I'm extremely excited to announce a brand new sponsor for the Behind the Shield podcast,
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This episode is sponsored by TeamBuildr, yet another company that's doing great things
for the first responder community.
As a strength and conditioning coach myself, who also trains tactical athletes, dissemination
of wellness information is one of the biggest challenges.
Now TeamBuildr is the premier strength and conditioning software for tactical athletes.
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Now if you want to try TeamBuildr, they are offering you, the audience of the Behind
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And if you want to take a deeper dive into TeamBuildr, listen to episode 1032 with
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And I'll spell that to you because it's not as you think.
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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show, founder of Mindful Junkie Outreach, Gina Rollo-White.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from her own journey into the world
of mindfulness and meditation, working with the first responder population, breath work,
tactical brain training and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment,
go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and
leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for
others to find.
And this is a free library of well over 1000 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Gina Rollo-White.
Enjoy.
Well Gina, I want to start by saying thank you so much for taking the time and coming
on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Yeah, I mean, thank you for having the Behind the Shield podcast.
That's the real thanks.
So where on planet earth are we finding you today?
So I am in Alexandria, Virginia, which is right across the bridge from Washington DC
and it's been snowing for like four days and really what I want are my kids to go back
to school.
So that's it.
Yeah, we don't get snow days here in Florida.
We have hurricane days.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
How bad has the snow been this year?
Because obviously we've seen parts of the Northeast are certainly getting battered.
Yeah, it hasn't been bad.
In fact, it's never in Alexandria, Virginia, we don't really get snow.
It's interesting.
We have snow days built into school, which is funny.
I'm from California.
So this whole concept of snow days was really new to me when I moved here.
What's a snow day?
So we have snow days where the kids miss school.
But ever since COVID, they kind of have done away with that.
They would build in like X number of snow days.
And now they're like, screw it, we can just learn async.
So they just put kids on pretend learning days.
So that's fun.
So my kids have been home for a really long time.
And yeah, we don't get a lot of snow.
And that makes me happy.
I saw a device and I'm sure it's come from that where you put your mouse of the computer
on and it makes it look like your cursor is moving.
So you can pretend that you're actually there and listening to what the people are saying.
So be careful your kids aren't buying that on Amazon.
Yeah, yeah.
Listen, modern technology, you got to evolve, right?
We got to be with it.
So it is what it is.
Well, you mentioned California.
Let's start at the very beginning of your timeline.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings?
Okay, so born and raised in California in Van Nuys mostly, which is the valley.
And I don't know for a certain group of people who are around my age, we remember the concept
of a valley girl, which I was a valley girl.
And we used to say things like, Oh my God, and Mike and gag me with a spoon.
And I literally said those things.
I'm so embarrassed now.
Actually I'm not.
Who cares?
It was funny.
It was it is what it is.
So I was raised there and went to school there, went to college there, university.
And then I was raised by two first responders.
Actually my mother was an ER nurse at a trauma center in Burbank, California.
In fact, she started the trauma unit.
It was like one of the first trauma units in LA that they would bring, you know, the
major trauma cases to.
And she was head nurse of the ER there.
And my father was an LA County firefighter and paramedic.
So we hit all the marks with first responder work and living in constant chaos and emergency.
I have four siblings, one older who is my father and my mother's daughter with myself,
and then three younger that are my bonus mother and my father's children.
And so there are four girls total in our family.
My father always used to say that he one time wished to be surrounded by women and he got
two ex-wives, a wife and four daughters.
And he was like, that's not what I meant.
It is what it is.
And they all live in California currently.
I'm the only one who kind of moved out.
And I worked in technology for years and lived in California doing high tech startups and
then eventually made my way across the country to Washington, DC, where I met my husband
and we stayed here and have been raising a family since.
And it's been, I've been here for about 20 years, maybe 23.
When I first moved to America, I lived in Burbank for a while.
So I'm very familiar with Van Nuys.
