Under Pressure: How Stress Affects First Responders’ Decision-Making

Well, good afternoon. Welcome to Mind Pilot This is December 27th, 2021, and I am Dr. Jana Price-Sharps. I am a first responder psychologist and a professor of forensic psychology.*INTRO SONG* We are here to talk to Dr. Matthew Sharps, who is a full time faculty member and is a researcher. He primarily focuses on memory and cognition. He has a great and in-depth understanding of the phenomena that all first responders are aware of, called fight or flight. His third edition of his book was just published this last year called Processing Under Pressure. It is published by Loose Leaf Law. Welcome, Dr. Sharps. Thank you for coming in today and talking to us. Thank you. Can you give them I gave them a brief introduction, but can you give him just a brief introduction of who you are? Yeah, I'm Matthew Sharps. I've been a full time professor for the last a little over 30 years now. I've published a representative of 300 articles and papers on the subject of perception and cognition, which is mainly affecting memory language, including two books, one on the nature of how mental events are represented in the brain, which comes in. The other hand is we're about to talk about because my other book processing under pressure and again that's 2020 two third edition, Loose Leaf Law Publishers. That book deals with the nature of perception, thinking and memory under the high stresses that happen both under, for example, stressful family conditions and also under conditions in the field and in your everyday work environment for first responders. Thank you. I think there are a lot of misperceptions about fight or flight, and there's a lack of understanding of how that's impacting the brain. You often say that the brain is basically our CPU. It's our equipment that is running the rest of us. And so when a first responder goes on duty, what begins to happen with his system or her system? Well, depends on the nature of the stress we see stress of two types, the acute stress which comes on suddenly and the chronic stress which can result from a long term exposure to difficult circumstances to violent circumstances over time. Now, both have very similar profiles, though under stress. The important thing to recognize is that you're preparing the body to deal with stress in what is really a fairly primitive way to deal with the stressors, for example, of the ancient world that your ancestors dealt with. That means you need big, hard muscles and you need to be able to move fast. So to do that, you need to get a lot of blood borne resources to those muscles. Now, where are you going to get that blood? Well, the brain is an enormous energy hog. We usually don't think of it that way, but your brain weighs about 2% of your body weight. But the figures vary, but it uses somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of your overall blood borne resources. So it takes a tremendous amount of energy when you need that energy in your body to get your heart rate up and get your breathing rate up and harden your muscles, get your endurance up a lot of it has to come out of the brain. Now, the problem is there are lots of brain structures that you just can't reduce very much in terms of of violent activity. The back part of the head, mainly by part of the brain, is about seeing or you don't want to shut that off to you. The other parts of the brain that tell you where things are and what the things are, you really don't want to shut those off. Parts that control your coordination and control the way you respond physically. Basically, the end result is this So much of the brain is got so many jobs to do under high stress that you wind up reducing your resources to a great degree to what's called the prefrontal cortex. That's the part of the brain right behind your forehead. That's the part that's involved in a lot of things, like good judgment and like allocating your attention properly, attending the things you need to and not bother to attend to, things you don't need to. It's really the part that does a lot of our higher thinking. And since you've done this, will have to be doing a lot of higher thinking to run away or get into a fight. We don't tend to be functioning quite as well in those areas when we're under extreme stress. So that brings the next question then. If the prefrontal cortex has diminished activity, which is where all our higher level thinking is happening, then what mediates that? When first responders are in very hectic crisis situations and that that part of the brain's activity is diminished, What compensates for that is that training is what. Yeah It’s a very difficult question. One's quite complex. What you're looking at in the overall fight or flight response. Several physical things happen to specific organs of the brain as the glands result in the three three major product products going into your body. One is aldosterone, which deals with your salt balance, obviously maybe sweating and things of that nature. That's what aldosterone is about. Other is cortisol, which provides you with necessary energy. The third is adrenaline or the adrenaline is what is really the core of this fight or flight response. So under these circumstances, what can you expect? You can expect, for example, that sounds maybe a lot quieter to you than they really are. Sometimes it's rare, the sounds seem louder. You'll find yourself focusing in very