SPEAKER_01 0:00

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining Mindpilot. This is Dr. Janet Price Schwarz. Today we're going to talk about how do you know if you're running too hot? And that may seem like kind of an odd statement, but let me tell you what I'm talking about. If you've listened to any of these podcasts, you know that when I talk about running hot, I'm talking about having too much adrenaline and too much cortisol in your system. Now, those are two very important chemicals, and they help you when you're in fight or flight. They help you be stronger, they help you to run faster, to do all the kinds of physical things that you may need to do as a first responder. Unfortunately, when there's not an actual threat, all they do is tend to heat up your system and make you want to either run or fight. And if there's nothing to run away from, or there's nothing to fight, well, then it sits there and causes a lot of agitation. So let's talk about what are what are some of the symptoms of running too hot? Because most people that you're working with are also running too hot. You know, if you're a firefighter or you're a combat vet or you're a police officer, all the other people that you know are also doing the exact same things that you're doing. And so you're not even going to notice it. So are you waking up in the morning or in the middle of the night covered with sweat? Very common with people that are running very hot. Then you may be having nightmares, but a lot of people that are running too hot, they have too much adrenaline, too much cortisol in their system, complain of being hot all the time. And so very often they'll wake up just drenched in sweat. That's a very common symptom that I see. Other symptoms, are you mad all the time? Does everything enrage you? Even things that don't enrage most people. Are you angry all the time? Do you have road rage? Is everybody on the road stupid? Now they may be, I understand, but are you getting enraged about it, or do you just go, huh, that's an idiot, and you go on? How are you responding to that? How do you respond when something shifts in your life in terms of schedule? Does that really make you angry, or is it like, oh, I didn't plan for that? Okay, well, that's what we'll do. Or does it really make you angry? So uh anger, irritability, um thinking about things over and over and not being able to focus your mind on other things, um obsessing about things, uh, again, easily irritated, not sleeping well, tossing and turning a lot, uh, waking up again in the morning or in the middle of the night covered in sweat. Uh, those are all very common with people that are running way too hot. There is a tendency with people that are running too hot with too much adrenaline, too much cortisol to try and do even more. So because you don't feel good, you don't feel mentally comfortable, well, why not take on some overtime shifts or do another deployment or you know do some overtime because that's where you feel comfortable because that's the place where you have a bunch of adrenaline and cortisol, but you can use it in your jobs. The problem is coming home and things are quiet, then what do you do if you're running too hot? It can feel very agitating and irritating that things are quiet, maybe things are not set up perfectly, and suddenly you're enraged. And later, two, three days later, maybe you got some sleep and you look back and you wonder, why was I so mad? Well, again, adrenaline and cortisol make you look for the threat. So I have invited Dr. Matthew Sharps, a frequent um visitor to this program, and I wanted him to talk a little bit about stress. So, Dr. Sharps, you've heard me talk a little bit about running hot. Can you talk a little bit about the physiological stress responses?

SPEAKER_00 4:35

Yeah. Um, when you are running hot, it can be your best friend. Okay, if you're in the middle of a fight, the last thing you want to notice is there are pretty flowers over there. You have to stay focused, you have to have this tunnel vision on the opponent you're dealing with, on the for fire you're fighting, on whatever your situation is. Okay. And you don't want to be having a lot of thoughts that are extraneous. And so you want your body also to be in very, very good shape, the fight or flight response, where your heart rate is higher than normal, which means your blood pressure is higher than higher than normal, but your muscular strength is increased. Okay, that's great. But the problem is that there is continuity in the nervous system. Okay? This gets a little complicated, but when you're looking at the world, you're not really looking at the world. You're looking at the world as filtered through your eyes and your brain, okay? And you're responding then to your perception of that world, which if you're being attacked by a tiger or a viking or a forest fire, that perception you better respond to it. But the fact of the matter is that what you're really responding to is your memory of what you saw a tiny fraction of a second ago as it came through your eyes. Now it's days later, and guess what? We're responding to the memory the same way we did to the perception. And that means we're gonna get our heart rate up, we're gonna get our blood pressure up, all this very nasty stuff that actually uh under the long term is gonna cause you significant physical damage, cardiovascular, digestive, and so on and so forth, but can also make it very, very difficult for you to function in your family environment with your colleagues in non-emergency situations and so on and so forth, because that fight or flight response, when it's not in an appropriate setting, in the appropriate context, can be very damaging for you.