So whereabouts was the hospital?
So it's called St. Joseph's Medical Center and it was right by the studios.
So right there by all the studios.
Is that where you lived by the studios?
Yeah.
Well, I was up, basically the planes that landed at Burbank airport kind of hit the
roofs of where we were living.
So it was a perfect, like, you know, we were in a shoe box, like part of a house.
And if you look at any, you know, I just moved to LA, you know, story in Hollywood, basically
that's what we were living.
That's yeah.
Yep.
That's, that's the classic scenario.
So were you in the entertainment space?
Is that why you were living in Burbank?
So funnily enough, I actually got hired for Anaheim Fire Department, but my ex wanted
to be famous.
That more than anything, she just wanted to be famous.
So we went there kind of like, you know, starry eyed, she was wanting to go to Hollywood,
but there wasn't really an actionable plan that went with it.
So but I worked, we stayed there for three and a half years.
So I worked for Anaheim just about three and a half, but lived in Burbank initially moved
down to Huntington Beach to be closer to the, to Anaheim.
But yeah, it was, it was an experience.
I mean, I think everyone should live in LA once.
So wait, so what did you work?
Were you LA City?
Is that LA City Fire?
What is that?
No, Anaheim Fire Department.
So down.
Oh, that's not an LS.
Yeah.
Okay.
So my dad worked LA County.
And there was always the running joke of it's like LA County versus LA City.
And it was like, Connie or shitty.
How are you doing during the fires at the moment?
They all okay?
Oh, it's messy.
It's messy.
One of my sisters who lived in LA, we, I, when I still spend a lot of time in California,
I never really moved.
And so we still have a house there.
And so she's now in my house.
She moved from LA to a safer, safer grounds.
And most of my family's now in like the Manhattan beach area.
And if things keep getting worse, they'll travel down more to Costa, to Costa Mesa with
one of my other sisters.
So far it's okay, but it was just, I feel for all the firefighters and emergency personnel
and all the people who've lost their homes, it's a shit show right now.
I mean, literally it's like Los Angeles is burning down.
We had the paradise fire a few years ago and I had the dispatcher from that.
That was an extremely powerful conversation.
Cause you imagine, you know, that feeling of just, you know, being unable to save anyone.
And she's literally listening to them take their last breath before the fire comes in
and you know, takes over their home.
But this is the problem.
And you know, I've had a lot of people on the wild land side on the show as well.
There are some things that you can do to lessen the chance of people, of homes, you know,
getting in the way.
But there's a lot of opposition that people don't realize, the prescribed burns or not
allowing people to burn in certain areas.
And so a lot of my wild land friends just like, yeah, this is what happens when, you
know, when you, when you push against the things that we need to do.
And even the, you know, the U S forest service and all the federal firefighters, they're
woefully underfunded, understaffed.
And yet, you know, obviously when something like this happens, everyone's screaming for
them.
Well, you know, this is, this is the issue and we'll sure we'll get into it.
You know, if you don't support your first responders all the time, when you absolutely
need them, they may not be able to be as effective as they should be because of that lack of
support.
Yeah.
And you touched on something that I work with a lot, which is this.
So it's like firefighters, paramedics, dispatch all kind of have the same feeling.
It's like you're working either you're on the phone with someone and you can't save
them and there's no closure or you, you know, you, you're on the phone with someone, they're
in a bad way.
Paramedics come take them to the hospital.
You never know what's going on.
There's no closure.
As a paramedic, you drop them off at the hospital.
You never know what happens to this person.
And it's something that so many people are affected by.
And just this left with this unknowing resolve and not knowing what to do with these emotions.
And I mean, there's so much sleep deprivation.
There's so much I want to talk about, but so much sleep deprivation and, and first responders.
And it's cause you're just sitting there at night, this poor person that you were talking
to just having to listen to someone who's dying in their home and knowing you can't
help them.
That's horrifying.
Absolutely.
Well, getting to your parents, I think that's interesting.
