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04-Managing Stress

Listen Up L27 Dr. Beth Murphy cover art
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04-Managing Stress
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This episode explores how we think about managing stress. Not just pushing it down deep inside, but really understanding it and harnessing it to make things better. We interviewed Dr. Beth Murphy a clinical psychologist who was also a former fire fighter. She has the first-hand experience, tools and resources to help fire fighters think about stress. And that’s what she’ll be talking about today. Below are some links to some of the resources she mentions in this episode:

 

“It’s acknowledging stress. It’s welcoming stress, and it’s utilizing stress. And, when I talk to firefighters about that, I tell them it’s something that they can use. They can use it after a call, for instance, because that’s a question I get a lot is, “How do I reset? When I’m going from call to call to call, how do I reset?

Dr. Beth Murphy

It is a great topic, talking about stress in the fire service and stress management. I think a lot of people like to think that they manage their stress. And most of the time, what that means is they ignore it. With firefighters, to be healthy, they really need to be purposeful about how they think about stress and how they manage stress. And, I would say probably first and foremost is to recognize how they think about stress or how they believe about stress. So, do they believe stress will make them sick, or do they believe that stress will make them better? And, people who believe that stress will make them better do better, overall, in general. And so that’s one thing that I try and ascertain from people is like, “Well, how do you feel about stress? 

Most of the time, people will answer, “It depends.” And so, you can think that stress makes you better, but still think that it sucks, for lack of a better word. So, it doesn’t mean that you have this positive attitude about stress. It’s like stress is stress, and you’re going to be impacted by it. There’s nothing you can do about it. So that fight flight response that we always hear about and talk about, everybody has that, and it’s normal. And, the extent to which you have it will depend on a lot of different factors, like how often you are under stress, how big that stress is, how novel that stress is. So, there’s nothing you can do about that. You’re going to react. What you can do is to think about how that’s going to affect you, and you can believe and choose that that will ultimately make you better. And, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to feel good.

 

Find out more at https://iaff27.org/