SPEAKER_01 6:11

What is the difference between, or is there a difference between chronic and acute stress?

SPEAKER_00 6:16

Yeah, that's hugely important. Acute stress, and the the the line between them is not the all that all that firm, but acute stress is the stress we have over the short term, a few minutes, a few hours, something along those lines. Acute stress is what happens when we're under stress for weeks or months or for years. Okay. Now, acute stress is something that your ancestors had to get good at. Okay. People were engaged in hunting, hunting of large animals and so forth, in what for us would be later childhood or the early teen years. They were basically functioning as adults. We know that. Okay, so they had to be good at acute stress, and that meant that you were good at that while you were still in your reproductive years. That meant that it had a chance to get into our genes, into our genetics. But the problem is this that a chronic stress, the effects of long-term stress, the symptoms are basically the same: higher heart rate, higher blood pressure, et cetera, et cetera. First of all, if they go on longer, they tend to do more damage. But secondly, they don't kill you immediately. What will happen is that in middle age or late middle age, which for which for your ancestors was basically old age, people live longer now. But as those things continue on, they continue on after you're no longer typically in your reproductive years. That means that our response to chronic stress never had that much of a good chance to get into our genetics. Now, it did a little bit, there's no question about that, but the fact is chronic stress, we are not as adapted to chronic stress as we are to acute stress. And that's why main one of the main reasons why maintaining these high stress reactions for a very long period of time is very damaging to us, and that's true both physically and psychologically, and once again in dealing with other people.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

So we've talked about homeostasis on this program before, but how much is the the tendency towards stasis part of keeping chronic stress at uh levels high?

SPEAKER_00 8:13

It seems very likely to have a role, right? Homeostasis is where you maintain a steady state. Now, when we've talked to a lot of people who've come out of the COVID pandemic, a lot of them report a lot of distress when they're back out in society dealing with, you know, cars and noise and you know other people and the stores around them, et cetera, et cetera. Because they developed a steady state of basically being at home and not having that kind of contact, that not that kind of that not that kind of noise. I've seen this myself when very, very urban people who've never really been outside of a major urban environment are suddenly subjected to the relative silence of some place like the deserts and forests of Utah, for example, or in western Colorado places like that. I I've seen people literally almost literally become hysterical with fear of where's the sound? Where are the people? What we're used to is what produces our homeostatic response, our maintenance of a steady state. Well, if what you're used to is the equivalent of active combat, if you're used to continual stress, or n never mind combat, never mind fighting police actions or military work or firefighting, if you're used to continuous, continuous stress at home, that's going to become your normal environment. And you're going to develop a set of habitual responses to that that are going to be very hard to get rid of.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

I've talked a little bit about it in other podcasts, but how would you change your homeostatic norm?

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Yeah, what we've seen in a lot of research is there are three main steps. And the three main steps involved in successful training for anything, okay, whether in in some of our research it's been the detection of improvised explosive devices or the development of better skill sets to do them with your family. One of the most important things is a prior framework for understanding what you're dealing with. Have a good idea of what you are psychologically and what the situation you're going to be in is going to be for you and what the likely outcomes are. Now, those that prior framework, that pr the framework of understanding you have before you get back into the situation, should be explicit for you. You don't want to give yourself a pass and okay, well, maybe this will happen this way, I guess this will be okay. Um you want explicitly to know what the steps are. Okay? You don't want to say, well, you know, I'm not going to be the way I am. That's not good enough. You have to have the steps. I am going to modulate my voice, I'm going to be speak more quietly, I'm going to give other people a chance to say more things. I'm going to remember, for example, that my spouse has been dealing with domestic crises while I've been out on the line dealing with emergency crises. You're going to have those explicit steps, explicit understandings. And that leads us to our third concept, feature-intensive processing. What you want to be doing is looking at the actual features of the situation, not just my spouse is mad at me, okay? But what are the features of that situation? What are the things that could actually be addressed effectively from our prior explicit knowledge that we apply to that feature-intensive, that feature-by-feature analysis?

