And we all have a window of tolerance and it's somewhat different every single day.
Your window of tolerance at the beginning of your career is absolutely different than
it is five years into your career, 10 years or towards the end of retirement.
It looks way different.
Welcome to the Firefighter Craftsmanship Podcast where we give you real tools to train ultimate
humor performance both on and off the emergency scene.
I'm your host Kevin Housley.
Let's get to it.
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Welcome to the Firefighter Craftsmanship Podcast.
This is episode one and we're excited to get started and share a bunch of humor performance
resources for firefighters and other emergency responders.
Thanks for spending some time with us.
So the point of this podcast is really going to be about humor performance both on and
off the job.
And so much of what we see, especially in the fire services, ultimate humor performance
relating specifically to fitness.
And while fitness is absolutely a massive portion of our job and what we need to try
to work a little bit better towards every single day to have ultimate humor performance
on the job.
There's a lot of other stuff that goes into it as well.
And so we can use fitness in a lot of different connotations.
Physical fitness is probably the easiest one.
But sometimes we don't actually need to do more burpees.
Sometimes we have to maybe even gasp, chill out a little bit and take a day off from physical
fitness training.
That physical fitness still is a huge portion and we're going to cover some physical fitness
stuff throughout on this podcast.
We're also going to look at fitness, mental fitness, you know, so mental health has a
really, really good new wave of focus within the fire services specifically.
And that's really, really important.
A lot of however what we see with mental fitness that's happening right now in emergency services
and fire service specifically is there, it's exclusively limited to what happens after we
experience some traumas or we have to deal with some things.
We have developed PTS or PTSD.
So we're going to dive into mental fitness and a lot of our presilience training.
How can we intentionally train ourselves to be ready for what is to come or what potentially
could come over a long career in the fire service?
And that's applicable whether you're a paid firefighter, a career firefighter or you're
a volunteer.
The job doesn't care and the people that call 911, they do care that the level of service
that you're providing is at the upper echelon of what you're able to do and they don't actually
care if you're a volley or if you're a career firefighter.
So this is going to be applicable for that.
We're also going to look at relationship fitness.
You know, how are we building those relationships both in our firehouses as well as at home?
And that's the thing that, you know, so often unfortunately we kind of ignore is the impact
of this job and this career and this calling on those around us.
And so that's really going to be a big portion of this podcast as well.
So just what to expect, we're going to have a mixture of guests.
We're going to have a mixture of just me trying to share some knowledge and some things I've
learned along the way.
We'll have short and long form content, but we really want to try to make this as valuable
as possible.
So some conversations will be pretty long and some will be quick hitters that you can definitely
listen to on the way to shift change or as you're getting going or something like that
when you're on duty.
So let us know what sort of information you're after, what guests you'd like to see, what's
going to be usable and things that you can implement instantly.
And we're going to try to give you usable information and frameworks within every single
episode along the way.
So some episodes will have downloads associated with them or downloadable resources, things
like that, just more to come on that.
So today let's kind of dive in right away about some human performance psychology.
And this first episode is going to be about a physiological response.
So something that's kind of happening in below the surface and something that is called the
window of tolerance.
So the window of tolerance really plays off of our autonomic nervous system.
And within our autonomic nervous system or the ANS, we have two different parts of that.
The first part is a sympathetic nervous system.
And most people know the sympathetic nervous system as fight or flight.
And it's pretty easy to talk about fight or flight.
And we've heard that about a fight or flight a really, really long time.
And there's really a third part that we kind of ignore.
And so the sympathetic nervous system is the fight or flight nervous system, but it also
has a freeze component to it.
So there's really three parts of that, fight, flight or freeze.
And we look at that from a fire service perspective.
Fight response is actually a trained response.
So if we look at animals in the wild, right, they're usually not looking for a fight.
When the deer is getting chased by the lion, it's not looking to mix it up with that lion.
It's trying to get away from it.
But we also see a freeze component in there that instantly sometimes you'll see if you're
watching some of these Instagram videos or whatever about this prey predator relationship,
sometimes you'll see that prey initially freeze and that sometimes is their demise.
They're trying to assess what's going on before they start to run.
And that one little step might be the difference.
And we see this quite often in our jobs and not just with the customers that we're dealing
with.
