state, it means being engaged and working to reduce the likelihood that something potentially or actually triggering will yield a strong stress reaction. It is a pre-emptive effort at unpairing or limiting the extent to which a stress or trauma-related pairing produces all of the survival responses we’ve been talking about throughout this series. Avoidance on the other hand, is about just not coming into contact with triggers at all. Avoidance is a passive state…although it doesn’t always feel passive when you’re driving way out of your way to avoid driving by that one intersection or have to find an entirely new place to shop to avoid that one grocery store, or whatever the case may be. Avoidance is trying to let your brain off the hook to not have to do the big reaction, but as we discussed a couple of weeks ago, it actually creates a whole new set of problems. You see, as we avoid something our brain thinks, yep, this is a great idea, and it will work harder and harder to continue avoiding that trigger…and it will start to generalize that trigger to other pieces kind of like it…and as we avoid more we actually create increased anxiety and reaction to the trigger. Not so off the hook then, are we?

For our purposes, I am going to break trigger prevention down into two major categories that I’m going to call Personal Resilience Strategies, and Event-Related Resilience Strategies.

Let’s start with personal resilience strategies. Have you ever noticed the difference between doing something challenging on a day when you have had lots of rest, feel calm, feel meaningfully connected to others, and so on; versus on a day when you’ve barely slept, feel frazzled and find yourself feeling lonely and adrift? 

When we face triggers, it is energy depleting and a resource suck. If we enter those moments already depleted, there is only so much we can draw from, and once that is tapped out it becomes a LOT harder to cope with the trigger and manage it. This opens up a window for the trigger to feel so much more intense and to hijack you so much further into your stress reactions, further entrenching the trigger as an association with negative and stress-related experiences. So, when we talk about personal resilience strategies, we’re talking about the pieces that help us build a buffer so that when we interact with triggering we are entering the moment with the fullness of our energy and resources in place. If we can focus on building our personal resilience by investing in intentionally attending to and growing our buffer, we are more likely to prevent, or at least, reduce the intensity of impact from a triggering experience.

Like I said before, this isn’t an avoidance strategy – it’s an active strategy that requires that you invest in your buffer continuously and consistently. I know that sounds like a lot of work, but if I could promise you that investing here was guaranteed to yield less frequent or intense triggering, wouldn’t it feel worth it? 

When we talk about personal resilience strategies, the focus is on strengthening the parts of our brain that help us feel calm, collected, and anchored – buffered from or quickly responsive to the random things that come up and try to knock us over. Working to enhance things like sleep, fitness, nutrition, hydration, being grounded and mindful, feeling nurtured, connected and cared for by self and others, and limiting exposure to counter-productive pieces like screens, substances, and other mindless numbing or counter-productive distraction. These are the focal points of personal resilience. 

Now, I know that covers a lot of ground and might feel a bit overwhelming to tackle. Don’t get stressed out, the goal is not to go from depleted and struggling to do any of these pieces to jumping all in to all of them. That won’t be sustainable and sets us up to fail. For now, focus on just a couple of tweaks and then build off of it. 

Need some ideas? Choose two of these suggestions and work on them for a week or two, and then try adding in one or two more. Slowly but surely, you will grow your personal resilience and it will invariably have an effect in supporting your capacity to navigate triggering. And side-benefit, they have a bunch of other advantages too! Try going to bed 10-20 minutes earlier than you might normally. Drink one full glass of water first thing after you get out of bed in the morning. Take a quality B complex supplement daily. Turn off screens 30 minutes before going to bed. Stretch for 5 minutes before going to sleep or stretch for 5 minutes on your lunch break. Delay alcohol or substance consumption by drinking one full glass of water first. Talk or text with a friend or loved one. Connect with someone who makes you laugh. Spend 5-10 minutes outside in the fresh air at some point during your day. 

If you’ll notice, none of these things are big things. They are all small and do-able. If you incrementally work to bridge some of these pieces into your daily routine, the additive effect will be consequential in helping to grow your buffer and support your personal resilience as you face challenging days and triggering moments. 

