In this episode, Andi shares how she wasn’t proud of who she used to be because of burnout. She didn't know how to handle her burnout before. She was a personal trainer but she reached the point that she couldn't work out. She faked it with her clients until she decided to learn and understand how to fight burnout so she could be a better wife and mom.

What You'll Learn

• Burnout which is also known as Adrenal Fatigue or in the medical world -  HPA axis dysfunction is a thing.
• Exercise is not the best way to combat sleep struggles, exhaustion, weight gain and stress management.
• And a lot more! 

Favorite Quote

“The job doesn’t have to change you in ways you don’t want to change.” Andi Clark

If you find that you are not being the spouse that you want to be or the parent that you know you can be but burnout is actually coming in the way that you are that rundown first responder, reach out.

Are you ready to learn all the tools needed to live a 911 lifestyle that can help you stay strong throughout your entire career? Then Gain The 911 Lifestyle Tools Today!

If you want to learn more about the 911 Elite Performance Program and have questions before joining, Book A Call with Andi here!

Or connect with Andi Online! 

• Learn more works of Andi at www.911lifestyle.com
• Follow Andi on LinkedIn
• Join the  free Facebook Community

Thanks for listening! You can also watch this podcast on our YouTube channel. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode!

This was a very tough episode to write because I'm not proud of who I used to be.

I am not the person that my husband married, thankfully.

Knowing now that my anger, my mood swings, pulling away from

everybody wasn't my fault and was in fact, burnout does help a bit.

And personally seeing how what I've experienced has allowed me to teach so

many first responders and really changed their lives, gives them their lives

back has honestly made it all worth it.

But it still doesn't take away that guilt or that hit to my ego and pride.

When I think back to that person that I used to be.

If telling you my story now will help at least one of you understand why you're

yelling at your kids for just being kids.

Why you're always on high alert when you're off duty or worrying

all of the time about everything that may happen at home or at work.

Or why your sleep is off you're snoring and your energy has tanked where you

are pushing through each and every day from the moment your eyes open.

Or you can't digest food like you used to, or your gut issues

have reared their ugly head.

Then my goal will be achieved because all of these symptoms

I mentioned they're not PTSD.

These are all symptoms of burnout and they do not mean that there is

something wrong with you or that you having mental health condition.

As you'll learn in this episode, it's about your physical stress system.

And it's about asking for support.

So, where do I begin?

I've been a personal trainer and nutrition coach for 27 going on 28 years.

My life was about sports.

It was about being active and being healthy.

Then in my early twenties, I went through a huge burnout crash while I

was preparing for fitness competitions.

It got to the point where I couldn't workout.

Every time that I tried, my body would overheat my strength was pretty much

non-existent injuries kept creeping in.

At one point, I even hired a colleague to train me, but I couldn't do

what he was asking my body to do.

And this is a body that was used to pushing hard in workouts.

I had been one of the strongest females in the gym that I worked at until one

day, it just all seemed to disappear.

I faked it with clients.

I told them that I worked out elsewhere to get a break from work when in

fact I wasn't working out because I couldn't, I totally felt like a fraud.

The motivation and drive and ability to push my body was gone.

Going upstairs was a feat.

I'd take the subway home and I would have to pause at the bottom

of the stairs before going up.

I had to take a breath.

It was just astounding to me that I had to pause before going up a set of stairs

when my life was about health and fitness.

I went to my doctor who looked at me and because I looked very fit and

healthy, I mean I had a six pack abs.

I was preparing for fitness competitions.

So, I was in like looked physically really, really fit.

They would look at me, the doctor and she would just say that it didn't look

like there was anything wrong with me.

And I had to really push, I had to push and push for testing.

The results always came back as normal.

And then she'd sometimes offer me prescriptions for my gut issues or

another symptom that I came to her for.

And then she'd send me on my way.

Over time I started distancing myself from others.

I'd sit on my couch and wait until it was pretty much a decent time to go to sleep.

I am thankful that during that time that I didn't have a family, I still

woke up tired every single day.

Like I was thinking and moving through this fog of cement, you know, after you do

work out how your limbs just feel heavy.

That's how I felt all the time without working out or just lifting

my arm took every bit of energy and concentration that I had.

