Fight, Flight, and Focus

Speaker 1 0:00

Good day. This is Dr. Jana Price-Sharps with Mind Pilot. So today I'm going to do something a little bit different. I am going to interview myself about my book. How about that? Actually, it is a book that I co-wrote with my husband, Dr. Matthew Sharps, who I have invited on for this episode as well. The book was just published. It is easily accessible on Amazon. The name will not surprise you because it's very similar to this podcast. It's called Beyond Survival: Pilot Your Own Brain, A Resiliency Guide for First Responders and Combat Veterans by Dr. Jana Price Sharps and Dr. Matthew Sharps. The reason I wrote that title is I think sometimes people forget that they're in charge of what their brain is doing. They get to choose their focus, they get to choose their responses to their world, they get to choose their goals, where they're headed in life. And so part of this book is focusing on empowerment and what you can do to make your life better and things that typically cause problems for first responders and how to resolve them, how to fix them. I asked Dr. Sharps to write a chapter in this book because we do a lot of lecturing together, we do a lot of training together. And one of the things that you've heard me talk a lot about, and he's actually been on the show discussing this as well, is the whole concept of fight or flight. And truly, for first responders, that's kind of at the core of what drives a lot of the other behaviors. So I've asked him to be on today and briefly discuss what he wrote, and then we'll talk a little bit about some things that I followed up with. So thank you for being here, Dr. Shark.

Speaker 2:11

Well, thank you.

Speaker 1 2:12

So can you talk a little bit about the importance of fight or flight and how it begins to impact first responders?

Speaker 2:19

Aaron Powell, absolutely. The human fight or flight response operates in both acute settings over a short period and over chronic settings over a longer period. And depending on the severity, the length of the stress, and so forth, you can get a lot of different effects there. Now, one of the things we often don't think of is the fact that the mind everybody knows about the brain, it's a physiological organ, but the mind and the brain are very intimately connected in some ways that a lot of people don't think about. And one of your problems is in the human fight or flight response, you're more about your body. Basically it's kind of a phys ed class that hopefully doesn't end, you know, with the with a horrible situation here. Your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up, you lose your ability to digest your food briefly, you lose a lot of the abilities to keep your immune system going. Now over the acute period or five minutes, that doesn't matter. Over a couple of years, okay, uh dealing with an IA, dealing with court cases, dealing with a bad divorce, these things can really get you, okay? One of the chemicals that's produced is cortisol, which actually does physiological damage. But the big one is adrenaline. That's what gives you all this the terrible problem with your heart rate's going up, your blood pressure's going up, all that bad stuff. But the thing is, all of that's related to your brain. Now, the brain has parts in the underneath the subcortical structures that are to a great degree about your survival, about a variety of other maintenance functions, as well as others. And the cortex itself, that's the big gray wrinkly bed on top that everyone thinks about when they say brain, right? But the different lobes of the brain have different functions, okay? And a lot of those functions, like the ability to see, you don't want to shut that off in the middle of a fight. The ability to understand where your body is, you don't want to shut that off either. But the part that we tend to reduce is well, one of the parts, I'm being a little fast and loose here. Um one of the parts we tend to reduce its resources is the prefrontal cortex. That's where we do our interpretation, that's where we do our real thinking, and that's where we get problems. Because um, your book here, your book, uh there's a lot of books, obviously, on mental health. And in my experience, I've been in this field a long, long time. In my experience, most of those books say, wow, look at all these horrible problems. Aren't they bad? They're like totally bad. They're really, really bad. Did we mention they're bad? Your book makes use of cognitive science and practical psychological technologies in the world of of clinic of clinical experience to solve a lot of these problems. Because one of the things I'm very interested in is your selection of the word resiliency in the title. Because resiliency is one of the things we lose when we don't have our prefrontal cortex operating perfectly. And by the way, there's a phenomenon called positive feedback that we take from engineering, and there's nothing good necessarily about positive feedback. Positive feedback is any process that contributes to itself. So if we're not thinking clearly, our problems may get worse because we're not thinking clearly enough to solve them. And then we get more worried and we don't sleep. And that lack of sleep causes us more problems, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And what we need is to recognize that things are not fated. We tend to go toward tunnel vision. Everybody's aware of tunnel vision in a tactical situation. You tend to focus on the individual in front of you with a gun, and that's where officers and agents often miss the individual to the side that shoots them. But there's an internal version of that too, cognitive tunneling, where I'm just focused only on this problem, only on the divorce, only on the sergeant that hates me, only on this terrible case, only on the AII effector. And we start to re lose the fact that we have options that we can make use of that same mind in a service of resiliency, of adapting as as they say, uh as uh some of the military services hold to, to adapt and overcome. That ability to adapt and overcome, that's what this book is really about. What way the term I often use is psychological technologies to overcome the stuff in my chapter about what happens to the to the brain during these situations. And to use psychological resources and practical applied technologies, not technologies in the sense of machines, but in terms of practical things you do with your own mind in the service of resiliency.