Cause you know, your lens as a young girl versus what you saw when they were working,
your mom first, when you unpack, you know, or she even unpacks her career with the 2025
lens, um, you know, what were the, what were the highs?
What were the beautiful moments that she's talked about in that nursing role?
And then what were some of the costs of her service?
Yeah.
So, um, let's talk about the cost first so we can end on a happy note, but you know,
the costs for her were great and, um, there was a lot of, um, emotional dysregulation
that didn't have a name and didn't have, um, a way of coping with, you know, it's, we have
all these great tools to train people to do their jobs, to, you know, do heart massages
and to do CPR and to fire a weapon and we don't have any training on how to manage the
associated trauma and outcome of these situations.
And for her that looked like, you know, it, a lot of depression and a lot of sadness and,
um, she was an amazing woman.
I mean, uh, she's such a bit, still she's such a, she sits on the VAT team now for the
police department in Manhattan beach and she's like 83 and they call her and they're like,
oh, we need you to come out to a call.
She's like, I'm on my way.
Um, she's a bad ass, but she did suffer from tremendous amounts of depression and sadness
and she would just get down and being home at night and seeing her just kind of go retreat
into her bedroom and just close the door and you could hear her crying down the hall.
And um, you know, a lot of it surrounded child abuse and child violence and you know, lives
she couldn't save and people, family, you know, she had to interface with public all
the time and tell loved ones that their child has died or their spouse.
And it just, it takes a toll.
And um, for her, I mean, she would show up, but also on top of that, I lived with my mom.
Um, my mom raised us, my mom and dad got divorced when I was two.
And so we were predominantly raised by my mother.
I was with my father a lot, but probably with my mother, she was working 12 hour shifts.
I mean, she's working 12 hours shifts as a single mother.
Um, you know, like we were shipped from here to there on our own, latchkey kids, all that,
but she did what she had to do to raise her family, but it did.
It took a toll and, um, and we would see it and we would know when to stay clear and know
when, uh, oh, mom's sad.
Don't talk to her right now.
But the good side is that she has tremendous, I mean, her empathy and her sympathy is huge.
She has tremendous care for people.
She, um, she transitioned from like the ER to the ICU to, um, then to home health care
then to, and she's just always been on the helping side.
And the amount of, I mean, it's sad, the amount of funerals she's been to is insane, but the
amount of people that want her at their funeral, I mean, she has changed the course of people's
lives.
She has helped them being there for them, sit by their sides.
Um, the amount of lives that she's actually saved is, I mean, you can't even count the
amount of lives she saved.
And just like with every other first responder, she frames it like a lot of these tragedies,
you know, you kind of have to laugh at it, right?
We have this sixth sense of humor in this industry where we laugh at the things that
most people would be like, that's gross, you know, from, you know, sitting there and cracking
some guy's chest open and massaging his heart and blood going all over her face.
And she's like, I don't know, I was massaging his heart and I was like, spit or swallow.
I swallowed.
It's like, you have to laugh at these moments or else you really go down the rat hole.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, it sounds like she's had a journey then.
So you know, I'm sure that when she was a young nurse, there was no discussion at all
about, you know, the, the, you know, the mental health side.
And it's interesting because if I reflect the first conversations we were having as
PTSD and now as we progress forward, we realized that, you know, yes, there's PTSD, but moral
injury is probably more prominent, you know, especially with the inability to save, which
I had 14 years in uniform.
I never saved a single cardiac arrest pre-codes.
Yes.
But one that went into cardiac arrest, the movie saves zero.
So you did everything that you were trained to do and everyone still died.
That's you know, that that's a weight as well.
What have been the tools that have allowed her to process that and arguably forge this
resilience where at 80 something years old, she's still, you know, running out the front
door.
So it's such an interesting question.
I think there are some people that are predisposed to be able to do this.
I think though, you know, a lot of times we look at like triggers as, oh, you're going
to be triggered.