It was like simple things like making a sandwich.

I had no energy to even figure out what was in the fridge,

let alone to make the sandwich.

I would work and then I come home.

I isolated myself more and more because I didn't have the

energy to do anything else.

More tests were done by my doctor and again, normal results.

More prescriptions were offered for one symptom or another,

always treated separately.

I started getting more colds and flus often in my chest, allergies,

hay fever started getting worse.

I basically resigned to the fact that this was my life and I

pushed through every single day.

From the moment my eyes opened, I was pushing in order

to just get through my day.

So, we'll fast forward another 15 years.

And in between that time, I being a personal trainer and nutrition

coach, I kept my eating super clean.

I was giving myself days, sometimes a full week to recover after

playing beach volleyball or another sport and trying to workout.

It just, I found a way in order to still be kind of active but

push through the exhaustion.

It did get longer and longer in between when I needed to like the

time in between in order to recover.

My husband and I met playing beach volleyball.

It was really the one sport that I could fudge because I could play a game and

then sit on the sidelines and just tell everybody that I was soaking up the sun.

When in fact I really didn't have the energy or the

brainpower to play another game.

My mood swings were horrible.

I had a friend once that described her as, as being like Medusa

and that is exactly how it was.

I'd be fine one moment and the next moment this Medusa would appear.

Looking back.

I am very, very grateful that my husband married me and didn't divorced me.

And I'm really not sure that I could have put up with myself

with how horrible I was to him.

I'd be calm one minute and like pissed the next about something.

He'd have to gauge my face and my body language when he would walk in a room.

If he should even speak or just stay quiet and even staying quiet

would get him in trouble then because I knew he was avoiding me.

Thing is, is that no one knew that this was happening in our house.

I hid it from everyone.

Possibly like many of you that are listening today, I could hide

it enough when I was outside.

But as soon as I would walk into the house, I would let this facade just go.

It was almost like I would walk through our front door, close the door and

everything would just come crashing down.

The frustration, the exhaustion would hit me.

I'd sit on the couch sometimes I had to sit before I could

take off my shoes and my coat.

I often took naps mid day and I really didn't do much around the house,

which is absolutely not like me.

I am somebody who loves to be active, loves to be busy loves

to always be doing things.

And I just couldn't with all of the work that I was putting in to being healthy,

as I could be I felt like I didn't have control over my energies and moods.

So, I started controlling more and more things around the house.

How the dishwasher was loaded, how laundry was folded and had to be my way or else.

That was the one thing that I could control was how things

externally in the house were done.

And then kids came into the picture.

I had a few miscarriages before our first son was born.

From what I do know now burnout can really be a factor and reproductive and

fertility issues, including miscarriages.

Which really does explain why I hear of a lot of struggles from both

male and female first responders when it comes to getting pregnant.

And then with the females with miscarriages, males with

testosterone struggles either high testosterone or really low astrogen

imbalances in both actually.

So, we had a successful pregnancy finally, on our third try.

I was beyond exhausted while pregnant.

And once our son was born, it was a push to do anything and exhaustion

that I felt deep, deep in my bones.

I talked it off to what people explained as to being tired

because of having a new baby.

But deep inside, I actually knew that it was much more.

We wanted two kids though, and I wanted them before I turned 40 and we didn't know

how long it would take to have another.

So we started trying around 10 months.

10 12th between 10 and 12 months.

And it was on our first try that we made it through the entire pregnancy.

And then our second son was born 19 months later after the first.

Not 19 months after we got pregnant.

So the problem though, was that with that pregnancy is my body was burnt out.

And it did not have the support for my second son in vitro.

And he was born in burnout.

We didn't know it then, but he had the worst case of the eczema

that our doctor had ever seen.

And that's with me taking out all kinds of foods in our diet.

He was always throwing up pretty much like projectile vomits.

He ended up on a specialized formula and once he moved to solids,

though, things got worse, he would be eating and then once he was

done, he would have a huge tantrum.

And I'm not talking about the usual tantrums that kids would have.

This would be a child who was happily playing completely playing

and all of a sudden rage and hitting himself against walls.

And this is also similar to what I hear from spouses of responders,

where they are yelling at their kids.

