Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from “Stop Letting the Job Become Your Life: How to Survive Working in a High-Trauma Environment Without Losing Yourself” by Vanessa Lake, LCSW. Lake is a licensed clinical social worker who provides mental health therapy for corrections officers and employees of high-adrenaline jobs who are dealing with trauma, anxiety, and burnout. Each chapter of the book is for a category of skills and tools to manage work stress: physically, mentally, emotionally, processing traumatic incidents, and then transitioning out of the uniform.
The Daily Grind
Right after work with those high levels of adrenaline you are not suitable for normal human interaction. Your threat response has you on edge, looking for a fight or to avoid it all and shut down. You need to give yourself a transition from work to home life.
Mentally start getting out of the uniform by getting out of the damn uniform. Now I’m not saying get naked in the parking lot but bring a shirt or hoodie to switch out of the button up or any department-issued gear. Make getting out of the uniform one of the first things you do when you get home. And don’t be afraid to wear something in color, not just more of the black and gray, because even colors get generalized as a uniform in the brain and keep you in work mode.
As I mentioned earlier, the brain is like a house and adrenaline is that tornado alarm that says there is a threat. You go to the basement for safety and don’t have access to your higher functioning, communication skills, problem-solving abilities, and mental or emotional processing. To get back upstairs, you need to shut off the alarm by burning through the adrenaline, ideally before you even step into your home.
Spend twenty minutes on physical exercise to shift the adrenaline into an endorphin—the feel-good, you can handle anything, pain-relieving hormones. Go directly to the gym or to a local trail for a brisk walk or a light jog. If you have a dog, then go home long enough to grab the dog, put on your walking shoes, and get out the door. Minimize human interaction because the brain sees people as threats right after a long day of threatening people—dogs, however, are safe and fun to play with.
No gym or the weather sucks? Use what you have at home, like workouts on an app or YouTube, but exercise before having interactions with other people. Then go shower and let the water relax you. Hell, imagine all the negative shit from work washing down the drain as you let it go.
Follow that up with some relaxation to really activate your calming nervous system. Stretch after your workout, or as hip folks like to call it, yoga. Focus on your breath, making your exhale twice as long as your inhale for three to five breaths. Observe nature if you’re outside and give yourself a moment of stillness, which signals to the body you’re not in rush mode, so everything must be safe and okay.
After that, it’s about training your brain to see home situations as different from work by actively reassessing home situations to find how they are different from work, not similar. Do things that remind your brain you’re no longer at work. Have a good non-alcoholic beverage waiting for you that you only drink when you are not at work. Put on some music that expresses how you feel, and sing. If you’re busy singing the wrong lyrics with confidence, you’re not mentally obsessing over the events of the day.
Brain Drain
Schedule your mental processing. Set a time at the end of your day, before the thoughts keep you up at night, to do a brain drain. Drain all the thoughts from your head. Give each member of the team a chance to air their grievances within the boundaries of a set amount of time.
Set a timer for just five minutes and write down all the thoughts on your mental whiteboard. Anything that might keep you up at night, anything that’s playing on repeat in your head, things that happened that day, random thoughts, fears and worries. Just clear the whiteboard so you’re not holding on to these thoughts day after day and running out of mental space.
For the next five minutes, look at the list and categorize the items like a DAD.
The DAD categories are do, act, and delete.
If the item on the list is something you need to do, add it to your to-do list. This is a written to-do list, often a dry-erase board on the fridge so you’re not trying to keep it on your mental whiteboard. This includes making phone calls, picking up something from the store, or scheduling an oil change. Things that you will forget or have been putting off.
If it’s something you need to act on, an issue you need to address, or a what-if scenario, create an action plan. But only create a plan A and a plan B. There are infinite possibilities due to variables you have no control over, so don’t get stuck on all the variations. Just create plan A and plan B and write it down. If your brain starts to bring up more what-ifs about the same situation, take charge. Tell it “I have a plan, Susan. Refer to the meeting minutes I just wrote down and stop wasting time repeating yourself. No one wants to hear you anymore.”
Anything you can’t change or create an action plan for, extreme what-ifs, past actions or conversations, regrets, random shit like whether there’s going to be another season of the show you’re watching, delete it. Physically cross it off to create a solid visual and physical experience of telling your brain you’re done with it. It’s off the agenda and won’t be discussed further. Let it go.
This is the basic ten-minute brain drain process I recommend doing at the end of every day until your mental staff learn that you’re the director and you determine what’s on the agenda so they can stop wasting time. You will get to the point where before you even get to your evening brain drain, you’ll be able to let things go or quickly jot things on a to-do list to free up mental space.
Stop Letting the Job Become your Life
By Vanessa Lake, LCSW
Finding Your Way Therapy, LLC