Show Notes:

Today we are getting trigger happy and we’re kicking off a new series for the month of February all about triggering. 

What exactly is triggering? At the most foundational level, triggering is an emotional, psychological, and/or physiological reaction to stimuli that is outside of our control. Triggering usually feels unexpected, automatic, and like it takes over. It can feel unconscious, and difficult to consciously override and regain control of ourselves. It can be a feeling, like sadness or fear; it can be psychological, like flashbacks or intrusive thoughts; it can be physiological, like racing heart or difficulty breathing; and it can be, and more often than not is, a combination of these things all rolled together. 

Being triggered is more than just getting worked up about something. I was watching something on the news recently and the commentator used the word triggered to describe someone who was worked up about a topic, and while I can appreciate that the term can feel useful to mark the significance of someone’s reaction – it’s not quite the same thing. What the newscaster was identifying was someone taking offense to something and expressing their sense of being bothered. While it can be reactionary to get offended, it is usually connected to our beliefs and values, which we have some ability to look at, choose, and change if we want to.

Meanwhile, triggering – true triggering – doesn’t feel optional. It is connected not to beliefs or values that we have some say in developing or altering, but to how our brains have interpreted, internalized, and held onto events that we didn’t get a vote in choosing. Triggering isn’t about getting upset by something or someone – it’s more like being held hostage to a brain that had to face something hard and continues to feel subjected to that experience.

What’s worse is that for many who experience triggering, they don’t always know what they are triggered by or even what experience that trigger connects back to. And this is where it really feels like being held hostage – because we can feel swept up in reactions that take our bodies over, turn our day upside down, impact our ability to focus or function effectively, and we might not be able to even really know why. 

So let’s break down the mechanics of what is happening when triggering occurs. Your brain, while highly complex and interconnected, is also segmented into regions and areas that do different kinds of jobs. For example, we’ve talked a lot on the show before about the pre-frontal cortex which is the part of the brain just behind your eyes and forehead, and how this part of the brain is responsible for things like language and executive functioning which really means our ability to make decisions, problem solve and manage complex information. The pre-frontal cortex is essentially the manager of your brain. It takes information from other areas, like memory and values and so on, and funnels these pieces into how we want to choose to engage, respond or interact with things that are happening in our lives now and into the future. Being in your pre-frontal cortex, having this part of your brain actively turned on and working, is pretty much the opposite of being in triggered mode. This part of our brain helps us to feel grounded, present and in control. It feels regulated and capable.

So where does triggering live in your brain? Well, it’s pretty interesting actually. There are studies, and I actually had the chance to do my master’s thesis research on just such a study, where researchers use EEG or other brain-scan data to see what happens in the brain when we trigger the crap out of someone. How do we do this, well, depending on the population we’re studying, we might use images of something scary or associated with a traumatic event they’ve experienced, or we can use something called script-driven trauma provocation where the participants actually write the story of a traumatic event, which gets narrated and turned into an audio that they listen back to while hooked up to whatever brain-scan tech is being used. I know it sounds cruel, but it has been a significant tool in understanding exactly what happens inside the brain when people get triggered and the results are genuinely fascinating and informative in terms of how we go about thinking about triggering as well as how we go about trying to treat triggering.

When a brain is exposed to a trigger – something that your brain feels is in some way directly or vaguely tied to a traumatic or stress-inducing event that left a mark – your brain perceives this trigger as a threat, just like the event that your brain believes it represents. Essentially your brain has this background system running all the time that is scanning for risk and threat and looks for it through the lens of what it has already known to be fear inducing. When it picks up on any small reference to something that aligns with its previous experiences, it sets off an alert system in an effort to batten down the hatches to self-protect from anything even remotely like your previous experiences from ever happening again. When your brain perceives something that seems affiliated to risk, it quickly activates your limbic system. What is the limbic system? It’s a region in your brain that is near the back of the brain tucked up right above your brain stem at the base of your head and top of your neck. Your limbic system is the area of your brain responsible for your stress response including fight-flight-freeze-or-fawn response. 

Before we keep going, I’m going to pause here for a moment because there are some really important things to know about your limbic system. 

First off, your limbic system is highly connected to a ton of your physiological responses. You know how your heart beats without you consciously thinking about it? Same with your breathing, your temperature regulation like sweating or shivering, your blood pressure and other unconscious moment-to-moment physiological basics? Your limbic system, when it perceives stress or a need to protect, automatically exerts influence over all of these systems. It’s why your heart will speed up, your breathing will become more shallow, it even shifts blood flow away from your extremities and into your core. It does all of this to prepare you to be able to fight back, run away, or manage the risk in whatever way best leads to survival. 

Second, your limbic system has its own version of memory storage. Because it is so highly responsible for altering your physiological state, it tracks events and stores memory like a muti-sensory movie. It believes that it needs to recall all aspects of a traumatic or stress-inducing event in order to be able to effectively prevent it from recurring in the future. So it takes note of additional information that regular memories, non-traumatic memories, wouldn’t normally care to remember. Things like smells, body positioning, vague sounds, lighting…all kinds of things that are way over and above what normal memory systems care to give strong attention to. 

Third, your limbic system doesn’t own a watch. While other parts of your brain have access to a clock that lets it know whether something was past, present or future, your limbic system only deals in the now. It doesn’t care if your heart beat 10 seconds ago, or frankly whether it will beat 10 seconds from now, it only cares that it is beating. The tricky thing about this is that memories connected to this area and stored as a multi-sensory movie, aren’t stored as memories from something that happened (past-tense) but rather as something that is continuing to be happening whenever it gets…you guessed it…triggered.&nb...