And I shouldn't just say spouses because those that I work with do

admit once we start working together, that their anger, their rage at

home just comes out of nowhere.

And it gets to the point where with some of the responders that I do work with

where they know their kids have told them, they're spouses told them that they feel

like they're walking on eggshells at home.

Where the kids aren't greeting them anymore at the door where they're

actually staying up in their rooms, especially as they're older to gauge

where the parent, the responder his mood is when they're coming home.

And there's no judgment for me especially when I'm understanding this

and helping you guys get out of it.

I couldn't keep my cool around my kids and I was easily frustrated.

I would get short with them.

Once we were driving somewhere with my son and he just started crying.

Mommy, mommy, I'm sad.

Over and over.

When a few minutes later he had been singing to music.

So, we're having me with these ups and downs.

We're having a child with these ups and downs.

There were so many similarities between my son and I.

He was also tested lots by pediatric gastroenterologists, pediatrics,

allergists and others where all of his test results also came back as normal.

I started looking for answers.

There was no way that my son was going to go through, being told

that nothing was wrong like I had.

There was absolutely something wrong because a child like this

should not be going into anger and this sadness of depression.

They shouldn't be having the worst case of eczema a doctor had ever seen.

Or just as he got older, like anxiety, all kinds of things that or happening.

I was like, this shouldn't be happening to a child with all

results are coming back as normal.

And then there was one day that I was listening to a podcast and

all of our symptoms were listed.

Even though we had different symptoms.

All of them were in this one list, the mood swings of anger and frustration,

absolute exhaustion, sleep struggles, snoring, sleep apnea, tired and wired,

can't stay asleep, deep sadness and depression, distancing yourself from

others because of low motivation and drive, which also stops you from doing

things that you used to love to do.

Anxiety or being on high alert where you just can't shut it off, food intolerances,

where you can't digest meat like you used to, you may have been able to have

had like a T-bone steak and now struggle with a small piece of meat or you avoid

certain foods because of the payback.

Acid reflux is another one they listed.

Gut issues, constipation, diarrhea, gas that can clear a room,

bloating, IBS, Crohn's colitis.

For females there's issues with cycles, miscarriages, PCOS.

For both males and females, fertility and reproductive issues, and miscarriages.

Skin sensitivities like Sima psoriasis, hives, and rashes, and more.

I sat there stunned, not one doctor had ever listed all of our symptoms

before and gave it one root cause.

And what they were saying in this was that it was adrenal fatigue, which

is also known as burnout or in the medical world is HPA axis dysfunction.

I honestly had to replay the video or the podcast because I was sitting

there and I kept saying, I'm not crazy.

This wasn't all in my head, this isn't in my son's head.

What was going on with the both of us is real.

And it had a name, adrenal fatigue, burnout, HPA axis dysfunction.

My mama bear came out and my type A personalities really reared its head and

I started researching, learning, taking courses, finding practitioners to help us.

I was doing everything that I could.

It took years of trial and error, took years of diving through all

kinds of taking on courses and things that added to already my educational

experience of working with the body.

There was a lot of error when we were finding the right

practitioner to help us both.

When I learned, why is because our stress system is very complex.

I think of it like a car engine.

And when the engine light comes on, the mechanic has to figure out what's

really causing the problem from this large list of possible causes.

If they change out the battery because it died, but they don't fix

the alternator or the spark plug or whatever it was that caused that battery

to die in the first place, then the problem's just going to come back.

So, in the medical field, they often look at each symptom separately.

As with my doctor, I was getting tests for one thing or another, but

nothing was ever looked at as a whole.

So, we get sent to this specialist or that specialist just based on one symptom.

So, when I kept getting chest coughs and stuff, I was sent

to a respiratory specialist.

For my gut I was sent to a gastroenterologist.

Like everything was to a separate person.

When it was sleep, they would just offer me prescriptions.

So figuring out which part of our stress systems we're in need of support

and finding different practitioners to help really was a game changer.

Like understanding that just because one specialist says that they work

with a symptom of burnout doesn't necessarily mean that they understand

all parts of our stress system.

So, finally figuring out the right practitioners, what we all needed

combined with my education in working with the body before I even went

into personal training, my background was massage therapy, sports rehab.