If you want to level-up your personal resilience beyond the starter suggestions I’ve listed here today – I’m going to suggest two things. First off, go to episodes 9-14 of season 2 where we did our Back to Basics Brain Health series and covered topics like sleep, fitness, nutrition, screens, mindfulness and so on, in detail with experts within each field. You’ll get additional suggestions to grow your personal resilience repertoire from those episodes. The other suggestion I would make is to check out my Beating the Breaking Point resilience training program designed specifically for First Responders and Front Line Workers. The program was built based on my experience working with those on the front lines and seeing the gaps in your training that set you up for major blows to resilience and sustainability, and I packed everything that is most important for you to know, along with tons of tools to develop a personalized resilience action plan, into the program. Those who have gone through the training have given really positive feedback and we’ve seen the program used by full staffs in an effort to promote resilience and wellness broadly within organizations. You can learn more by clicking the link in the show notes. Just as a quick heads up, we will be running a promotional reduced rate coupon code for this program starting next week if you want to snag the course for $100 off. Listen in next week for details or keep your eyes peeled for those of you who are on our email list or follow me on social media, we’ll post about it there as well.

Ok, let’s move on to Event-Related Resilience Strategies. There are two parts to this category – the first is about risk reduction, and the second is about harm reduction. Risk reduction is a front-end prevention strategy. It’s about trying to minimize or reduce the risk that stressful or traumatic things will happen in the first place. Let me clarify again that this is NOT the same as avoidance. An example of avoidance might be avoiding an intersection because I was in an accident there and I find it trigge...

Show Notes:

Today we are getting really practical as we get further into our Trigger Happy series and talk about tools and strategies for trigger management. If you’ve missed the last two episodes, make sure you go back and check them out. Today’s topic really builds on what we’ve been learning about the last two weeks, and references pieces from the last two episodes that may not make the same amount of sense if you haven’t been following along, so I would encourage you to go back and start at Season 2 Episode 22 so that you get all you can out of this. Through this series, we’ve been talking about triggering – the experience that happens when we have a knee-jerk, psychological and physiological reaction in the present to something that reminds us of a stress-inducing or traumatic event that happened in the past. We’ve talked about how triggers can be really sneaky, subconscious and nuanced. We’ve also identified that the reactions they evoke in us can feel really automatic and outside of our control. And last week we talked about how the discomfort of triggering can lead us to get really crafty at avoiding triggers, but that this can create a series of new problems and that what we really need to do is tackle our triggers head on, but in a way that keeps safety intact. And that’s where we’re picking up today. When we face a trigger, we need some tools in our toolbelt to help us hold on to safety, and to support our brain in keeping the prefrontal cortex online. Today’s topic is going to equip you with the tools you need in that toolbelt.

So let’s jump right in. We’re going to talk about two main types of trigger management categories and I’m breaking them down based on the part of the brain we’re trying to help. So, we’re going to talk about limbic system regulatory tools and we’re going to talk about pre-frontal cortex activating tools. Again, if you skipped the first couple of episodes from this series, you’ll want to go back and start there so you know what I’m talking about here. As a super quick recap for those who have a memory like mine and need it – let’s remember that triggering is what happens when our stress/trauma centre is provoked by a reminder to something it has previously encoded and identified as a warning connected to a prior lived experience. When this happens, your brain thinks that this trigger represents the possibility that the bad thing that happened before COULD be happening again and activates your stress centre in order to get you ready to deal with it and prevent it from being like it was before. Your limbic system is the part of your brain most responsible for your stress survival responses and it gets all fired up really quickly. As we identified at the start of this series, your limbic system is also a fuel hog and it shuts down many of the other systems in your brain in an effort to give it all of your resources to help it do its job. When we’re triggered in a situation where a survival response is not needed to keep us safe, we need to regulate the limbic system to help is slow its roll; and we need to get the other parts of our brain back online to keep us present and anchored to our higher-level resources and capacities.

Alright, so let’s start with limbic system regulatory tools. If you remember back to the first episode in this series, two weeks ago, I told you that your stress centre has a huge influence on your physiology. It can change your heart rate, breathing, circulation, and so much more and all in an instant once something threatening is perceived. Fascinatingly, your body is among the most incredible feedback loop and this is no different when it comes to your stress response. What do I mean by feedback loop? Well, think about it like this. I’m laying in my bed relaxed and ready to fall asleep when I hear a startling noise. My limbic system quickly interprets that noise as a potential threat and starts having an effects on my physiology to prepare me for what might come next. Part of the physiological changes my stress centre is putting in place allows me to have heightened awareness, a highly attuned sensory system helping me to be extra-on guard and able to perceive additional indicators of risk. So I get out of bed and I creep down the stairs and I see something move from the corner of my eye, and that new information gets fed into my system acting as confirmation that yes, something’s up. As I move toward what I saw, my brain now has me even more highly aware of what is around me in preparation for how I might need to be able to grab something to fight with or know where an escape route is if I need to run away. As additional bits of information get fed into my system, it offers feedback to my brain that either confirms or denies the need for this stress response; and as my brain receives that feedback, it determines whether and how to amp up or slow my response. That’s the loop. And that’s what we need to take advantage of.