Show Notes:

Today I am joined by one of my favourite people to have on the show, Jenn Pound. Jenn is a retired RCMP staff sergeant and has been a guest on the show a number of times. Today we’re also joined by a friend of Jenn’s, Greg Scollon. Now, if you don’t already know, we’ve been working through a series on detangling identity and we’ve been talking about the need to protect our sense of self, our identities, from becoming entangled and enmeshed with the work roles we serve in. We have, throughout the series, talked about the risks of over-identifying with the job, particularly when the work you do is so crisis driven and out of your control. We have also talked about practical tools for supporting greater protections around our identity, including building balance and crafting control. Today we are talking about cultivating connection and I am so pleased that we get to talk about this and related topics with two people who have been there, done that, and got the T shirt. 

Jenn retired from the RCMP after discovering that she was facing post traumatic stress injuries from her time working with the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team in Vancouver. She has shared in previous episodes about the impact of the work, and the lack of support she received when she most needed it. The systemic dysfunction and lack of support was career ending for this incredible woman who is a legacy member – married to an RCMP member, the daughter and sister to RCMP member’s – she was all in. But when push came to shove, they weren’t all in for her. 

When I asked Jenn if she would be interested in joining me for an episode during this series, she offered connection to a friend, Greg, and when I heard his story I was thrilled to have them both on. Greg worked for Shaw. That’s right, he’s not a first responder, but his experience being suddenly let go from work he had poured himself into is relevant and I think that his insights from going through the process of loss and reinventing himself are significantly meaningful for you to hear. 

Listen in on our conversation and gain insight from the wisdom of our guests.

Episode Challenge:

How are you cultivating connection? How can you make this a continual area of investment?

Sign up for the Self-Care Dare waitlisttoday to be the first to find out when registration opens and secure one of the limited spots in this cohort of the dare.

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 Jenn’s blog, Fuel For First Responders.

Use (and re-use!!) our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Check in with yourself around indicators for burnout and make sure you are being preventative or intervening when you need to in order to curb burnout’s impact on your life, both on the job and off. Signing up for this free tool also gives you access to our regular emails with new podcast episodes and other special resources designed just for you on the front lines.

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:

Today we are continuing our series on detangling identity and we’re focusing this episode on crafting control.

The challenge with the kind of work you do, is that while it draws people who enjoy feeling in control – it is an unending stream of out-of-control mess. Whether it’s the calls or the work-related risks or the organizational dynamics, there is SO much that happens that is not in our control. 

So, what do you think that means when we’ve enmeshed our sense of identity, our sense of self, with our work? US Marine Corps veteran and behavioural scientist, Dr. Kevin Gilmartin wrote the book “Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement” and summarizes this so well. He says, “If the job becomes your life, and you don’t control your job, then you don’t control your life.” 

Nailed it.

I said during last week’s episode that your work is a really important part of who you are. But the KEY is remembering and being intentional about keeping it a PART. A portion. Just a piece. Think of it like a pie chart. Work is a valuable piece of who you are – it says something about you that you do what you do. But if the piece of the pie chart your work occupies is the biggest slice of the pie, or outweighs the amalgamation of several other slices of the pie, then your balance is out of whack and you need to go back to last week’s episode to take a look at how you rebalance. If your work piece of the pie is dictating too much about who you are, how you feel, and how you value yourself in your world or experience value in the world, then you are running some serious risks and Dr. Gilmartin is hitting it on the head. Our work is so often outside of our control. The job is literally responding to crisis. The defining nature of crisis is NOT in control. And while we’re trained to enter into the chaos and intervene to help, the truth is that we can only ever do so much, and it is almost always REACTIVE which feels much less in control than preventative or responsive. On top of that, even within the organizational framework, we can often feel at risk of an adversarial or blatantly aggressive or hostile workplace dynamic that further undermines our sense of stability or control. Decisions that affect us are made without consultation and we are left to hold the repercussions.

If this is what we are using to define us, no wonder so many are burning out, experiencing mental health concerns and struggling to continue. When I make my identity tied to something that is so unstable, it is internally de-stabilizing. As we internalize an identity that defines us based on an environment and experience that can be so tumultuous, we internalize the chaos and the helplessness and the lack of control. And these features start to increasingly take hold inside of us and dictate how we feel, how we think and how we engage in our lives. 

THIS is why it is so deeply risky to make work our life. 

Now, I’m going to say, AGAIN, that work is of course an important part of your life. Yes, you have to work to pay the bills. And yes, you are allowed to love your work, feel passionately about the work you do, and invest deeply into the work you care about. Just not exclusively, or mindlessly.

I’m not asking you to not do your job. Really, what I want it the opposite of that – I want you, with all of the amazing skill, training and experience you’ve acquired, to be a kickass contributor to the work for a long, long time to come. Our communities need you. They need skilled, experienced people who ARE passionate about the work and committed to being in the thick of it. But we are losing really great people – veteran skilled staff – because the job got too big and swallowed them whole. What I want for you is to be mindful and intentional about keeping the job in its place – as a piece of the pie. And in so doing, I want you to craft something that is far more sustainable. Something that keeps you able to remain in the work for as long as you choose to be in it. 

Last week we talked about balance and distributing our interests and sense of self across multiple “pillars”. An important piece of this process is anchoring to building aspects of my life that I have control over. 

When we spend a significant proportion of our time in a workplace that really lacks control, we need to build a life outside of that that really enhances our connection to control, even in seemingly small ways. It is also really valuable to work at implementing pieces within your work day that give some amount of control back wherever you can find it. There are two specific aspects to crafting control that I want to encourage you to focus on.

The first is refining your values and the second is drawing your boundaries. 