specifically on the center of what you're looking at. It's called tunnel vision. But most important, to answer your question, I think is the phenomenon called automatic pilot. You tend to start doing whatever you tend to do automatically without thinking about it. And a good example of that is if you ever swat a mosquito, you don't really think about it. You just SWAT. Look at those automatic processes Are controllers automatic or semi automatic process. I really should say I control deeper parts of the brain. So when the prefrontal cortex, so to speak, goes partly off duty, that's a little oversimplified, but apparently off duty. When you're under high stress, you'll tend to go back and function automatically. Now, this is a really kind of a long answer to the question. I'm sorry, but the gist of it is this. What is is the source of your automatic behavior? It's your training and experience. If your training has been bad, you will then start to engage in automatic behaviors which are highly negative, which may diminish your survival, may diminish your operational success. If your training maps very well, though, on to the kind of situations you're going to see in the field, you will then behave more or less automatically as you were trained, and these habits of mind will then be will then contribute to your success. What I mean to say. So a lot of this has to do with two major factors your training and your experience, because you will tend to fall back automatically on those factors under high stress. So correct me if I'm wrong, that is why very seasoned first responders can react more efficiently and make better decisions under stress. Typically, if they've, you know, had good training than somebody that is very new in the career and is still learning the career. That's a big part of it. Their experience and their exposure to good training over long periods of time have more or less prepared their brains for dealing with those situations In a way those brains couldn't be prepared without that training and experience. But there's another factor as well, which has to do with a concept called homeostasis. The maintaining of a steady state. Long term first responders may be responding better with reference to the prefrontal cortex itself under bad circumstances, because they've been in those circumstances so much that their arousal state may not be as severe as that of people who have not been used to those circumstances. And once again, people get used to those circumstances either in the field or under really good training that mimics the field as closely as possible. There's really two things going on here. One is the results of your experience of training and the other is closely related to that experience and training. Virtually. That experience may have resulted in your ability to deal with the bad situations quite literally more calmly with less of the fight or flight response involved. You know, that makes a lot of sense because when I've gone on ride alongs, for instance, I've been, you know, with officers that are very seasoned and officers that are newer in the career. And when there was a code three or crisis call, I noticed that very seasoned first responder would get on the radio, be very calm, would be calling it in, calling location, etc., where a younger first responder, newer in the position they would still do a good job. But it was faster and you could hear the adrenaline and kind of charging them up. And so that's why that part of that is homeostasis and part of that is training, part of that experience. Am I right? Yes, absolutely. That's a very good example of the combination of training experience. I remember being in a police car code three in a pretty major city with officers who were very experienced on this, and the officers was driving very quickly, managing to avoid all these various objects, vehicles and so forth out in the street, running the siren, running everything. And he was literally drinking coffee with his right hand while driving with his left hand. Another very similar situation was in a rural area where a man of very similar experience, lacerations of that very similar seniority, was driving the vehicle. And even though there were far fewer things we could have run into, it was in a rural area. He was still quite tense. He really seems sort of white knuckled on the wheel, driving at the same speed, but in a much less crowded area. And yet his level of relaxation was much lower. In the former case, the urban officer had far more experience of high speed driving under urban conditions to the point that, you know, rather than this being a crisis, it was more or less, so to speak, to state. He was literally taking time out of this high speed situation to drink some coffee. The other officer would not have wanted that distraction. He was really focused. And the main difference between these two two men of approximately equal seniority was the environment in which their experience had occurred and the amount of practice they'd had on Bronco go through driving. That makes a lot of sense. So one of the things that it seems to me, but correct me if I'm wrong, adrenaline because it does promote a fight or flight response, I think I said that right? Yes. A new recruit or fairly new recruit that gets into a high stress situation may be more likely to react impulsively if they don't have a lot of experience. In other words, they may get angrier than a very seasoned