Speaker 1 6:30

One of the things that you talk a lot about uh is how when a person wants to change what's going on, a lot of times habits are more gestalt. They're more general. Um they're not feature-intensive. And so to break down a habit, you go from kind of what you do automatically to breaking it down into feature-intensive processes, and then over time that becomes a new gestalt, which is very much the process that I talk about in this book of okay, here's how to break it down, here's how to develop the new habit. Can you talk a little bit about gestalt, some feature-intensive processes?

Speaker 7:16

Aaron Powell Sure. The word gestalt, it's kind of hard to translate out of the German. It just means uh a hole or a configuration, okay? We think in gestalt terms, we're thinking in terms of holes and configurations. So for example, yeah, if you're in a furniture store, you look at it, you see, there's a bunch of furniture. That's gestalt. If you go, okay, I need a living room chair, okay. No, these are kitchen chairs. Ah, here's the living room chair. Then you can wind up selecting the chair. Well, the point is this, you're not going to get the right chair if you walk in and go, me want furniture. Okay? So there's this interesting continuum between the gestalt and the feature intensive. Now that said, you don't usually say if you're going to the furniture store, let us now go to the store where they sold dining room tables and chairs and this kind of chair and that kind of chair, you just say the furniture store. Gestalt processing has a purpose. It's quick, it's fast, and you can use it in broad descriptive terms. But you can't use it as an analysis. If an officer wakes up on the floor and goes, Oh, I gotta stop drinking, well, that's gestalt. If you say, but wait a minute, every time I go with Sergeant So-and-so and we just start discussing the department and all the problems we have there, and then we just have one beer, but then it turns out we have more, and wow, I have a specific personal tendency to continue to drink once I stop drink start drinking. If I don't take that first drink, I don't drink more. Hmm, that's interesting. But do I drink at home? Well, if I don't buy it, I can't drink it. Hmm. If you start going through the details, you may be able to control or or attenuate or reduce a drinking habit.

unknown 8:47

Okay?

Speaker 8:47

If you're in a distra, this is more Dr. Preisharf's department than mine, but if you're talking in a destructive relationship and you just go, I hate her. Okay, well, maybe so. But wh what are the elements you have? What are the problems here? How many of them could you be causing yourself? How many of them is the spouse causing? Well, how many of them are the ones the spouse is causing could the spouse actually deal with on a realistic basis? Okay. Lots of officers will come home after, my gosh, a long, long stakeout or a long operation. And you tend in the field, right? You don't tend to say a lot of please and thank you and pass the tea, right? You tend to give orders and take orders. Well, you get home, and you know, your house is probably not as orderly as the average police station, or even the average police operation. You try to keep things as orderly as possible, right? So you come through the door, and my gosh, the house is a mess, and there's kids there who don't even live here playing with your kids, and there's messes here and messes there. Well, you don't discuss that usually in, you know, tw terms of sweetness and light. You start giving orders, okay, I want this kid at home, I want this kid in the bath, I want this kid over here, I want this cake wrapped up, et cetera, et cetera. And your spouse is basically sitting there with this frozen smile on their face, going, I hate you. Wouldn't it be better to have analyzed what you were going to say in this situation that happens every time you have a bad one? Yet people do the same thing again and again and again.

unknown 10:10

Okay?