When it comes to refining your values, it’s really a matter of taking the time to step back from the auto-pilot nature of life to really dig in and be intentional in thinking about what matters to you most. Life has a tendency to get us caught up in the moment-to-moment of the daily grind. We can get hung up in some of the survival mode that life calls us into. We’re busy. Work life, home life, fixing the leak in my house or taking my car in for the weird noise it’s been making, visiting that ailing family member, getting that call out of the blue that says my pet needs surgery or someone I care about is leaving their spouse… Life doesn’t stop life-ing. The pace is high and we get caught in the current of it. It’s not that we intentionally fall out of living into our values, it’s that we lose track of time. But then, before you know it we have lived a life of reaction to whatever has come at us any given minute – feeling out of control and left with that funeral question but without the time left to cast a different kind of vote for how people will talk about and remember us. When we can make the time, prioritize the space, to get clear about our values – and to re-clarify them on a semi-regular basis – we are more likely to shape choices that allow us to live into our values even when life keeps life-ing. 

When you are working to refine your values, I want you to think about where in your life you have experienced a sense of control. Think back – as a child or teen, as a young adult all the way to this time in your life – when have you felt like your best self? What kinds of activities or interests brought this out in you? Where did you feel like you were owning life? What are your greatest skills? Where do you shine? Who are the people who bring out the best in you?

Inventory the answers to these questions, along with that most central question – what would you hope that people would remember about you or say about you at your funeral? What characteristics about who you are and how you are in your life do you hope make the greatest impact on the world and those in your life? 

These are your values. These are the spheres of control for you. 

Identifying these, and taking time on a semi-regular basis to re-evaluate your values and how you are going about living into them, is the single most important thing you can do to help build a sense of control in your life. And in crafting an increased sense of control, we help protect ourselves from the impact of the areas in our lives where we experience reduced control. 

As you identify your values, try to get creative in thinking about how you can connect to these. It may not be the same and it may not be perfect, but aim for close approximations. For example, one of the areas in my life where I have experienced a high degree of control and feeling in my ...

Show Notes:

We are into our latest series on detangling identity and we’re going to talk today about building balance. 

Here is the thing about balance: life balance is not a fixed point. Life, and people within life, are never fixed points. We are always changing and adapting. Life is always moving and flexing. Ebbing and flowing. Think of it a bit more like balancing on a stand up paddle board on ocean waves. You might find a balance at one moment when the waves are calmer and the water is more still, but then the wind picks up, the waves hit a bit harder and each moment is effort to find and re-find balance under the fluctuating conditions. The tricky thing about building balance in our lives is we won’t ever be done with it. It isn’t a one and done. We won’t find this wonderful balance point and be able to just ride that out indefinitely. Life will come along and give us some waves, and we’ll need to re-adjust and re-discover balance all over again. 

I know that likely sounds a bit daunting, and I’m not going to lie, it can be. But here’s the good news – once you build balance that feels good to you, most of the adjustments will be tweaking. Like the stand up paddle board – it’s starting that’s the hard part. It is learning to find your centre and strengthening your body to remain centred in moving conditions that is difficult. Once you get used to it, get good at it, the adjustments are pretty small tweaks moment-to-moment to respond to fluctuations in the water conditions. 

As we look at detangling our identities from our profession, we need to focus on building balance so our identities are an amalgamation of who I see myself to be in various diverse parts of my life. Last week I suggested thinking about this like investment banking. When we build our identities in exclusive ways, like into our profession, or another common one is into our role as parents, and tie them to things that invariably come to an end or can be pulled out from under us, we put all of our eggs into one very janky basket. So then, if I’m off work, or I retire, or my kids leave home, my sense of self feels jeopardized because that basket just got yanked and my whole self is tanked without it. 

In investing they talk about diversifying your portfolio. Financially is isn’t wise to take your hard earned money and put it all in one company’s stocks. Because if that company takes a hit, you are along for that ride in a very deep way. The recommendation is to spread what you want to invest into a few areas so that if one takes a bit of a hit, it’s likely counterbalanced by something else that’s doing well, and over time you can better ride the ebbs and flows that are a natural part of the market, coming out ahead overall. The same theory is true for us as people. We need to conscientiously and intentionally diversify our personal portfolios. We need to invest our sense of self into differing areas so that if I’m off work for a stretch of time, the part of me that feels tied to that is supported by other things that also and equally meaningfully define me. 

So, where do we invest ourselves to be able to achieve a greater return on our investment? How do we do this whole diversified portfolio thing for our own personal balancing act?

It starts by cultivating interests and prioritizing time to be versions of ourselves that feel good, affirming, meaningful, and so on. Dr. Kevin Gilmartin, who literally wrote the book on emotional survival for law enforcement and whose work extends into most first response and front line work experiences, talks about “I usta syndrome”. That before the job officers tend to have a lot of friends, hobbies, interests, activities, and so on. But then, as they pour into the job and start spending more time with work-mates doing work-related things, they invest more and more into their work lives and less and less into their personal life roles outside of t he work. So it becomes, “I usta fish, I usta go out with friends, I usta go camping” and so on. What did you usta do? What used to mean something to you? What used to feel fulfilling or interesting to you? What have you always been curious about trying but never done? What was your favourite thing to do as a child? What do your friends like to do that you could get into with them? What does your partner or your kids like to do that you would be up for participating in? 

I was reading an article written by psychologist Dr. Rachelle Zemlok (link below), and in it she shares this story:, “Joel Fay (Retired police officer, founding member of First Responder Support Network and lead clinician at West Coast Post Trauma Retreat) was quoted stating ‘As I stood there an image came to mind, that of a roof being supported by a single pillar. If that one pillar were removed the entire roof would collapse. But I had a lot of pillars in my life besides work. I had friends, family, volunteer work, sports, and many other interests. I could afford to lose this one pillar. At that moment I knew I was going to be OK.’”