And you know, it's like some of the things we do that might look bad are actually protective
mechanisms.
And I think that her view, being able to just kind of take things a little bit surfacey
and not dive too deep has protected her.
She's not one to sit and super analyze things.
I mean an injury and you know, something she has to do for work.
Yes.
But in general, like, you know, she's happy and go lucky.
And I think so there's this just personality trait in general that she had.
And I mean, you know, you could probably go back into her childhood and look why she chose
to be on the surface of things and not dive deep and get carried away from them.
But what my, it was probably a negative thing to begin with, but it served her well for
the job she was in.
She's able to put things in a place and kind of put them in a bucket and leave them there
and not go back and touch on them.
But I will say also she has had tremendous amount of therapy and she as an adult went
to therapy and why?
Because all of a sudden she just was suffering from depression.
And what did the depression come from?
It could have come from just she might've been depressed regardless of her job or was
it from her job?
We won't know.
But she did.
She suffered from depression and luckily was able to see some really great providers who
have been treating her and giving her the proper medication.
A lot of times we think like there's this weird stigma with being medicated.
If you have depression and I don't feel that way.
I feel like, no, it's a chemical imbalance.
Let's write the course.
So she has been able to through therapy and through interventions like chemical interventions
been able to manage some of the stuff.
But in general, she's just kind of that way.
She's a little bit more like laissez faire.
It's interesting because when I look at my journey, I am literally no different than
any other person wearing the uniform at the moment or prior.
I'm no better.
I'm no worse.
I'm just a human being that chose to do this job.
So many people that had on the show, they were there.
They were there with that pistol in their hand.
Some of them jumped off the bridge and survived.
My question was, why not me?
Why didn't I spiral down as deeply?
The only thing I can really come up with, which aligns with a lot of the holistic healing
that we know now is even though there were some pretty shitty things that happened when
I was young, I grew up on a farm in England.
My dad was a veterinary surgeon.
So we were around blood and guts.
He was healing animals.
There were people from extended royal family to gypsies cycling through the house.
I was one of five kids.
We always ate around a dinner table.
We laughed and joked.
So just by winning the genetic lottery as far as where I was born, I think there was
this constant coping mechanism infused to my childhood, even though I almost died in
a house fire and my parents had a horrible divorce and some real traumas.
And so it's interesting to see as your mom progressed through her early timeline, was
there a similar thing that even though there were some bad things, were there other things
infused that just organically gave them coping mechanisms, which is probably what happened
for most of history, tribally and beyond, until we got to this very technological age
and this kind of ridiculous facade that, for example, talking about your mental health
is weakness.
So we were shoving all our emotions down, not talking about them.
So you brought up something so interesting, which was dinner table and sitting around,
we sat around the dinner table.
And so I've been doing this, I don't know, for like, I don't even know how long, 15 years,
something like that, mostly 10 years with first responders specifically, but before it
included them.
But anyway, what we used to see, and this is sad, the trend of suicide, is it okay to
talk about suicide and say suicide and things like that?
That's how we fix it.
Yes.
Okay.
So we saw the trends of suicides are really interesting.
And way back when, suicide rates among law enforcement were higher than suicide rates
with fire services.
And as of recent, like last 10 years, it's slowly been changing.
And the last time I looked, fire services was higher than law enforcement, but that
was last year.
I don't know what the exact numbers are now.
So someone can research it.
But I find personally, and I would love if someone would do a study on this, a direct
correlation, oops, I think there's a direct correlation between dinner table talk, processing,
and suicidal ideation.
Way back when, when my father was a firefighter, we used to go, I was in the fire houses all
the time.
We'd sit around the table, everybody's making meals, you're having a meal together, everybody's
talking shit, you're talking about the last call you went on, you're talking about, you
know, this funny thing happened, this tragic thing happened, and you're sitting around
and you're processing, right?
You're sharing what happened during the day, you're sharing with each other, you feel this
idea of community, of connection, you all have the same goal.