Speaker 10:11

That's part of the highly aroused brain, that's part of the thing it's one of the things I should say, that fights against resiliency. And there are specific techniques, in other words, a bit long-winded answer, and I apologize for that. Gestalt processing has its use, but not in complex situations where you have to operate in a stepwise manner. You all know that in training, okay? Dealing a weapon dealing with a weapon, dealing with hand-to-hand interactions, you have to learn step by step before these interactions become the smooth gestalt habits of long practice. There's continuity in the nervous system. Those same factors apply to questions of resiliency and even of lifestyle. That's where these techniques, these technologies to move from the gestalt to the feature-intensive, at least in the initial stages of learning how to do these things. As we need to learn more about the nature of resiliency, that's where these stages come in.

Speaker 1 11:05

Absolutely. This book is actually written for a variety of different people who often have the same problems. So this book is for law enforcement, it's for fire personnel, it's for EMS, and it's also for combat veterans and combat personnel. Why? Why did I choose such a broad range of an audience? Well, first of all, I'm a first responder and military psychologist, so those are the populations I tend to treat and have a lot of experience with. But the other reason is, as Dr. Sharp says, there's continuity in the nervous system. Those are all vocations where there is a lot of adrenaline and cortisol coursing through the system that is causing very specific kinds of reactions. And I see the same kinds of problems over and over throughout those populations. So that's why I chose to write this book in a very broad sense for different populations, but all having similar issues. So the book is set up that you can choose a chapter to read, or you can read the whole thing. Yes, the chapters somewhat build on each other, but you can also just choose a chapter and read that. At the end, there is a chapter about a self-evaluation. And some people are going to do that, some people are not. I tell people the more you can self-evaluate, the happier you're going to be. I started years ago when I first started self-development. I started standing in front of the mirror on Sunday afternoons for like five minutes, and I'll say to myself, what did I do well this week? What do I need to work on? What are some changes I need to make? Oh, yeah, I forgot to do that. I need to add that back in. And I tell you what, life gets a lot better if you can make these small changes. You don't want to make them all, you know, at once. You don't want to take on the world like a lot of people try and do on New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, right? You know, pick one thing a week, pick one thing a month and say, okay, I'm really going to focus on this over the next couple of weeks and see what I can do about this. And I can tell you, because I've done it myself, change really does happen when you do that. Life gets better, your decisions get better, your relationships get better. I started working in self-development many, many years ago, way before I met Dr. Matthew Sharps, way before I became a professor or psychologist. I started listening to Zig Ziegler, who was a very famous self-development speaker and motivational speaker. And he changed my life in many ways because I started to realize I had all these habits that I had accrued that weren't working for me, but I didn't know what to do instead. And ever since then, I've been a very strong fan of just learning what works and getting rid of what doesn't work, rather than going, huh, I wonder why I'm having all these feelings. At the end of the day, and I know this is almost sacrilege for a psychologist to say, it really doesn't matter so much why you're having the feelings. What matters is how you're letting those feelings navigate your life. And are you using your brain in a productive way or are you using it to self-destruct? And we all get that personal choice, but you got to take action. And this book is all about action. What do you do to change? What do you do to have a happier life? Because at the end of the day, you get to have a happy life. You get to wake up in the morning and be happy, but it's a choice. It's not something somebody is going to give you or do for you. It is a choice that you have to make. It's not always easy. I'm not saying self-development is easy. I am a work in progress just like all of you. But I work on it daily. I hope you will think about purchasing the book. If you like the book, please leave a review in Amazon. Again, the name of the book is Beyond Survival: Pilot Your Own Brain, a Resiliency Guide for First Responders and Combat Veterans. I truly hope I did you proud. I hope it is helpful to you, and I truly hope that it helps you to have a good life. Thank you for all that you do. God bless. This is Dr. Jana Price Sharps.