That’s what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to be intentional about building up other pillars to support the weight of life. Work is a pillar. It is an awesome pillar. We can get a lot out of our work and it does get to be a facet of our identities. But that’s where we need to be conscientious – am I allowing it to be a facet or have I defaulted into making it the whole shebang?

If we are identifying that we need some additional pillars and that we need to work at building in some more balance, there is going to be a temptation, and it’s the tendency to go to extremes. As we recognize the risk we’re at by making work the fullness of who we are, we are likely to try to swing to the other extreme and try to build 5 new pillars at the same time. That won’t work, and here’s why – people suck at sustaining extremes. So yes, you’ll join a gym and you’ll book a camping trip and you’ll buy some fishing gear and you’ll pick up knitting, and , and , and…and then you’ll likely fall off of doing all of it because it’s too much too fast. Start small, make it incremental, and recognize that building things…anything…doesn’t happen overnight. Like we said at the start, balance is not a one and done fixed and move on kind of issue. If we pile on too much too quickly, it will feel like that huge wave that came out of nowhere and rocks us off balance and tosses us into the ocean. If we can do it a little at a time, it’s like the smaller waves that our bodies can have a chance to be responsive to adapting to a little bit and a little bit. If you want to start working out more, don’t sign up for a marathon – start by going for a walk on your lunch break a couple times a week. If you want to volunteer don’t sign up to some kind of weekly commitment, but maybe agree to help out occasionally here and there. And don’t commit to things in diverse areas all at the same time. Space it out, see how it feels to add in a thing then another thing and let yourself notice the balance before adding anything more. 

When you are considering what pieces to add in, focus on your values. Many of us commit to the work because we value helping and caring for people and making the world a better place. That’s a cool value, but one that can also get draining if we’re not careful. Get curious and creative about ways to lean into this value without depleting yourself. For example, my grandma knits mittens, toques and scarves for homeless people. She does it at her own pace while she watches the news and sips her coffee. It is a hobby she enjoys that she is able to turn into something that contributes toward a value and that she feels passionate about. If we value time with o...

Show Notes:

Today’s episode we are kicking off a new series on de-tangling identity from the work we do. In this episode we talk about the commonness of enmeshed identity with work, cultural norms that support this kind of enmeshment, as well as the risks involved. In coming weeks we will tackle skills to work at de-tangling our identities from the work we do. 

In this episode I cite a couple of articles – check them out here:

The Atlantic article by Derek Thompson, here.

Psychology Today article, “You are not your work”, here.

BBC article, “Why we define ourselves by our jobs” with quotes from Anne Wilson, here.

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:

In this episode I cite a couple of articles – check them out here:

The Atlantic article by Derek Thompson, here.

Psychology Today article, “You are not your work”, here.

BBC article, “Why we define ourselves by our jobs” with quotes from Anne Wilson, here.

Use (and re-use!!) our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Check in with yourself around indicators for burnout and make sure you are being preventative or intervening when you need to in order to curb burnout’s impact on your life, both on the job and off. 

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:

These last couple of weeks we’ve talked about physical grounding to help anchor our bodies to the present. We have also talked about mental grounding to help our brains turn on the prefrontal cortex and offer counterbalancing support to the stress centre in an effort to approach times of stress with our whole brains working to solve problems rather than just our survival mode working on overdrive. Today we are going to talk about emotional grounding – another term for which is “self-soothing”. And when we use these three forms of grounding together, consistently and intentionally, we gift ourselves with an increased capacity to notice and honour our needs, as well as the needs of others, and we allow ourselves the opportunity to make strategic choices about how we respond in situations rather than feeling knee-jerk reactive to them. 

Now, if “self-soothing” sounds like “baby-ish,” know this: I often tell my clients that adults are just children in tall bodies. While our brains have matured just a little bit more than the brains of our kids, we still share much of the needs, wants, hopes and wishes of our child selves. We gained reason and logic, but we didn’t outgrow the need for support, care, nurturing and soothing. That’s not how brains work. Somewhere along the way, though, we decided that needing care and soothing was a “baby thing” or “weak” and we made it a cultural no-no to model what it looks like to do adulthood self-soothing. So we developed new habits to manage this gap – drinking, drug use, self-harm, binge eating, binge watching TV, endless social media scrolling – these are all our version of semi-socially acceptable self-soothing in adulthood. Notice how many of these things are not particularly healthy?

To be clear: the goal of emotional grounding is not to remove emotion, it’s to support our emotions to keep them within a range that seems ok given the conditions we’re facing, and that allows us to be in the present moment feeling appropriately about the thing we’re doing without undue influence from past or future.

Healthful emotional grounding aka self-soothing looks like and how we implement this in adulthood:

1.      Find faces you can trust. Try imagining the face or voice of someone you know and trust and care about, or look at photos of someone you care about, and imagine what comforting thing they might say to you in this moment. 

2.      Practice kind self-talk. When you are watching a kid try something and they mess up, would you say, “oh my god, you’re such a screwup, you’re terrible at everything!” …I sure hope not! When we’re talking to kids, we tend to have this ability to hold a lot of grace and be gentle and kind, compassionate and coaching. But with ourselves, if we don’t meet our own standards we rake ourselves over the coals. As previously mentioned, adults are just kids in tall bodies. You brain hasn’t stopped needing that kindness and grace just because you got bigger. We need to work at speaking to ourselves the way a good parent or teacher would speak to a child. “You are working really hard at this, it’s ok that you’re not perfect at it” or “This is tough, but I have done tough things before, I know I am capable of facing this” or “I’ve been struggling with this on my own for long enough, it’s ok to ask for help.” These are all examples of kind self-talk that we can work at implementing in lieu of our harsher self-criticisms, which don’t tend to help us make positive change and keep us stuck in feeling shitty.