officer because of they're not they don't have that homeostatic norm that is used to that high of adrenaline. Is that an accurate statement? I would think so, yes. That's really part of it. Another part of it again goes to experience the understanding of something to me, the technical term, the understanding of scripts that operate in any given situation. Okay, We have a variety of scripts that we're all aware of that operate sort of running in the background as we go through our daily life. Most of the people listening to this can't possibly remember what they had for breakfast five weeks ago on a Tuesday. But if they asked, Did you get out of bed first or have breakfast first, everybody knows they got out of bed first. That's the script. That's what we do that they can go further with that. Suppose they say, okay, here's a guy who does it the other way every day. He has breakfast before he gets out of bed. My question is, is, is he rich or poor? Virtually everybody goes, he's rich, right? He has breakfast in bed. His butler brings it to him. We often have this script about things like eating things like the patterns of eating. If I were to start asking you questions about you setting your dining room table, you'd be able to tell me without ever having thought about it before what you do, what you put down first, etc., etc. All this stuff operates more or less on automatic. Now where that's important is the same kind of scripting phenomena occur in the rarer world of high speed or tactical situations. Officers will develop scripts, hopefully adaptive scripts of the scripts that reflect good training and successful experience, which they'll then bring to bear. Just as when you set the table, you bring those long term scripts of a high dollar table to set efficiently the officer dealing with an arrest, the officer dealing with high speed driving under different circumstances, that officers had different experiences. For example, of different parts of a given city or rural area that present different hazards. His or her habitual responses. We term automatic pilot. It's not really a technical term, but it's practically a technical term to say that you, an automatic pilot, will tend to conform more closely to whatever that experience and that training dictates. You know, my one of my mentors early on in my career was a field training officer, and I did a lot of ride alongs with him. And he was an amazing man. And I, I watched him work with younger officers and I from my experience with him, I really feel like the field training officer has such an amazing impact on those young recruits. If the young recruit can see that seasoned officer working with the public, responding in ways that are that work out well, for instance, then that new recruit begins to develop that script from watching his FTA. Oh, is that a fair statement? That should be absolutely. And although the specific research hasn't been done on this, to my knowledge, a psychological theories, cognitive theory shows very clearly that your first experiences in an even set situation really stick with you. And so that first field training officer, his or her behavior toward the recruit, his or her way of handling things, the recruiter is going to be watching that. And those first experiences of police work are very life. I don't want to say set the tone of the career. That is probably an overstatement, but they're certainly going to be very important and for a very long time. And there's a flipside of that, too. If those experiences are negative, that negativity may stick with that recruit for a very long time. It is an extremely important that the initial experiences of the recruit give a very good view of how best to succeed in police work and law enforcement work in that given environment. Obviously, that'll differ between rural and urban environments, between different precincts in any given environment for in any given law enforcement region, for example. But that's going to be the leftovers themselves. So what are the best what are the most important things to show these recruits early on? Some of that really should be in the minds of people both doing training and involved. Involved training in other ways is the initial experiences are likely to be relatively formative. So one of the things you mentioned earlier was homeostasis. And I want to hone in a little bit on that. So if the person has had a long career, you know, ten plus years as a first responder, and so their system is used to being fairly adrenalized significant cortisol output and maybe they've been even working long hours and now they come home. What does that transition and what are some problems and what are some transition problems that you might see. That will vary a lot because of individual differences. Some people are temperamentally more easygoing than others. Some people have hobbies, some people simply have greater self-awareness than others do. But all things being equal, there's going to be a tendency to try to maintain the high activity level of the working environment, even at home, unless you do something very specific to demonstrate to yourself this is a change. I'm now taking off the uniform, so to speak. I'm now going home is very possible. If you've been ordering people around necessarily at a traffic situation or trying to control a complex crime scene. When you get home, if you start still you you obviously you're trying to control a complex crime