So if a recruit firefighter has never been trained on what to do and they're not given
the appropriate tools in the fire academy and we throw a big time evolution at them
right away, they're set up for failure right off the bat.
And they might eventually try to do something about it, a fight response.
But more often than not, they're either going to try to get out of that situation or they're
going to just freeze and completely lock up.
And so that's a perfectly normal thing that happens.
And so the fight part of the sympathetic nervous system is actually kind of a trained
response.
More often than not, we're going to try to flee run away.
We can do some episodes specifically about the sympathetic and fight or flight and freeze
response in the future.
But there's just a general cursory overview of the sympathetic nervous system.
So the sympathetic nervous system, the automatic nervous system is actually always assessing
for threats.
And it's really trying to keep us alive and healthy as long as it possibly can.
So since we're always assessing for threats, when we go to an environment like a fire station
and we're expected to be up and on our game all the time, we're trending more towards
that sympathetic activation all the time, which is a stressor.
So whether that's who's getting their balls busted along the way in the firehouse or if
we're nervous about training or we're just even watching a movie or something, but you're
always kind of up waiting for that next call to happen.
Maybe the big one is about to drop.
And this even happens even though we're asleep.
And so that's one of the reasons why a lot of times when we come home and you finally
get more than five seconds to yourself and you might have this massive power down feeling
and you can really kind of feel that energy zapping out from you.
That might even happen on the drive home.
It might happen in the driveway.
It might happen after you've already walked into your home environment and real life
has started again for you.
So you might feel that big energy dump along the way.
And so that's a normal response, but it's because we've had such high sympathetic nervous
system activation along the way.
Little things can also impact that sympathetic nervous system quite a bit.
And one of those things is, is how do we breathe?
So this podcast is going to dive into breathing for performance, breathing for up regulation
and down regulation quite a bit.
How we can use breath as a superpower for us, especially to have long, happy, healthy
and strong careers and finish strong for retirement.
So we're going to talk a lot about breathing on this.
But one thing that really negatively affects the sympathetic nervous system is hyperventilation,
especially when we're breathing at rest.
And so more episodes to come specifically at breathing at rest.
And we're going to have quite a few resources coming up in regards to sleep and breathing
as a big, big part of sleep as well.
So just realize, start to be aware of how are you breathing?
Are you breathing through your nose or through your mouth, especially when you're just hanging
out watching a movie?
How about when you have a stressor, but it's not a life for death situation.
Maybe you're helping your kids with your homework.
And it's stressful because you can't teach them fifth grade math.
And so they're asking you questions that you can't answer and you're getting frustrated
and they're getting frustrated.
What's your breath doing?
Are you breathing through your nose or you're breathing through your mouth?
Are you breathing?
How fast are you breathing?
What's your respiration rate?
When you're at rest and you're just sitting there, do you really need to be breathing
20, 25, 30 breaths a minute?
Probably not.
It's a hyperventilation state, which is creating too much sympathetic nervous system activation.
Another big stressor on sympathetic nervous system is social media.
And so as we know, as AI gets more and more prevalent and the computers get smarter and
smarter and it tracks all the clicks that you click on and it starts to feed you content
because it thinks that's what you want to see.
A lot of times that content, they know that negative content is more, gets more clicks
and more views than positive content does.
So social media is a massive sympathetic nervous system stressor.
And if you're getting super bent out of shape about some political thing that you've clicked
on in Facebook and now all it's doing is feeding you that same political rhetoric, maybe it's
time to take a step back, stop clicking those links and install those apps from your phone,
something like that.
And that implies that we're having these sympathetic insults upon our brains, our psychology and
our physiology all day long.
The other side of the autonomic nervous system is the parasympathetic nervous system.
It was nice for whoever named these two things that they made them super, super close to
one another with sympathetic and parasympathetic, but that's what we got.
So the parasympathetic nervous system is the rest and digest side of that.
And so your body really has this like gas pedal, brake pedal, homeostatic relationship
with sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system.
And so they're kind of always fighting for position and they both burn energy.
And so even though it's a rest and digest, the parasympathetic nervous system is still
burning quite a bit of energy as it's activated.
So when we think about rest and digest, it's not just sitting in the lazy boy and kicking
up your feet.