3.      Snuggle. A pet, a kid, a partner, a pillow, a stuffed animal – find something and cuddle. We are wired from birth for cuddling. Cuddling is what helped us regulate as infants, to feel safe and cared for by our caregivers, and we never lose that innate longing for close connection and emotional reassurance. Research has shown that our “cuddle hormones” help to regulate stress, relax our bodies, and regulate our systems. 

4.      Play. Sometimes when we are feeling big feelings that are hard, we can work to regulate them by doing the opposite. When my mood is sinking, going to the park and swinging or playing tag can be an instant mood shifter. You can do this with a pet, kids, a partner, friends – go be playful or silly or spontaneous. Do something you used to enjoy, or try something new. Be a goof. Look silly. Be ridiculous. Give the child inside your tall body a chance to run wild for a beat, and notice how it feels different.

5.      Focus on favourites. Some people like to list things they are grateful for, others list their favourites of things – food, music, movies, places, books, etc. Whatever it is for you, catalog the good, the likes, the meaningful things in your life. Doing this helps us remember to see the forest for the trees and helps us step back from the immediacy and intensity of what we may be struggling with to see that our lives are bigger and have lots of good too.

6.      Find a safe place. Whether it’s a real place you have been, or an imaginary place you wish existed, choose a place that you can visualize and go to. Try to imagine yourself there with all your senses – what would you see in this place? Trees, ocean, stream, …? What would you feel in this place? A breeze, cool water, warm sunshine…? What would you smell in this place? Fresh cut grass, salt water, sweet flower scents…? What would you hear in this place? Crashing waves, chirping birds, stillness…? Try to fill the visualization out to make it as real as possible. Make this a safe place you can come to in your mind any time you like. Meditating on a safe place, focusing in on visualization like this, has been shown to reduce stress activation and support capacity for regulation.

7.      Listen to music. Music can be so evocative. It can elicit emotions in us we weren’t having 5 seconds ago. It can be tied to memory and nostalgia, good, bad and otherwise. Find some music that feels comforting, soothing, or evokes emotions that feel good to you. Have a playlist saved that you can jump to whenever you might need it.

When it comes to us doing these pieces for ourselves, our major stumbling block is likely to be stigma. Not just stigma from others, like I don’t want people to see or know what I’m doing for fear of being judged; but also stigma from within ourselves that judges ourselves critically as weak or something for needing these things. Here’s what I want to make really clear: EVERYONE needs these things. It is literally how brains are wired, and you are not magically the one unique brain in the world that doesn’t need these things or is better than this. While our culture like to praise independence and self-sufficiency and a bunch of other bullshit, it is also a culture that has increasing mental health challenges.  What that tells us is that how we are setting up expectations is NOT in alignment with how we’re wired, and we need to do it differently. So yes, this might be uncomfortable, and it might feel counter-cultural, but good! The culture is breaking us, so let’s be counter-cultural. Let’s declare a new direction for our culture and value supporting ourselves so that we can sustainably support and value others without breaking ourselves for it. Let’s recognize our own needs, be attuned to meeting them, and create more effective wellness so that we’re not on the verge of burnout every minute of the day. Let’s make new expectations and take ...

Show Notes:

We are back talking about grounding skills and ways to strengthen and resource our brain so that our brain can do it’s best, allowing us to be OUR best. Last week we talked about some basics around what grounding is and how it works. We also focused on practical and applicable strategies for physical grounding, which uses our bodies to help turn on parts of our brain that help to counterbalance our stress centre and regulate our system. Today we are going to be taking it one step further and we’re talking about mental grounding activities. 

Before we go into the practical skills, let’s pause for a minute and make sure we feel really clear on what we’re doing and why it matters – because feeling really tethered to it mattering is what will help us engage the skills rather than stay in our default patterns. 

I want you to think of your brain like a muscle. I know it’s not technically a muscle, but let’s pretend for a minute because in a lot of ways it has some parallels in how it operates. The more you use a muscle, the stronger it gets. When we need a muscle or muscle group to work for us in significant ways, we can benefit from taking time to stretch it, strengthen it, and so on. We also stand to benefit from strengthening surrounding and supportive muscle groups to help facilitate the success and sustainability of the muscle or muscle group that we demand a lot from. If we don’t carefully attend to caring for these muscle groups that we rely on, we risk injury. 

Your brain, if we can use the muscle analogy, has areas that tend to get worked out at a far higher rate than others. Our lives, from quite young, train us to be very conscientious about the future – thinking, planning, anticipating, worrying, about what comes next. We also train our brains to be highly aware of the past – reflective, learning, ruminating about what has happened so we can try to recreate what’s gone well and deflect from reliving things that haven’t gone great. These pieces of our experience, past and future, tend to activate the areas of our brain connected to our stress centre, giving it a pretty consistent workout. Add to that being in a job that is high stress and demanding, along with being in a daily life that tends to be pretty demanding in its own right, your stress centre has learned to be a pretty dominant force in your brain because it is the muscle you use most. 

Meanwhile, using it so often and asking it to lift so much of the weight of life, can lead it to being exerted to exhaustion. We risk injury, ie. mental illness and related concerns, if we don’t offer it some support. 

