“Don’t compare yourself to the person next to you, compare yourself to the person you were yesterday.”
It’s no secret PTSD is an issue for 9-1-1 professionals. The two major types of stress we battle that can lead to PTSD are critical incident stress and cumulative and chronic stress.
In critical incident stress, our coping mechanisms are overwhelmed and our normal coping mechanisms don’t work. When we think of critical incident type calls, suicide, officer-involved shootings and calls involving children come to mind. The reality is that different types of calls may be critical to different people. We must stop being narrow-minded and stop trying to fit critical incidents in a box. Critical incidents shouldn’t be defined by the type of event, but by the response to the event.
Cumulative stress is common for people who work in chronically stressful situations. Cumulative stress results from an accumulation of various stress factors such as heavy workload, poor communication, multiple frustrations, coping with situations in which you feel powerless, and the inability to rest or relax. Sound familiar? Leave work at work, turn off the radios and take off the uniform. Change before and after work. Even wearing a Thin Gold Line shirt keeps us in the work mindset.
The difference between critical incident stress and cumulative stress is the incident. With critical incident stress, you can pinpoint the event causing the stress. With cumulative stress, you can’t remember where the stress started.
Stress can cause personal priority dissonance. Our actions, invested time, and spent finances do not match the personal priorities we claim for our lives. Think about how your priorities have changed since working in this profession. Most of us valued family time, had hobbies, exercised, attended religious services. Slowly, we let all those things fade away, and all we are left with is work. As a result, work sees the best of you, home sees the worst of you.
To overcome stress, we need to pack our backpacks with tools to succeed.
- Pack the whole circle of life. We need time with our family and friends, time for hobbies, and self-improvement. We have to have more than work in our backpack.
- Pack realistic expectations and modified responses. We can change the outcome of events by changing our response, even if we cannot control the events themselves. We can choose a negative response or a positive response.
- Unpack negative thought patterns. Stop diminishing positives and highlighting negatives. We have the amazing ability to overcome flight/fight/freeze every single day at work. Simply showing up is a huge positive for what we are able to accomplish for the community and our coworkers.
- Unpack avoidance. Procrastination is really just fear in disguise. Take the challenge by the horns and go for it. The number one predictor of PTSD is a severe perceived lack of control.
Ultimately, if we are aware of the problem, but if we do nothing to solve it, we still have the problem. By making the right choice when packing our backpacks, we can make positive change.