So, really diving into the nerves and the muscles and everything with me,

working with sports rehab and working with high-level CEOs in my career, all

of the courses and everything that I had taken on top of all of these additional

courses they really helped me figure out the complex solution for burnout.

And it's not just one solution, the same solution for everybody because

it depends on which system for you is being taxed the most and what

it is that's taxing those systems.

It's a very complex thing when you first start looking at it but the more

that I was able to break it down, the more I was able to simplify it, which

has gotten me to where I am today.

But at first it got myself to where I sleep right now.

I wake up with energy because my battery is fully recharged.

I am back playing sports and everywhere we go, we have balls packed in a bag with the

kids and we're usually kicking or throwing a ball with them around and if they're off

doing something else, so my husband and I we'll pepper our volleyball back and forth

while the boys are doing their thing.

I can't tell you how much relief there is in saying that I am not

the women that my husband married.

No more bad sleeps requiring me to nap on the couch, putting the

kids on front of the TV because that's all the energy I had.

My gut doesn't rule me anymore.

My stomach is flat again.

My six-pack abs are back.

The best part of all though, is that those mood swings, my mood swings are gone.

Yeah every once in a while life happens, stressors add up but I rarely

get pissed at my husband anymore.

I'm able to stop it so much faster.

I may get annoyed, but now we actually talk about it and it doesn't

end up in this big argument where I'm just yelling and he's just

doing everything just to get away.

I am not yelling at my kids anymore for just being kids.

Instead I play with them and they want to be around me without having

to consider what mood I'm in.

My brain is clear, my motivation and driver back.

I am a much better wife and a mother than I used to be.

I have my life back.

I swore then and there that I would not let anyone struggle

the way that my son and I did.

No more going to your doctor, getting tests that come back as normal.

Wondering if it's all in your head, no more prescriptions

that don't fix the real problem.

No more thinking that this is a life that you have to live pushing from the

moment your eyes open until your day ends.

It was time to refocus my business from pushing the stress system through

exercise to teaching others how to support their stress system in order

to reverse and prevent burnout.

I started working with other mom entrepreneurs as that's really

what I am and it was going well until one day I was talking with

one of my husband's colleagues.

He was an officer and noticed the difference in my energy.

And he asked what had changed for me.

Like he said, you seem so much more relaxed and you're

happier what's going on.

So I told him the truth, all of it, even the ugly parts.

And he started telling me about other colleagues and how much they were burnt

out and experiencing what I'd explained.

He strongly encouraged me to make the switch to police.

So this started a lot of discussions with my husband.

I truly didn't realize what I was getting myself into.

When I started this, this was back in 2018 suicide rates were three

times that of line of duty deaths in the states for police officers.

That number has changed astronomically for both line of

duty deaths and suicides since then.

I was really unaware of the operational stressors and services of how each

service ran and since the last three years with black lives matters and

COVID, I have seen and heard and learned so much and if adapted.

All of my trainings and all of everything that I've done in order to really keep

diving deeper into the research of first responders, keep diving deeper into how to

support them and also how to support me.

And a lot of this, as well as a lot of the research to say out there really doesn't

take a new account, a 911 lifestyle.

There's more research coming out now, but a lot of it in the start of doing

this, I had to really learn from working with first responders and us

working together of trying this, see how this works, see how that works

and figuring out what worked with and without certain shift schedules with

certain family dynamics , and different admins, stressors and different

stressors that were happening at work.

We had to really work together in order to make sure that I created a

program that really, really worked for you and your life as 911 lifestyles.

The one hitch we did have in the beginning as well was that my husband

had kept what he did as a secret.

As a precaution to keep us safe, most of our neighbors didn't

even know that he was a cop.

So, me going on social media and speaking at conferences where my name would be made

public meant really bursting that safety belt role that he had created between

his job and our home life but we decided.

That if I was able to save even one life, then it would be worth it and worth the

world, knowing what he did for a living.

So, this is where things got interesting though.

When I first started, I started posting on social media and creating

free trainings all on burnout.

It was all on burnout symptoms.

So getting angry, yelling at your kids and spouse, sleep, tired and

wired, waking mid sleep, waking out, absolutely exhausted without your

battery recharge, where you're feeling almost hungover, disoriented and where

a pot of coffee or an IV of coffee isn't even really affecting you anymore

too it's just keeps you baseline.