SPEAKER_01 11:10

So clinically, what this looks like then is you're at work, you're wound up, maybe you haven't been sleeping, maybe you've had a long deployment, and you are headed home, you're tired, you're probably grumpy, you haven't slept well, and you're filled with adrenaline and cortisol. Before that ever happens, in your job, you know that's likely to happen. So you make a plan for what you're gonna do on your way home. You don't wait until you're in that state. You make a plan three months before. Okay, I know that if I have to be out for three months or two weeks or one day or two days, and I'm not gonna get any sleep. This is what I need to do before I go home. And part of that may be preparing your person that you're living with, your partner, your life partner, whoever that person is, that you're exhausted and that you need to come home and go to sleep. You know, don't wait to get home and they start wanting to tell you all about their week or their month, and you tell them to be quiet and storm off. Plan with them. That's what that feature-intensive process means. Take point by point and go, okay, I am going to let this person know the day before that I've had a really rough time deployment, time on uh overtime, whatever it is. Uh, I haven't slept, uh, I'm hopefully coming home tomorrow. I know that the kids go to school at nine, I should be home at 10, whatever it is, and this is what I want to do, this is what I'm going to do because I'm gonna need to sleep. And I am just exhausted. You plan it out, and the more you can communicate that with your life partner, the better it's going to be because then they know what they're going to do tomorrow as well. Rather than waiting until you get home and and expecting them to understand how you're feeling and you not being in any mood to have that kind of uh communication with them effectively. Does that make sense, Dr. Sharps?

unknown 13:32

Dr.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

Yeah, in terms of the research evidence we have, it makes perfect sense. Because what you're effectively doing is sharing this concept of a prior explicit framework for understanding, which is also feature-intensive, feature-by-feature in nature. You're making sure that you and the spouse both have access to a plan, to a plan you've arrived at as a prior framework previously to getting into the crisis situation. So you don't have just a general idea. You know how I am? Don't be like that. You don't just have that general idea. You have a feature-by-feature, explicit plan for what you're dealing with on the part of both spouses, uh, both uh partners, whatever your living relationship is. And so what you're basically doing there is make taking advantage of the better, the best cognitive characteristics of human beings instead of the worst ones when you go into that home situation, that social situation, whatever situation that you might be inadvertently and inappropriately applying your emergency self to.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

I think it's important to remember that you spend most of you spend a lot more time at work than you do at home. So when you're tired, you're worn out, you're run down, uh, and you've had a lot of adrenaline and cortisol in your system, you're going to revert back to what you do most of the time. And so the way you communicate most of the time as a first responder or someone in the military is typically to give orders. And so, and not necessarily to communicate the why or to problem solve, it's more my way or go way kind of framework. So the more you can have these discussions way before this stuff happens, because it's going to happen if you're a first responder or if you're in the military. So go ahead and plan for it with your loved one and figure out what works for both of you so you're not trying to decide this and communicate this when you're tired, because you're going to go back to your typical mode of communication, which is giving orders. And that's usually where the disconnect is when you talk to uh significant others of first responders, invariably, and it really doesn't matter whether it's military or it's police or it's fire or it's EMS, it really doesn't matter. They all say the same thing. This person gets home and they start issuing orders. They all say that. And why? It's because the person coming home is exhausted, they've had a long shift, they're tired, and they're full of adrenaline. And that's just a recipe for going back to your normal state of functioning that you are at work, not necessarily what you need to be at home. So make a plan, figure out what your symptoms are when you're running hot, and figure out what that needs to look like when you come home and what does it need to look like at work? Because the same thing happens at work. Maybe you were up all night and now you're trying to respond to calls, or you're trying to respond to situations. Are you getting angry? Are you yelling? Are you telling people do this, do that, and and just breaking down the whole communication uh of whatever group you're working in? You have to know those key signs in yourself so that you can take action if if you're running really hot. So what do you do? Again, you need to laugh, you need to distract, you need to listen to something that brings you joy. I don't care if it's 1980s music, who cares? Whatever it is that you like, distract your brain with it so that your mind can cool down, so that you can think effectively and maintain those good relationships. I hope this was helpful. Thank you so much for joining us. This is Dr. Janna Price Sharps with Dr. Sharps with Dr. Matthew Sharps at Mind Pilot. Please don't forget to subscribe.