Your body also does rest and digest along the way, even sometimes in stressful situations,
if you're built for them and you're ready for them, you might be able to do some good
parasympathetic activation, which then increases your cognitive ability to make critical decisions
on scene, actually have situational awareness.
We'll do a whole series on situational awareness as well.
What that means, how we can train it versus it just being like a feel good term that we
tell everybody to have high situational awareness.
But rest and digest parasympathetic activation does have a pretty good psychological impact
on us, but it also can have a relatively massive negative impact on us.
And we're seeing this quite a bit in emergency services and the fire service specifically.
And if we have too much parasympathetic activation over too long periods of time, it creates
apathy and could even lead into depression.
And so depression is a thing that everybody goes through different cycles of depression,
but some people have depression that they need to be managed through things like physical
fitness, through things like mindfulness practice, breathing practice, and sometimes
through medication.
And so if you feel like you have depression, please reach out to all the resources that
are out there and talk to your primary care physician about it, as well as your peer support
teams and things like that and try to get ahead of that.
There's a lot of options out there for you if you're feeling down in the dumps, depressed,
apathetic.
Let's work through that stuff.
And that's where the mental health and the fire service is kind of really, really focused
right now is on that maybe over parasympathetic activation in that depression and possibly
PTSD or PTSD field.
So sympathetic or parasympathetic isn't all great, and it isn't all bad either.
So there's there's a lot of different things that we can do to mitigate too much sympathetic
or too much parasympathetic activation.
We'll kind of dive into that in this podcast.
So if we draw a line on a piece of paper at the top of the line of horizontal line and
we write sympathetic across the top of it, and then we come down towards the bottom of
the paper and we draw a horizontal line and we write parasympathetic activation across
the top of that.
We have two lines that are parallel to one another on this piece of paper.
We got this big area in between.
And so we can draw like a waveform, just a swooping line in between those two lines.
And that waveform line is called the window of tolerance.
And we all have a window of tolerance.
And it's somewhat different every single day.
Your window of tolerance at the beginning of your career is absolutely different than
it is five years into your career, 10 years or towards the end of retirement.
It looks way different.
The good news is, is you get to control what that window of tolerance looks like based
on intentional fitness training, whether it's physical, mental relationship training, all
of those things that we can really, really have a really good impact on our window of
tolerance.
But just realize some, some days you have a really pretty big window of tolerance and
other days you do not.
And there's a lot of factors that play into that window of tolerance.
One of the biggest ones of those is sleep.
And that's why we're going to dedicate a significant amount of time in this podcast to talking
about sleep, having great sleep hygiene.
What does sleep do for us?
Why does it matter?
How do we make it work both on and off duty?
And so, but sleep has a massive impact on our window of tolerance.
So think about maybe the last time you had a pretty good set or shift and you guys, you
know, you guys and girls out there got the beats and you didn't sleep really much or
if at all.
And when you came home, your tolerance for everyday life or the stressors that happen
when you have relationships, whether it's a spouse or a partner or children or even
just the neighbor driving home, road rage, all of those things that might, you know,
some days you're more resilient and you're able to intentionally respond to something
and other days you just react.
And that usually shows up in forms of anger.
And that's just a little bit where your window of tolerance wasn't big enough in that situation
to intentionally respond to that situation and instead you had some sort of outburst.
Okay, so what happens with the window of tolerance is over time that window of tolerance for
us in the fire service gets smaller, mainly because we have sympathetic activation and
we have too much sympathetic activation over long periods of time.
And so what happens is those two lines that you drew on that piece of paper, they used
to start out really, really far apart.
Well now they start to squish together and that sympathetic drops down and that parasympathetic
line keeps coming up.
And now our window of tolerance that might have started out, you know, as a foot on your
piece of paper, eight inches on the piece of paper now might be a millimeter away from
one another.
And so that's why every little teeny thing that happens just puts you into this certain
state and typically like I said, that's going to be an anger or frustration state.
Stuff that didn't used to be a big deal will kind of spiral out of control and you'll
ruminate on those thoughts all day long for weeks, months, sometimes even years.
And so the window of tolerance is a really, really big concept that we want to be aware
of when we have to understand how it works.