Brain fog where reports are taking you much longer and not being as

sharp with remembering the details post-call for your reports or having

a chat with your spouse and forgetting what you had just talked about as

soon as you walked out of the room.

So all the things that I experienced with burnout and those who I was

working with, the first responders I was working with were also experiencing.

These are what I was talking about.

These were the symptoms of burnout, adrenal fatigue, HPA axis dysfunction,

whatever you want to call it.

And over and over again, those with PTSD who had been struggling with the

treatments, kept telling me that they had never had anyone explain their

symptoms and understand them so well.

And I've never said the word PTSD.

I was always talking about burnout.

This flip side is that I also had some pretty bad backlash in the

first year or so saying that I was disrespecting those with PTSD and harm

could come to them in their families.

I started asking myself why when I'm talking about burnout, are

those with PTSD thinking that I'm talking to them and then it hit me.

PTSD is a stress disorder.

Stress disorder, post traumatic stress disorder.

It says it right in the name.

Then we have PTSI post-traumatic stress injury.

These all stem from a traumatic stress.

Why would their stress system not be struggling?

I mean, when you have PTSD, you have experienced some of the

biggest stressors in your life.

So I started asking questions and found it, many of the symptoms that I spoke

about creeping in they would often appeared even before the trauma occurred.

The sleep struggles, not waking up with a fully recharged battery

or really relying on coffee.

Anger may or may not have really reared its ugly head yet but it definitely

not as extreme as it did post-trauma.

Sleep and energy though, seem to be the first symptoms that most first

responders do experience in their career when it comes to burnout.

With gut issues too.

I found that many of the first responders did end up struggling with gut issues that

really, really came out after a trauma.

And those would be more like the diarrhea, the constipation, like the really big,

bigger symptoms Crohn's colitis, IBS.

But if we looked at them before the PTSD, they may have had

gas that could clear a room.

They were bloated where on shift, like especially for a police officer

they really notice it because the vest as they're going through their

shifts, the bloating would occur and their vest would hold tighter.

But bloating near the end of your shift, stomach acid issues so many

first responders are on taking antacids are on proton pump inhibitors,

which is a prescription by your doctor for stomach acid issues.

And many of us would report that after the trauma, sometimes six months

to a year, there was a noticeable increase in these burnout symptoms.

And especially that anger, hypervigilance, or the distancing themselves from others.

So, I was diving more and more into research.

And I learned that PTSD has four specific symptoms that they have to be showing for

more than 30 days in order to be diagnosed by a medical professional as having PTSD.

So the thing is, is if you don't have all four of these symptoms, then a

diagnosis of PTSD should not be given.

The first two are definitely not burnout symptoms.

The first one is intrusive memories.

So those daydreams or nightmares, flashbacks, reoccurring memories of one

or multiple traumas, but it is you're having for more than 30 days, there is

one memory that does keep coming back.

The second one is avoidance.

That's avoiding the situation.

Avoiding the place that it happened.

Anything that puts you, in a place where you may be exposed to that

trauma again is you pretty much don't deal with it you try to avoid that.

I've talked to guys where on their beat, they don't go down certain roads.

They will take a longer route to get places to avoid a certain street

where certain traumas have happened.

Then we'll dive into these other two symptoms of PTSD and that

are burnout symptoms as well.

The one is cognition and moods.

So that's where with burnout, we can get short-term memory loss, where you're

chatting with your spouse and maybe talking about like a honeydew list,

getting a honeydew list together, and you walk out of the room and you forget

what you were even supposed to do, or you forget what you even just talked about.

So we get some of these cognition, forgetting of things, your body doesn't

remember things that happened during the day, if you're at a conference

or seminar, or you're struggling to remember your notes for your reports.

It can be so many different things that we can get with that cognition

and the moods we already spoke of that anger, the frustration, anxiety.

A lot of these are definitely symptoms of burnout as well.

So that was cognition and moods for number three, number

four's arousal and reactivity.

So with arousal and reactivity, that's that hypervigilance always being

on high alert, can't shut it off.

Somebody just walking around a corner can scare you like in your house

where I know or just somebody that will walk in your room sometimes

and when I was in burnout, I jumped.