This is where grounding comes into play. Grounding activities, particularly mental grounding activities, help to activate your prefrontal cortex. Your prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that is responsible for all your higher-order characteristically human capacities, like language, problem solving, rational thinking, and so on. Our prefrontal cortex is where our executive functioning lives – this is the part of us that can assess, make decisions and determine next steps. When your prefrontal cortex is working, it acts as a support system to your stress centre – when your stress centre says “time to freak out”, your prefrontal cortex, if sufficiently strong, will jump in and say, “hang on a sec, let’s assess and go from there.” The problem is that our stress centre is connected to a very long evolutionary history of keeping us safe – it jumps to conclusions and acts without consulting your prefrontal cortex. Because we have trained our stress centre to be really strong, it dominates the conversation in our mind. It calls the shots without consultation. This is why we have to train our prefrontal cortex – the more intentional we can be about working out our prefrontal cortex, the stronger a voice it will have to demand that our stress centre take a breath before reacting and allow a more balanced conversation to unfold. 

Again, if we anchor to the muscle analogy – think of your stress centre as your abs. You do a ton of crunches and sit ups and bicycles – you do this every single day and over time you get some killer abs. Now, think of your prefrontal cortex as your back muscles. If you don’t equally work to strengthen your back, having killer abs will be largely ornamental and not super functional. Strong abs without a strong back sets off your alignment, weakens your posture, and limits your ability to engage in activities with the full strength that your abs have to offer. When you value the supportive muscle groups, you support your whole self and that’s what we’re aiming for. You’ve done a great job working out your stress centre. I’m sure it is really strong – but is it helping you? Is it capable of doing what you need it to do, when you need it to do it, in a way that benefits you? My hunch is that the answer is no. My guess is that your stress centre leads you to overreact or underreact in certain situations. That it might lead you to freeze in some situations, and go overboard, exhausting it’s own reserves, in other scenarios. I would bet that it often leaves you feeling regret about how you handled something, or uncertain about what to do next. And I bet it costs you a lot of energy. Energy you likely don’t feel you have to spare. 

So, if we are going to train our brain to strengthen the prefrontal cortex to help balance out our stress centre, let’s get to it. Today we’re going to talk about 7 totally practical activities you can do, anywhere, anytime, to help with mental grounding – and yes, you’ll find these in the show notes as a quick reference if you need them after you’re done listening. Let me state that these work best when practiced and can be used whenever as a training tool. That said, these can also be fantastic tools to pull out in moments of high stress, particularly if you’ve practiced them in times of lower stress, to help turn your prefrontal cortex on and give it a vote in the decisions your stress centre is making. When people do therapy for anxiety, panic attacks, and things like that, grounding activities are some of the first things we cover as they can be really effective ways to help the brain regulate fairly quickly. 

1.      Use short term recall. Your prefrontal cortex loves to notice differences and distinctions, track things and make use of short-term recall. Try a memory game – google “spot the difference pictures” and you’ll find an endless collection of images where your brain can work to find the distinctions. Similarly, playing memory with the flip cards, or playing that game with your kids where you line up items and take a few away to see which ones are missing, can be great fun ways of strengthening your prefrontal cortex…and theirs! Also games like bop-it or simon where you have to keep track of an order can be easy to do solo or with others.

2.      Play a categories game. I often suggest to my clients that they play the alphabet game. Choose a category – fruits and veggies; singers; song titles; movie titles; Disney characters; dog breeds…legitimately it could be virtually anything, and work the category through from A-Z. Try to find at least one thing for each letter. If you get stuck, remember that the point of the activity is not to actually find something for each letter, it’s to turn on your prefrontal cortex and regulate your stress centre, so if you’re starting to get stressed that you can find a fruit or veggie that starts with x, skip it and move on. No one will ever know, you are not being tested.

3.      Use math. Your prefrontal cortex is heavily involved in all things n...

Show Notes:

In today’s episode we are continuing to work on back to basics for brain health and we are finishing this series by address grounding. What exactly is grounding? Grounding is a term we use to describe various activities that help people to feel anchored to present time, space and capacity. So often in the busy-ness of our lives, we get caught up in thinking about the past, or focused on the future. Thinking of that next place I need to be or reflecting on that time way back when… When we are spending time in past or future, ruminating about things that have happened or anxious about the next thing to happen, we activate our stress center. Our stress center's job is to help us manage significant stressors – but when we’re talking about past or future, there’s not a lot we can do about those stressors right now – so our body just sits in the distress of having our stress center running without anywhere to put that energy that meaningfully changes or supports the past or future scenario. The role of grounding is to help us anchor back to the present moment, in our present space, in our present day selves. 

When we engage in grounding activities, we help to quiet the stress center of our brain AND we help to resource it by strengthening connections to the best thinking parts of our brains (the pre-frontal cortex). The benefits of strengthening these connections between your stress center brain and your awesome thinking brain is that when stress comes, you will have enhanced capacities to navigate the stress from a place that utilizes some of your best thinking resources. If we don’t work to build these connections, we’ll be more likely to feel overwhelmed or shut down by stress, unable to find a way to navigate it, or being reactive to stressors rather than thoughtfully responsive to them. 

For today we’re going to focus on physical grounding activities, and in coming weeks we’ll talk about mental grounding and emotional grounding. Blending activities related to all three together will give you the most bang for your buck in supporting your brain, so it can give back to you in big ways. So do be sure to listen to all three episodes and pick out some action items that you are going to try out sometime during your week. 

Alright, Lindsay’s list of physical grounding activities:

1.      Interact with hot and cold. Using temperatures to help our bodies anchor can be really useful. One version of this is holding an ice cube, or putting an ice pack on your neck, or submerging your hands in cold water; and then if you want, try alternating this with a heating pad or submerging in warm water. The sensory feedback of more extreme hot and cold is something our brain will tend to focus in on and prioritize over other kinds of fleeting thoughts, so using temperature can be a great way to help your body connect to present and anchor here.