How, you might ask? Well, first, we need to get intentional to feed the loop SOMETHING. Once the stress centre has been provoked, your brain is itching to find confirmation of risk and threat. To help it detach from the sense of intense need to engage in risk scanning and threat assessment, we need to give it something that offers the opposite kind of feedback. So instead of giving it data that enhances its sense of confirmation around risk, we need to feed it pieces that strongly indicate the opposite of threat: safety. I’ll get to what that looks like in just a sec, but I want to make it really clear that when we get triggered and the stress centre gets activated and cascades into all of the physiological responses connected to this, it’s a bit like hitting the gas on a train going full steam ahead. To stop it, we can’t just let it coast its way to a stop, we need to actively pump the breaks. What this means is that we shouldn’t just ride out our stress reaction, because of a piece we identified last week, which is that it leaves the connection between the trigger and the reaction as is. So, for example, let’s imagine that I have been exposed to some stress-inducing situations that have involved loud noises before, and then I have this experience of a startling noise as I am trying to fall asleep. The noise is startling in its own right, but it’s also triggering times that have previously felt unsafe for me. The noise yields a disproportionate reaction in me. If I just leave that as is and try to ride it out, I am further conditioning this response that loud noise yields uncontrollable, disproportionate stress reactions, and the feeling of powerlessness that goes with it. Every time we are confronted with a trigger, we are being given an opportunity to teach our bodies something different, and we need to get really intentional in using these opportunities for all they’re worth.

Ok, so what do we feed into the feedback loop? Well, we’ve already talked about how the limbic system exerts a lot of influence over your physiology, and that it is keenly attuned to feedback from your physiological sensory systems to help it in doing its job of assessing and reacting, so we’re going to get crafty and use this to our advantage. Sensory input is a key way we can work to regulate the limbic system and help bridge our brain to a new potential connection. Smell, sight, sound, taste, touch…I know it might sound simple, but that’s exactly why it works. Here’s what you’re going to do – when triggering happens in situations where your risk of actual harm is low but your brain and body are having a hard time agreeing with you, you are going to input sensory pieces that affirm your safety or act as reminders of good, fine, ok, calm times. Here are some ideas:

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Show Notes:

As we open today’s topic on the avoidance dance, I want to acknowledge that avoidance is a totally normal reaction to things that are uncomfortable or actively painful. We avoid all kinds of things that we’ve had previous experience with or exposure to that has taught us that we don’t want to do it again. Avoidance is a stress reaction that comes from having learned something. We talked about this last week – if we think back to caveman times, and I go down a path and am confronted with a bear, my brain is going to take a multisensory movie that remembers the smell of sweet berries and the sound of a gurgling stream and the next time I head down a path with the same scent and sound my brain is going to be triggered in an effort to help me avoid another close call with big jaws and sharp claws. In that kind of a context, it can be a really good thing that we learn from our exposure to stressful stimuli in an effort to support our actual survival.

The challenge is that these avoidance prompts can become bigger or more generalized than is helpful to us, and if we’re not careful we can fall into the trap of learned helplessness.

For those who haven’t taken a psych class in a long time, let’s do a quick review. Back in the 1960’s Martin Seligman did research involving dogs. PETA would have a field day with this research, but at the time it was common practice. Seligman’s research was on classical conditioning, which is about the relationship that forms between two stimuli when they are consistently presented together. In this case, when a bell would ring, the dog would get a mild electric shock. After a short time of being presented together, the dogs would show a reaction as if they were being shocked whenever the bell would ring, even if the shock wasn’t administered. The bell became such a strong warning sign of the impending shock that the dogs came to assume and physiologically respond as if the shock happened simply because the bell rang. The researchers then took this one step further. They built a cage with two sections divided by a low fence that could easily be jumped by the dogs. One side of the cage was able to administer a mild electric shock, and the other side was electricity free. The dogs were placed on the side with the shock, and for any dogs who had not previously been in the bell experiment, they would quickly jump the fence and be free from the shock. Meanwhile, the ones who had been a part of the bell part of the experiment just laid down and didn’t even bother trying to find out if they could get away from the shock. This is what Seligman termed Learned Helplessness. The dogs had learned that they couldn’t escape or evade their fate…even though in this case they could have. The learning became so deeply held that they gave up trying and just stayed in it. 