And then over time, we started using our iPhones, which they serve a purpose, but honestly,
they're a fucking shit show, like so much else in this world.
But I mean, I have an iPhone, I use it all the time, but now you have people in fire
houses are off on their own.
They're off on their own doing things, and they're not sitting around the table anymore
as often processing.
Some houses are doing it, some places are doing it, and I feel like there's such a correlation
between being able to sit and just talk about shit and having things be okay, right?
Because we know when we talk about it, just like you said about the word suicide and talking
about it, so the more we talk about it, the more we normalize it, normalize the talking
about it, and making it just more, you know, more accessible, and it's not such a taboo.
And I feel like that's one thing we're missing right now, and what never really law enforcement
didn't have it to begin with, because they never had, they didn't have the 24 hour shifts,
or 48 or whatever.
And so I think that's interesting to look at and to talk about is just this idea of
sitting down like you had with your family, sitting down around a table and just talking.
In my family, we sit down, we have dinner almost every night, and we say, and I'm not
saying like I'm all that, and I'm so great, it's just something we do, we sit down and
we say, you know, tell me the best part of your day, tell me the worst part of your day,
and tell me a neutral part of your day.
We just go around the table, and it's, we get to talk about stuff.
It brings stuff up.
Yeah, no, I mean, this is what I look back now.
I mean, I had real food, you know, we had fresh air, we had exercise, and it wasn't
even working out, it was mucking out stables and herding sheep and all that stuff.
But when you look at now, you know, when a lot of these retreats that first responders
and military members are going on, they're outside, they're talking to each other, there's
exercise, there's fresh air, there's sunlight, there's dirt, there's animals, I mean, all
the things that are infused.
So, you know, if you think about us a long time ago, you know, the warriors that came
home from war, you had those tribal ceremonies, and they would talk about what they did, or
whether it was coming back from a hunt, or, you know, and stories are passed on from generation
to generation, like which plants to eat, which plants not to eat.
And we've just become so detached from that communal conversation, that I think that's
a big underlying element.
And our poor kids that were born into this world, this generation, we wonder why there's
a crisis in their mental health.
It is true.
I was lucky enough to be brought into this amazing group of people.
It's the Recon and Sniper Foundation.
And they brought me in, and every year, they take a group of veterans up to this ranch
in Colorado called Rawai Ranch.
I think I pronounced it right.
Rawai, I don't know.
And we go up there every year, and we take like 20 people, 20 veterans, and it's exactly
that.
We're doing outdoor, we're doing physical activity, whether it's riding horses, or taking
hikes, or fly fishing, or we've just recently incorporated Jiu-Jitsu, which is really fun.
And then all day long, I do therapeutic mindfulness with them.
So one-on-one, therapeutic mindfulness, and then there's a psychiatrist there.
She does all the talk therapy.
And then at the end of the day, we all get together and we sit around the table, and
we just, for an hour or more, we're sitting there having a meal together, just talking
smack, and it has all the components you just said.
You're outdoors, you're around animals, you're doing an act, you're not just working out
to work out.
We also, we get there before the ranch has all the people that show up to rent places
from them, and we clear fields.
We clear trails.
We're out with chainsaws, clearing all the debris away.
And it's just like you're outdoors and working out just to be outdoors and working out, not
to build muscle, but just to be in the outdoor elements.
It's so cool.
I agree.
I wish our lives, I don't know, we could, I don't think we could do it, but wouldn't
it be cool if that was our life?
I mean, if you have one of those EMF things that you hear about where it just kills every
electronic device, you know, and assuming that there was an infrastructure where people
just didn't simply starve to death, it would be interesting the impact that would have
on mental health if we had to just be out there growing and hunting and foraging and
all the things that we used to have to do.
We'd have to cook around a fire.
We'd probably be super sleepy by eight, nine o'clock and go to bed.
Oh, before that.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
So yeah, it would be interesting as a social experiment.