2.      Actually get grounded. A few weeks ago Dr. Catherine Multari, the naturopathic doctor who joined us for our episode on nutrition and supplementation and the brain shared a suggestion to go out into your yard, take your shoes off and spend some time with your feet in the grass. Plant yourself. Root yourself. There is something that ties us to the earth and connecting to nature is a part of who we are. Another version of this is putting bare feet into sand or digging with bare hands in the garden. It is the tactile connection between us and the earth.

3.      Use sensory objects. Have you seen those fidget spinners or those silicon poppers that they make for kids to manage ADHD or tendencies for stimulation? Having some kind of object that encourages tactile connection can be super helpful for adults too and can be extra useful in stressful situations. For example, I often suggest that clients going to court choose a tactile object – a particularly smooth rock that feels soft and calming to the touch, a pendant necklace or bracelet that has some bumps on it that they can touch, or similar kinds of things. This tactile feedback when practiced can help remind our brain to ground, calm and regulate even in more stressful situations. I have some stress balls I love the feel of, and a necklace that has some pointy parts that are helpful to ground me, and a rock I carry in my purse at all times that is a bit bumpy. They are objects that I can draw attention to, that give my brain sensory feedback and move it into interpreting that sensory information – when I use them regularly in calm moments, they build a connection to being calm – so when I use them in more stressful moments they prompt my brain to associate with calm and bridge me back to the part of my brain that has access to calm, logical, capable, and so on.

4.      Breathe. Obviously we are breathing all the time and that should be a no brainer, but most of the time, particularly in higher stress, we are breathing wrong. Most people, whether they know it or not, breathe relatively shallow a significant amount of the time, and hold their breath more often than they realize. Taking deep intentional breaths, and building breathing activities into your daily life can make a big difference to your general health and wellbeing, benefit your brain, and support more effective stress management. We’ve talked on the show before about box breathing as an easy example of a breathing technique you can try out – as a reminder in box breathing you breathe in for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, exhale for a count of 4 and hold for a count of 4. Do this for a few rounds, and then resume normal breathing. 

5.      Savour something. Choose a flavour or a scent and savor it. Draw awareness to it and allow yourself to really soak it in. Find a mint you love, a gum you love, a small candy you really enjoy and focus on the flavour. Alternatively, find scents that make you feel calm or give you a big breath and find ways to access that scent wherever you can. I do this in all kinds of ways. I keep mints I like at my office, lip chaps I love the smell of in my purse, a roll on essential oil that helps me breathe more deeply and feel more energized, and other essential oils that I diffuse at my home, at my office and in my car that make me feel calm and connected to good things. Be in the moment with the smell or the flavour and really focus on enjoying it. What I love about this is that these pieces tend to be able to fit into small moments and be portable, so they can be easily accessible in a lot of workplaces or on quick breaks.

6.      Move your body. I think we’ve heard a lot between our episode on fitness and our episode on mind-body connection, about how movement is good for us. When we are moving our bodies we need to have some amount of connection to where we are and how we’re moving so we don’t bump into someone or knock something over. Being in movement means having some amount of present moment conscious awareness. You can also use moments of movement to build your grounding skills – for example, while you’re out for a walk, really focus on your breathing. Try breathing in for 3 steps, hold for 1, breathe out for 5 steps, hold for 1. Play around with the count, but use this as a time to focus. Another alternative is being out for a walk and really paying attention to what you hear around you. 

Keep in mind, the more you practice the better grounding works – don’t give up and do lots of repetition. Simple is better – don’t make it complicated. And last but not least, get creative and find ways to bring grounding into every part of your day – at home on your own, at the park with your kid...

Show Notes:

Today we continue our series on Back to Basics for Brain Health and we are diving into the digital era’s great controversy – screens and brain health. 

Let’s start with talking about the common challenges that come up around digital health for First Responders and Front Line Workers. Some of the most common ones I hear in my office include feeling tired and finding social media scrolling, video games or TV to be easy, passive ways of feeling like they are “doing” something without actually having to “do” much of anything. Another concern is that engaging with screens becomes addictive – we seek the stimulation, the noise, the comfort of the busy-ness around us. There is significant reward to scrolling and stumbling on that hilarious cat video, or hearing an alert that let’s us know someone has liked something we’ve posted, or watching just one more episode of whatever the latest show is… Another challenge is that so much of what we once did is now on our devices. My husband criticized me awhile back for being on my phone a lot while the kids were in the room, and at first I agreed that it was likely more than I wanted to model – but I also realized that when I was a kid my parents ignored us for lengths of time to read the newspaper, call their families, read a book, read the mail, and so on – and now ALL of that is on my devices. So no wonder we’re spending so much time in front of screens! It’s also true that screens are just a very significant and unavoidable part of our day – interacting with screens and technology has become a central aspect of many workplaces, schools, and other public venues. It is also a part of our home lives as we help kids navigate homework or seek to connect with friends for a game or online chat. It is so embedded into our tasks and needed actions that even if we restricted use for pleasure, we would still find ourselves spending a lot of time in front of a screen.

Recognizing that there are some trip wires that get us hung up in a ton of screen time – let’s talk about the impacts. The research has largely focused on the impacts for kids and I think a lot of parents feel concerned about their kids screen time and work to manage that as well as they can given whatever factors are at play for their family. For adults, the difficulty is we don’t have our own adult to censor and help us manage our behaviour. We have to self-impose restrictions or guidelines that serve us well as people in relationship with tech. And that’s tricky, because one thing most people struggle with is some version of self-control.

The thing about self-control is that it’s not fun. The reward isn’t obvious or direct – it isn’t as rewarding as finding that hilarious goat yoga meme that makes you giggle every time you think of it. So doing self-control feels like it means depriving ourselves of something rewarding for some long-term benefit we don’t feel a clear sense of achieving that feels too far into the future to really hang our hats on. Which is why, even when we try really hard to reduce screens or regulate other parts of our lives, we will tend to inevitably fall back into old patterns. 