Now, here’s where the research becomes interesting for our purposes. After they completed this phase of the research they asked a new question – can we break associations once they’ve been made? Essentially can we reverse learned helplessness…and the answer, is YES. In the case of the dogs, the researchers tried a number of things, including demonstrations of them stepping over the fence, bribery with reward as well as punishment to try to get the dogs to jump over to the non-electrified side of the cage. But the thing that worked was when the researchers physically picked up the dogs and moved them - when the dogs were forcibly given the opportunity to see for themselves that this side would be different. After two times of being carried over, the dogs started to regain their capacity for curiosity and were able to direct this toward their self-preservation rather than trying to conserve energy by lying down and waiting out the pain. Similarly, the researchers would ring the bell and NOT administer the shock, and while the dogs continued to have a physiological reaction as if they were being shocked for a little while, after several repetitions, the dogs learned that the bell was no longer associated with the shock. This process of unlearning a conditioned association is called extinction. We’re extinguishing the connection and the related reaction.

Ok, so what does this mean for us as humans almost 80 years later? Well, there are three key learnings I think we can draw from this that relates to stress exposure and the question of avoidance as a coping tool for dealing with triggering.

First, triggering is simply a more nuanced version of conditioning. In the Seligman studies, the conditioned stimuli are easily identifiable. Bell, shock, fear. Put those three together enough times and bell will yield fear even in the absence of shock. In life, we rarely get such a clean example. While facets of a stress-inducing or traumatic event can feel clear or obvious, others can feel far more difficult to identify. For example, in a car accident it might seem obvious that the survivor might develop a triggering reaction to driving, driving in conditions similar to the accident, like at night or in the rain, and maybe even to just being in a car or thinking about being in a car. Those are the easy ones. But there are far more subtle connections that can be made as well. For example, if the accident happened after leaving the house following an argument with a parent or spouse, the feeling of being angry can become a trigger because it was present at the time of the incident and serves as a connection to what happened. If the accident happened in a rural area with the smell of farms and manure; or near a fast food joint in all its greasy glory…these prompts can be so subtle that they are not even consciously in our awareness…but then we go to grab a burger and experience a flurry of flashbacks and feel totally insane. Remember last week we talked about why triggering exists – that it’s intention within your brain is for survival purposes, which is your brains absolute top priority and objective. While it can be extremely uncomfortable, inconvenient, and sometimes even newly dangerous (having panic attacks while driving is not safe for anyone on the road), it’s for a reason and it’s trying to do the important job of keeping you safe.

The second thing we can take from Seligman’s research is that avoiding exposure on the front end is a good idea. If we can prevent the consistency of exposure to the pairing of stimuli, we can reduce the power of the connection and the degree of damage we suffer as a result. This is where trigger prevention measures come into play. If we can work to provide ourselves with a buffer, a protective layer that helps us to keep our prefrontal cortex active during stressful events, we can reduce the consistency with which triggers are paired with events that feel significantly negative. What if, in the dog studies, the bell were paired with the shock sometimes but not all the time, AND it was paired with getting delicious food sometimes but not all the time, AND it was paired with getting pets and cuddles sometimes but not all the time, AND it was paired with getting a bath sometimes but not all the time – if the stimuli (the bell) were presented in a host of situations that evoked positive, negative and neutral feelings, it would likely become background noise. Not specifically becoming a hallmark of anything in particular. Similarly, if we can build experiences that evoke a variety of feelings with the things that could otherwise become triggers, we can be proactive at nipping triggering in the bud.

Another way we can prevent the consistency of exposure to the pairing of stimuli is by reducing our exposure more generally. I’m not saying avoid triggering here – I’m saying limit exposure to the stress and trauma to be...