Yeah, my family thinks I'm crazy because I'm like, one day I want to live on a commune.
I want to sit and like everyone's going to have their own task and I'm going to be responsible
for X and you be responsible for Y and we're all going to take care vegetables and goats
and all.
And I can't even like water a plant to save my life.
Like I have no plants in my house.
I am so bad at planting and gardening, but I feel like if I have nothing else to do,
maybe I would do it.
Absolutely.
Well, going, you talked about your mom, just quickly touch on your dad as well through
your 20, 25 eyes now.
What were the highs?
What were the struggles when it came to his career?
So first of all, my father died of a heart attack when he was 62, which is really young
and I attribute it to just the high stress of his life and his job.
And he had a lot of injuries working as a firefighter.
He ended up working air ops for a while in LA and was the guy who would like would hang
out of helicopters and rescue people off the side of mountains.
And he had knee injury and back injury and elbow injury.
So he had a ton of injuries and when he retired, he was on a lot of medication.
Some of it was self-medicated and he loved basketball.
And one day he was playing basketball on a pickup game while he was picking up one of
my little sisters who was coming home from diabetes camp.
And mind you, my stepmother had died five years previously from breast cancer at the
age of like 45, which is way too young.
And his daughters, my sisters at the time were really young.
So we also had that stress, but he goes out to play a pickup game and like drops dead
on the basketball court, like in one fell swoop, dead.
And I do really think that it was accumulative.
I think it was accumulation of stress.
Going back to way back when he was raised in an abusive environment.
My mom was very like, I think about things in like the window of tolerance where you're
hypervigilant or you're hypovigilant.
And my mom was very hypovigilant.
She pulled into herself when she was stressed out.
She was very quiet.
She would cry, depression.
My dad was on the other side.
He was hypovigilant, very angry, very active.
I mean, holes were always in our walls, couches flipped, like the whole thing, right?
He luckily didn't touch us much, but like physically violently, but he sure did like
inanimate objects.
And I ended up liking those also.
So his father abused him.
And so I know that that's where it came from.
So I don't think all of it is to say it's from fire services.
But then once he got on the job, he was really sensitive.
And he worked really hard to not be violent, but he had this side of him that really resonated
with children.
And he had an enormous amount of child deaths on duty that he witnessed and was a part of.
And every single time you just, he was just crushed.
Like he couldn't function.
And it was so sad to watch and so hard to watch it as a child to watch, because you
don't really understand it.
But he would, I remember one time there was a little boy who was at a pool, maybe like
two or three, and he sat down.
I don't even know how this happened, but you know, like outside of a pool, there's that
external drain and it has a suction on it.
And he sat on it and somehow it suctioned him to it and just pulled a lot of stuff out
that it shouldn't.
And my dad was there, brought him, helped him, brought him to the hospital.
The poor child ended up dying.
But my dad was at that hospital for every, like for a week, he would go there every single
day and just sit with this kid and feel the pain of not being able to help and feeling
like, like you were saying in the beginning, it's, you know, this moral injury of, you
know, once the shit hit the fan, you were trying CPR, they were gone, they were gone.
You couldn't bring them back.
And just that pain that he, I saw him numerous times, way too many than someone should deal
with trying to work through this.
And it really took a toll on him.
Now, the other side of it, my dad was like hysterical, amazing sense of humor.
I mean, constantly playing jokes on us.
I can't like, the guy, you would just walk down the hall and all of a sudden you'd see
his head sticking out, like on the floor, he'd be lying sideways being like, surprise, just
weird shit.
So he had this other side of him that made him resilient, that made him enjoy life and
have fun.
He didn't drink.
He just kind of enjoyed life.
But there was the dark side.
And it was dark and it was ugly and it was sad.
This is, I think, one of the two areas that aren't discussed when it comes to mental health
and first responders.
I mean, they are by some, the really passionate ones, but the general conversation is there's
a disregarding of seed deprivation, which I know we're going to get to, which is a huge,
as I say, herd of elephants in the room.