space crime scene. You're speaking very loudly. You're speaking with a command presence. You're giving orders. You get home and start giving the same orders in the same tone of voice to your spouse and your children. The children, William may very well run away crying and your spouse may be thinking divorce or it may come back with something like, What the hell is wrong with you and you're going to come. Nothing at all. I need you to move back against that. Anger was good. You start giving orders, right? You start. Humans are very much, very much creatures of habit. We are not there yet. It varies among people, but the fact is that if you have long term ways of coping with your tactical environment, it's very easy for those ways of coping to come into into the home environment or into other environments as well. I remember a lecture on the subject to detectives overseas in one of the African nations, and we were talking about the fact that lots of times the person will come home if the detective comes home and the child has done something some bit of naughty, that's okay. And the detective basically sitting in the chair and starts doing this, essentially a police interrogation on a five or six year old kid rapid fire questions or. Yeah, then why doesn't this why doesn't this part of the story hang together, etc., etc.. And the fact of the matter is that once you're aware that you're doing that, you can stop it. That's, that's what really that's, that's, that's what really allows us to adapt to function differently. They say, oh my gosh, this is what I'm actually doing. I need to alter this behavior. I need to change this in a very explicit way. But unless you have those behavior patterns pointed out to you, there's a good bet that, yeah, you're going to treat your family. The league would treat the the onlookers of the crime scene. The good thing is, is that the brain is very adaptable. But you're right, you have to be able to look at your own behavior and start really thinking about what you're doing and why you're doing it. So I hope this information is helpful for all of you that are first responders and you're listening to this, but also to your family members. The good thing is there are ways of cooling this system down. I call adrenaline as heating the system of adrenaline and cortisol. So I call it running hot. It's kind of like putting jet fuel into a Volkswagen and well, it runs like heck for, you know, five miles and then the engine explodes. It's very similar with the physiology. If you start heating ended up with adrenaline, you've got to learn to cool it down and there are mechanisms to cool it down. And so I'm going to talk about a few today. We'll have other podcasts on this. But one of the fastest ways that I have found for first responders to cool their system down is to use comedy. So, you know, look up something on YouTube. There's some great comedy apps out there and, you know, 5 minutes of laughing can begin to shift your mood and it can cool your system down. The other thing that I would highly recommend is before you walk into that front door and say hello to your significant other, your spouse, your intimate partner, before you say hi, take 10 minutes, 15 minutes in your vehicle and cool yourself down. It's very helpful if you can change your uniform before you come home. Your body and your brain is going to be responding to all those details. So we have found in the research that you put your uniform on and your arousal starts going up even before you actually get the uniform on, your heart rate is going to go up because you're preparing to do what you have to do in the field. So if you can change your uniform, if you can take that 15 minutes, listen to some comedy, listen to some, you know, motivational podcasts or something that's funny, nothing that's going to hit you up, something that's going to relax you and then think about how you're going to be at home. Maybe you go in and you take a shower before you start talking to everybody, and maybe you have that conversation with your significant other, your spouse and say, Hey, when I come home, can you give me 30 minutes? Let me get a shower, let me get, you know, changed in other clothes or whatever it is. And then I will be here and I will be focused on the family. If you just run into the house, you're going to still be in first responder mode and your communication is going to be different. And if you've been a first responder for any length of time, you're not going to notice it. Your family will notice it, but you won't because that's your homeostatic Norm. You spend a lot more time at the job than you do with your family. And it's not as if I hear guys and gals say, well, I leave my job at work. Well, that's great, except you have the same brain. So it's not like you're screwing your head off and putting it beside the door and screwing a different head on or a different brain on. And you walk into the house, it's the same brain that was just dealing with somebody crisis on the job an hour ago. So realize it's the same brain and so you have to do some things to cool that brain down. And some of them are very easy. But anyway, I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Please subscribe to this podcast. We are going to be producing a lot more of them. I hope you find it helpful. Please give us your feedback. And this is Dr. Jana Price-Sharps with Dr. Matthew Sharps for Mind Pilot. Have a good New Year.