Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from “Tactical Brain Training: A Guide to Trauma and Stress Management for First Responders and the Professionals Who Support Them” by Gina Rollo White. She is the founder and CEO of Mindful Junkie, a not-for-profit organization focused on first responder stress and trauma management. Gina has developed and delivered trauma-aware mindfulness and stress reduction programs tailored for law enforcement, fire services, medical professionals, military personnel and other high-stress professions. This excerpt explains that first responders often overlook or downplay their own chronic stress and trauma because of stigma and limited self-awareness and introduces Tactical Brain Training as a mindfulness-based method to recognize stress in the moment, regulate emotions and sustain emotional balance before, during and after crises.
I was speaking on a panel at an Officer Safety and Wellness Conference when an audience member asked,
“It seems like first responders are experiencing chronic stress and trauma. So why aren’t they asking for help?”
I get this question a lot. I think it’s hard to comprehend that someone whose primary job is to care for others would have difficulty tuning into and taking care of their own needs. My initial response to the question was to validate that stress is indeed a chronic problem for firefighters, paramedics, nurses, police officers, 911 responders, corrections officers, ER doctors, military personnel, and anyone who is on the front line of support for our communities in times of crisis. Along with intense challenges like rescuing a family from a burning house, pulling up to a fatal accident, chasing a perpetrator down the street, or working a sexual assault case as a daily part of the job, first responders deal with on-the-job stressors such as enduring physical and verbal abuse from the public, witnessing domestic violence, working an overdose . . . the list goes on. All these factors can take a significant toll on the mental well-being of these dedicated workers, especially as they accumulate day after day, year after year.
I then brought up the all-too-familiar concept of stigma as a contributing factor in first responders failing to ask for help. Admitting any type of mental health issue can create curiosity among superiors about job efficacy and leave coworkers wondering about dependability, generating both real and perceived issues with job security. As a result, mental suffering becomes the elephant in the room—everyone is conscious of it, yet everyone ignores it.
Among the thousands of first responders I’ve worked with over the years, I have seen glimpses of appreciation for stress-management tools, but that appreciation is overshadowed by nonchalance when speaking about their personal experience of stress. Many on-the-job stories are told with distance and even disassociation, harrowing details offered in a flat tone of voice with no evidence of emotion. When I ask follow-up questions like “How did you feel about what happened?” or “How did you deal with that experience?”, I mostly hear variations of the following:
“I’m used to it.”
“I’m fine.”
“It’s what I’m trained for.”
“It’s my job.”
“I’m not that stressed.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘“trauma.’”
If running toward chaos is a job requirement, yet openly recognizing that this leads to negative repercussions for employment, it makes sense why no one is asking for help. But that day on the Officer Safety and Wellness Conference panel, something gave me pause. For the first time, I wondered if we’d find more answers if we looked at this issue from the inside out. Instead of asking why first responders don’t reach out for mental health support, maybe we should instead be asking something like this:
If first responders have minimal acknowledgment of the impact of stress or trauma, how can they even know if stress and trauma are affecting them?
Two Sides of the Stress Coin
Stress is part of the first responder experience, no two ways about it. But stress is not always the bad guy. It gets the blood pumping, puts the body on alert, and can sharpen our focus, making us better able to protect ourselves and others. Good stress helps to get you out of bed in the morning, finish a project, or complete an assignment. It pushes you to work out, encourages you to reach goals, and propels you to take action in an emergency.
Still, even though there are beneficial effects of the stress state, the feeling itself can make the small irritations of everyday life feel downright threatening. When overly stressed, a simple miscommunication feels like intentional sabotage. A constructive criticism can look like a personal attack. An animated tone can be misconstrued as aggression. These misperceptions can send anyone into a state of distress, knowingly or unknowingly, with emotions that range from feelings of violence, anger, and chaos to distraction, sadness, and withdrawal.
Because it’s hard (maybe impossible) to eliminate stress altogether, a more realistic solution is to acknowledge stress and work with it, using the good stress in emergent situations and regulating the bad stress to ease the suffering we experience from those situations. The key to this is mental regulation—knowing what is occurring while it’s happening, then making purposeful decisions in the moment. Creating a connection between what and how you feel helps restore your ability to show up the way you want to, at work and at home.
However, working with stress is only part of the equation. The other equally important part, essential for first responders and those involved in chronically high-stress or traumatic environments, is a clear strategy for becoming aware of, organizing, and regulating the emotions that stress brings up. Coming up with a game plan to manage the two sides of the coin—noticing the impact of high-stress experiences and learning to regulate response to that impact before, during, and after times of crisis—is what Tactical Brain Training is all about. It develops your ability to think about your thoughts and emotions in real time, as they are happening, so that you can respond in ways that help situations rather than make them worse. Each Mindfulness Intervention practice builds the “muscles” of self-awareness and behavioral control—you’re training your brain to recognize you are doing something while you are doing it. Then TBT takes it one step further: rather than just acknowledging that you lost your cool (Crap, I did it again!) Tactical Brain Training teaches you to notice the next time it occurs (This is what it feels like when I’m losing my cool), then deploy an intervention that helps you regain emotional balance.