And they'd be like, didn't you hear me coming?

And things like that will just get you on edge.

You'll become reactive.

You can go from zero to a hundred without even realizing it.

So upon learning this and I took a few steps back.

There is that bit of overlap with the cognition, the arousal and reactivity,

which I wonder and I don't know, cause I am not the PTSD expert.

I wonder if this is the stress system screaming for support.

And it's very interesting because I have also worked with some guys who have had

PTSD diagnosis, who were struggling to make it through their PTSD treatment.

I had one guy where he had some suicide attempts.

When I met him, he was suicidal and he had given up on his PTSD treatments.

So I was like, okay, well, let's see what we can do.

I was like, I do not know what we're going to be able to do.

I don't know what headway we're going to make.

I'm not PTSD but let's see what strengthening your stress system will do.

And we started working with him and his flashbacks in the first month.

So he was having flashbacks every two to three minutes.

In a month of working his stress system, he was getting flashbacks

two to three times a day.

That is huge.

And he was able to start going to therapy.

And he was able to start making progress again in his PTSD treatments

where he wasn't able to before.

And that's where I really, really saw the difference between getting that stress

system physically supported and then them being able to have more strength and

resilience than being able to have more ability to handle more stress because

PTSD therapy, PTSD treatments, they suck.

Him and I used to talk about how much therapy sucked but how much is worth it

to go through that because of him out the other side, he maybe once a month

now has flashback which going from two to three every two to three minutes to once

a month his sleeps are so much better.

He's able to get himself out.

He hasn't had a suicide attempt in a year and a half, I think.

And when I started working with him there were quite a few.

So yeah, it's just been amazing.

So with working together and getting these guys where they're able to handle more

stressors, they're not as hypervigilant.

They're not in that reactive state.

And they are able to make those strides in their recovery with their PTSD

treatments, with the experts in PTSD.

So where does this leave the responders that aren't having those

intrusive memories or avoidance of a trauma or not having all four of

those criteria, those PTSD symptoms.

One thing that absolutely fascinates me since starting to work with first

responders is that when you look at like a CEO of a big company.

And they're having anger issues, they're struggling to sleep, their

lack of focus on their day to day job.

Everyone just says, "Oh, they're burnt out.".

They need a break.

You know, they need to go take a vacation but as soon as it's a

first responder struggling with anger, not during their job as well.

The first instinct is that they have a mental health issue.

And I'm not saying that they don't, but why do we treat the CEO of a high-

end company that's dealing with like billions of dollars every day differently

then we would treat a first responder?

Why is our first go to that they have PTSD?

Should we not work our way through a series of steps to rule things out?

Firstly, starting with the physical stress system and making sure that they

don't have those four criteria for PTSD.

There are other solutions out there that when somebody does have anger, those

moods, I mean, I didn't have a trauma.

And I had years and years of even exercise nutrition, working on the physical not

being able to get it because I didn't know how to support my stress system.

My child was born without any traumas other than probably childbirth,

but he was struggling with burnout and he didn't have traumas.

So why is it that we instantly assumed that a first responder who's

struggling with the short fuse, who is frustrated by things paperwork goes

down their memory, they're not able to sleep, why do we instantly assume

that it's a mental health issue?

And the thing is too, is that services are really pushing hard on the

mental health front, which is needed.

Absolutely.

I am not denying that the traumas of the job are real.

I hear them most every day from different responders.

My husband being an officer, he says he experienced this way less

than I do because I hear from officers, fire and EMS from all over

North America, UK and Australia.

They're pushing so hard though on this mental health front, but little

as heard about the operational stressors and its effect on burnout.

The things that I hear as well this is how it's always been.

We always work these shifts schedules.

We always work lots of OT.

These are just the way it is in services, but the job really has changed.

Call volumes have been increasing.

Extra shifts are needed to cover for short staffing and especially over COVID.

I would hear about fire services that were out or EMS stations and stuff that

were the whole station would have all off on quarantine that services right

beside then had to split their team, split their crews to cover both service areas.

And it was exhausting doing 48 96 hours straight at busy stations.

The crime has increased.

There's more protests.

There's stress from social media for all of you because

everything that you're doing now is filmed by somebody or another.