And so a lot more resources can be found linked in this show note.
We have a full on blog post series in relation to this.
So click on the show notes or visit firefightercrassmanship.com for more resources on what does the window
of tolerance mean and how can we train it?
All right, so for today, a really easy thing for us to do is in the fire service, most
of us have too much sympathetic nervous system activation, which is stress.
Sometimes that stress is positive stress from us doing things like physical fitness, sauna
work, cold plunges, all positive stress, intentional stress.
Other times that's negative stress based on department culture, 911 calls that we respond
to and life itself.
Okay, so more often than not for us to get more resilient, for us to get more, for us
to get tougher in the fire service is we need more parasympathetic activation or parasympathetic
tone to create a bigger window of tolerance overall.
So we have to train that.
Okay, we have to train that rest and digest system and we have to intentionally chill
out and calm down.
And a lot of the best training that we can do is in the middle of those things like cold
plunges, sauna work, physical fitness, hard conversations you're having up and down the
chain of command is to intentionally use that as a training opportunity, but also capitalize
on the moments of silence and enjoying those things and be mindful and intentional about
those those times in our life.
Okay, so today I'm going to give you a really, really simple thing for us to train.
And it's going to be a mindfulness practice just using our breath.
And so to increase parasympathetic activation or parasympathetic tone, a very simple breath
protocol that we can use is a two to one ratio.
And this breath protocol, if you can tolerate it should be done 100% through the nose.
So both the inhalation and the exhalation by the end of this protocol should be performed
through the nose if you can.
We know from lots of scientific research that when we breathe through the nose, it creates
a vagus response, it triggers a vagal nerve, which the vagal response also creates parasympathetic
tone.
So simply by breathing through the nose, we can create parasympathetic tone, parasympathetic
activation and calm down, which is going to give us over time, a larger window of tolerance.
Okay, the reason we're using a two to one ratio protocol is that also has been shown
through scientific study to create parasympathetic tone.
So we're kind of double whammy in this thing through the nose and a two to one protocol
to start to increase that window of tolerance by focusing specifically on parasympathetic
tone.
So what does a two to one ratio means?
It just means that when I breathe in through my nose, let's say I breathe in through my
nose for a four count, four seconds, then I'm going to double that on my exhalation.
And that's what's going to help us create that parasympathetic tone.
So when we breathe in for four seconds, we're going to then breathe out for eight seconds.
All right, so getting a comfortable breathing position, sit up nice and straight.
And you can do this while you're driving.
It doesn't really matter.
Try to do it all through the nose and I'll just give you a quick little count on how
this works.
So exhale your air and then breathe in through your nose for one, two, three, four, and then
out through your nose.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
Do it again in through your nose.
One, two, three, four, and out through your nose.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
And hopefully you can instantly kind of feel a little bit better by just taking those mindful
reps.
So that was just two breast cycles right there.
We're slowing our respiration rate down.
If that protocol, the four seconds in and then eight seconds out made you feel like you're
kind of drowning on land, then that's something to just take note of.
And as you start to dive into breath practice, it will get better.
If you feel like that wasn't long enough, you can do whatever you want.
You can do a five second inhale.
You can do a 10 second exhale, a six second inhale, a 12 second exhale, whatever is comfortable
for you, and it's going to depend on the situation.
So start to use this two to one protocol, unstressful situations.
You can use it on EMS calls to start to develop this.
You can certainly use it in route to calls or when you're staged on responses or you're
in route to the training center and you're kind of amped up about what's to come or you're
getting ready to have maybe a conversation that you know is going to be a little bit
sticky whether that's on the job or off the job.
And so that two to one protocol is really, really going to help you.
So there's your little takeaway for today.
We're excited to have you here.
We're excited to get this podcast up and off the ground.
And please reach out if you have any questions or would like specific content or have any
guest recommendations.
Thank you for listening to the firefighter craftsmanship podcast where we give you real
tools to train ultimate human performance both on and off the emergency scene.
You can find more information on our webpage at firefightercraftsmanship.com including
all the classes that we offer.
And there's plenty of free resources and training on the site as well.
Reach out to us on social media including Instagram and Facebook.
We'd love to have a conversation and figure out how we can help you achieve your goals.
Stay smart.