What is emotional balance? While it looks different for every person and for every situation, in general it refers to the ability to manage whatever situation comes up without becoming overwhelmed by the associated feelings. Often described with phrases like “being in the zone” or “finding flow state,” emotional balance is a feeling of calm awareness and mental stability. For the purposes of this book, we will define emotional balance as being mentally energized and at ease, having agency and ability to rationally respond to situations.
When life feels like all is going well, emotional balance is easy to achieve. But when we’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed, emotional balance becomes difficult to access. When shit hits the fan, emotions fly everywhere like shrapnel, unless we bring our thinking brain into the equation.
The Four Elements of Mindfulness
The definition of mindfulness I resonate most with is by Jon Kabat-Zinn:
Let’s break it down a bit:
- Awareness: Being conscious of the fact that you are doing something
- Paying attention on purpose: Deciding to identify and, notice thoughts/actions
- Present moment: Doing it right here, right now
- Non-judgmentally: Without beating yourself up
Mindfulness teaches us to strategically think about the information offered by our emotions. It starts with noticing what is occurring at the moment it is happening, becoming curious about the feelings associated with what we notice, and concludes with choosing an action to ease those feelings.
For example, I was walking down the street, not a care in the world, when suddenly I felt “off.” Because I have been training my brain for years, I quickly realized I had had a mood shift (awareness). I then deliberately became curious, wanting to understand what this mood shift was (paying attention on purpose), and I decided to do it right then and there (present moment). Rather than getting caught up in the fact that I was in a bad mood all of a sudden (non-judgmentally), I instead deployed a mindfulness intervention by taking a few deep, slow breaths. The intervention calmed me down a bit, which gave me a moment to identify more precisely what I was feeling and why. Turns out that I’d walked past someone who reminded me of my father, who had recently passed away; while I hadn’t consciously noticed this similarity, my subconscious brain had registered it, and it had brought up feelings of sadness and agitation. Rather than getting caught up in those feelings or stuffing them down only to have them eat me up inside—both of which invariably make me relate to my surroundings in a negative way—I allowed myself to feel the difficult emotions for a few minutes (another Mindfulness Intervention that we’ll discuss in a later chapter). Giving those feelings room to breathe was the final piece that restored my emotional balance and allowed me to continue on my way.
Through repetitive practice of Tactical Brain Training tools, your brain learns to notice you are losing your emotional balance while it’s happening and to take action toward restoring emotional balance before you do anything else. Over time, you will develop a preemptive sense for when your balance is about to go awry and an instinct for seamlessly incorporating a Mindfulness Intervention that helps moderate your stress and allows you to think clearly and respond the way you want to.
The tricky part, as you might have guessed, is doing this in the moment. We all know it’s way easier to analyze a situation after the fact, but in the moment of stress? Not so easy. However, TBT helps you develop a sense for what it feels like when you’re leaning toward imbalance. It’s kind of like riding a bike. When you first learn to ride, you have no reference for how to respond to the bike’s wobbling motion. But the more you practice riding, the better your body learns the nuances of the wobbly feeling. You develop an instinct for whether it’s a “normal” wobble that will work itself out or a wobble that means a crash is imminent. You also develop an instinct for the right motions that will take you from wobble back into balance, whether it’s to keep pedaling forward or to put your foot down on the ground and stop for a moment. With even more practice, you learn to anticipate what will create the wobble (a crack in the ground, turning suddenly, going too fast down a hill, etc.), and you automatically make the necessary micro-corrections to avoid the wobble altogether.
In the same way, finding your emotional balance starts with noticing whenever you’re out of balance and tactically choosing an action to restore your balance. To reinforce this effort, it’s important to practice noticing without judging yourself. Instead of berating yourself once you notice that you’ve fallen into an emotional reaction, all you need to say to yourself is something like this: The negative reaction happened, I noticed it, now get down to business recovering the balance.
About the author
Gina Rollo White, MA is an author, keynote speaker and mindfulness leader. She is the founder and CEO of Mindful Junkie, a not-for-profit organization focused on first responder stress and trauma management. With over 17 years of experience as a mind-body teacher and educator, Gina holds a Master’s degree in Mindfulness Studies from Lesley University. Her graduate thesis, Mindfulness and Law Enforcement: An Effective Approach to Implementing Mindfulness for First Responders, laid the foundation for her work with trauma-sensitive populations.
Over the past decade, Gina has developed and delivered trauma-aware mindfulness and stress reduction programs tailored for law enforcement, fire services, medical professionals, military personnel, and other high-stress professions. She has trained hundreds of departments nationwide and is a nationally recognized keynote speaker, presenting at conferences across the U.S. on resilience, performance under pressure, and trauma recovery.
Gina is the author of Tactical Brain Training: A Guide to Trauma and Stress Management for First Responders and the Professionals Who Support Them and the Justice Department–approved Criminal Justice Mindfulness Training Curriculum, Tactical Brain Training®: Mindfulness for First Responders. She also created and delivered the First Responder Mindfulness Journey on the AmDTx app and the Learn To De-Stress 15-day course with Mindful magazine.