There's politics.

My husband has said to me that there's no way that he would be okay right

now, if it wasn't for all of the burnout tools that he has acquired

from me to help them with the hours that he has worked this year alone.

During the trucker rally, he worked 232 overtime hours in 29 days.

I don't actually know what the count was and he has 37 days that

he worked straight, but he did say once he calculated it, all it

equaled out to about 18 hour days.

That leaves six hours to get to home and back to shower, to eat, get prepped

for the next day and sleep six hours to do all of that for 37 days straight.

We pulled out all of our tools.

I had everything out and we were doing everything at home that he needed, and we

were doing everything that he could when he was on shift in order to not burn out.

And then as soon as that 37 days went, we kicked in as well on his post recovery.

So the way that I work is that we have this, I have things that you do

on shift when you're in the middle of a trucker rally or something that

is like a special operation, anything that is really taxing your body.

And we have things that we do post in order to recover.

And then we have things that once he's recovered to make sure

that his body stays that way.

So going into whatever the next thing happens, which for him was covering

all of our sports teams play offs.

So we just had our basketball team and our hockey team were in the playoffs.

Our basketball team got out in the first round.

My husband is a huge sports guy.

And this is the first time he's not cheered for our home team because

he was never seeing our family.

All of the emergency plans and everything that he had to do before all

of the games would take 12, 15 hours to write and then he'd be anywhere 12

hours sometimes 15 hours on game day.

Sometimes 17, because he was actually doing his regular day job plus the games.

If he really didn't know how to make his stress system strong in his downtime,

so that he was ready for whatever did pop up and have the tools during an

operation to know how to get the best quality sleep possible with however

many hours that he had on shift and support his body for the added stress

of the operation, knowing how to recover quickly after he'd be in burnout.

He would be the one that would be, well, I always know it's creeping

in with him cause he starts snoring through the trucker rally.

He started snoring like halfway through and I'm like, oh how

long is this going to go?

Cause that's my first signal that he's really starting to burnout.

So he'd be snoring and you know getting short with the kids and

starting to distance himself from us.

I knew that these things would be happening but they're not

because he had the tools.

That 911 lifestyle spiral I call it is really taking out more and more

first responders each and every day.

It's switching them from being this, what I call the eternal first

responder into a rundown responder.

And my big dream why I really, really got into this is to teach you how to prevent

and reverse your own burnout so that you can start sleeping, waking with energy.

You take back control of when you're in that high alert stage to keep you

safe on a call and when to switch it off when to turn it off so that you are

not living in that state, when you're doing your reports, you can big picture

think when you're relaxing with your family and enjoying your downtime.

And I really want to get you to stop feeling like that rundown first responder.

And then this is where the big picture comes in is I want you to be able to

take this knowledge back to your service.

I want you to teach your colleagues and then with this new found

energy you can get promoted.

It's been phenomenal listening to the responders I work with and they're like,

ugh, you know, going in from promotion and they're getting their promotions.

And what that allows you to do is as you get promoted, you can teach your

team the stuff that you've learned to reverse and prevent burnout.

And as you're going up in the ranks, you have more power to make that

positive change within your service.

Changes that you have figured out based on understanding your stress system and the

operational stressors, and being able to see where your service can make changes

because every service does have its own little ways that it does do things.

They are all a little bit individual.

So you can start bringing that in and presenting these

ideas to start making changes.

And I want to see these burnout rates decreasing in first

responders just like you do.

So that you guys can all become that elite first responder.

The one where you can last your entire career, where you're not waking up

wondering if you have the energy that it takes to make it through

your day, let alone your shift.

And that quick reactive time in order to be able to keep

yourself safe on the job as well.

And having more energy leftover for your family.

The job doesn't have to change you in ways that you don't want to change.

So if anyone that's listening to this, if you find that you are not being the

spouse that you want to be or the parent that you know you can be but burnout is

actually coming in the way that you are that rundown first responder reach out.

We are 911 lifestyle.com.

Come to our website, gather resources, learn things.

I'm going to be teaching you a lot more in this podcast about burnout how

to be supporting your stress system all of the things that are out there.

So keep an eye out for all of that.

Know that I've got your six.

And I'm going to do everything that I can in my part, to give you the tools