We talked about this concept a bit with Zam in the episode on fitness and brain health. We talked about how the long term reward of fitness is worth it but feels hard to wade through the uncomfortable parts early on where there are fewer short-term rewards to keep us motivated. He talked about the intangible rewards and anchoring to these, and we also talked a lot about having to really anchor to WHY it matters.

We’re going to have to take a similar approach when it comes to talking about screens, self-control, and working to side-step the tendency to fall back into old patterns. 

Before we start talking about how we’re going to shift and shape our relationship with our devices, let’s first acknowledge some of the significant impacts our existing relationships with tech have on our brain and our wellness. I want us to feel grounded in the WHY for wanting to take a step back from our coveted devices. And trust me, I’m talking to myself as much as I am to the rest of you!

Let’s start with this one – the advent of tech the way we experience it today has meant that we never get to turn OFF. The whole entire world is literally CONSTANTLY at our fingertips. Yes that means cat memes, but it also means that email from your boss, and news about bombings in Syria, and text messages from your mom guilting you for missing Thanksgiving, and, and, and… It is never ending and can become inescapable. It gives people who used to have more concrete boundaries in place, like your boss or co-workers, a level of access to you that they likely shouldn’t have – and it can feel suffocating. This has meaning for our poor brains that are holding way more than they were ever meant to, and not granting our brains a break from stimulation, expectation, demands, and information overload. There is some indication that this degree of connectivity is related with increasing anxiety rates. I can appreciate that the access to be connected to feels meaningful for us – but the reality of what it means to be “on” all the time has real consequences in terms of our wellness. For example, one study found that adults exposed to more than 6 hours a day of screens (including TV and computers) were significantly more likely to suffer from depression. 

One of the pieces cited in studies linking devices to mental health concerns like depression is not just to do with the information overload, but also with the sedentary nature of engaging in device use. We are finding ourselves to be an increasingly sedentary culture. I hear from a lot of First Responders and Front Line Workers this echo of “I was run off my feet my whole set, when I’m on my days off I don’t want to move.” And I get it – although I likely have the opposite problem as someone who is literally paid to sit all day. But this circles us back to that interview with Zam a few weeks ago – movement is one of the pieces that benefits our brain and our bodies in such meaningful ways, and the problem with devices is that they tend to really trip us up from getting the movement we need. They keep us engaged but stuck all at the same time, and that can be a contributing factor to mental health declines into depression.

Alright, we also have to call out the impact of screens on sleep and we’ve already talked about sleep’s impact on your brain. We touched on this one a bit in our episode two weeks ago with Dr. Glenn Landry. The problem with screens and sleep is primarily two-fold. First, the blue light wave emitted by screens and other lights mess with our brains ability to produce melatonin at the right time when it’s time to feel sleepy. This can make it harder for your brain to fall asleep and can mess with your sleep cycle – which then has negative consequences for your ability to feel regulated and capable when it’s time to wake up and face another day…especially when this adds up on an ongoing. Aside from the blue light issue, we also face the challenge of “revenge bedtime procrastination” which we also touched on with Glenn in our episode on sleep. We didn’t go far into it, so let me take a second here. Revenge bedtime procrastination is identified as a tendency to feel like we’ve earned some time to ourselves at the end of a long hard day. Work is finally done, dinner’s been made, the kitchen is clean, the kids are in bed, I FINALLY have some time to do something for ME. So we put on a show, that turns into 2, 3, 4 episodes; or we open a social media platform and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll – and suddenly 3 hours have gone by and I should have been in bed 2 hours ago and…well…since I’m already so late ...

Show Notes:

Thanks so much to Olivia Mead from Yoga for First Responders – check out YFFR and learn more here.

I am grateful for our conversation and the chance to dig into the brain science behind yoga and insights into training our brains to offer their best back to us. I so value Olivia’s background and deep-rootedness in the research as well as her commitment to supporting our community heroes who serve and sacrifice. 

We talk in this episode about taking yoga out of the chic studios and getting back to gritty training that we can use in real life. We talk about the essential aspects of mind-body connection and use of breath work and related yoga tools to support life in high stress. We also dig into the research and rant a bit about the system…you’ll love it!

Olivia Mead is the Founder and CEO of the non-profit organization YogaShield® Yoga For First Responders® (YFFR). Olivia is a life-long yoga practitioner and has studied Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Human Performance, and Trauma-Sensitive Yoga for Veterans. She has taught yoga since 2003 and has focused primarily on public safety since 2013 starting at Los Angeles Fire Department and Los Angeles Police Department. Since then Olivia has taught thousands of first responders and military personnel around the country and has spoken at several trade conferences, events, and public safety agencies. Olivia is a member of the Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association and the International Society of Fire Service Instructors.

Olivia shares about YFFR’s app which you can find by clicking here or by searching for YogaShield (YFFR) in google play or app stores. 

You can also find YFFR on social media @yogaforfirstresponders on Facebook, and Instagram.

Episode Challenge:

Choose at least one takeaway from today’s episode and work on applying in your life! And if you’re brave enough, tell us about it – reach out on Facebook and Instagram (@lindsayafaas), or email me at [email protected] and share what you’re up to, how you’re making use of what you are learning during our Back to Basics for Brain Health Series and how it’s going. 

Additional Resources:

Absolutely do go and check out YFFR and learn more here. They have a ton of resources and supports and are genuinely trying to help make a difference for those who sacrifice so much on the front lines. 

And if you haven’t checked it out yet, or it’s been awhile since you used this tool to self-assess and check in with your wellness, grab our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help assess where you’re at on the burnout spectrum and to get proactive in course correcting.

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