But then also what happened to us before we put the uniform on, from in vitro through
to you get the badge pinned on, we've had a life.
And more often than not, if you look at ACEs scores of first responders, most of us have
some significant things that have happened, which I would say if addressed becomes absolutely
a strength, but if left unaddressed and shoved down, fractures the foundation.
And if I'm playing white belt psychologist, if your dad was hurt as a child, subconsciously
his mission was to protect children, which is probably why he was so crushed when he
couldn't.
Right.
I'm right there with you.
Like I'm not a doctor, I'm not a psychologist, but I feel the exact same way.
Also I see that a lot of people who put themselves in jobs and that are filled with like high
energy and danger.
Oftentimes, I've noticed a correlation, like you're saying with childhood and, and whether
it's to right a wrong or it's because people have become desensitized to pain.
I think it's worth something.
It's worth looking at because a lot of times if you live in constant chronic chaos and
pain, your threshold is different.
And when you are engaging in the world in order to feel anything, it has to be dangerous
because you felt so much pain your whole life and so much suffering your whole life.
That's your homeostasis.
You're just used to that.
That's normal.
And so in order to feel anything, sometimes it has to be above that threshold.
And that's where danger comes in.
And that's why being attracted to dangerous jobs and dangerous behavior is really attractive
because it enables people to feel something who normally can't.
Yeah, I think the other element that I've heard people mention as far as when they kind
of started spiraling downwards was when it wasn't exciting anymore.
So there's almost like this element.
You see this with what we affectionately refer to as the overtime horse, that they just take
every hour they can.
It's like you've got a family at home.
Why don't you want to go home?
But busyness is another under recognized symptom of mental health challenges.
If you cannot just sit with your thoughts, that's a huge red flag.
If you have to be busy.
And the problem with the first responder profession is just like you said, once we hit eight,
10 years ish, a fire isn't a fire anymore.
At 14 years, unless I had to fight my way to the front door, I didn't even call it a
fire.
Whereas as a rookie, if a mattress is on fire, like, yeah, I had a ripper today.
So when that becomes less exciting and or less busy, you know, to distract the mind
from the thoughts that it wants to think about, that I think is why, you know, a lot of the
suicides and struggles that you see are people that are a little bit later in their life.
And I think part of it is exactly like you said, it's not as exciting.
And it's not therefore as distracting from the things that are simmering underneath.
Right.
It's dysregulating.
Calm is dysregulating because chaos is the norm.
Your system is used to being revved up.
It's used to being in emergency mode.
And the second you take that away, it's like, that's all of a sudden uncomfortable.
Being calm and and just copacetic is uncomfortable and dysregulating.
And that's yeah, that's fucked up.
Right.
At the least, that is it's it's really disheartening.
And then, yeah, it's like we also I've it just made me thought about the concept of
purpose.
Right.
It's when you talk about it happens later on in life and a lot of time after retirement,
it's all of a sudden your whole entire identity, who you are and what you do and how you show
up in the world is gone.
And I mean, we should have reentry programs.
We should have we I know some places do, but it should be mandatory.
Part of the job is like, what happens after retirement?
What do you do?
Finding something, finding purpose, because without it, I feel like that leads to a lot
of suicides.
Yeah, 100 percent.
And we just get especially the man of my generation.
I've talked about this a lot.
You got the yin and yang.
You know, the black is the the soft and compassionate and the white is the hard and, you know, on
a structure fire on an extrication.
Yeah, you can lean into the operational side, the white.
But through this kind of faux stoicism that, you know, the Schwarzenegger and Stallone's
gave us when we were younger, these men become a white circle, especially men.
You know, I'm sure it happens in the women, but I think more so in the men.
And so then they become I'm a Marine, I'm a firefighter.
And then you come out the other end and then you fall apart.
But what they fail to recognize is it was the other side, the black side, that was the
compassion and empathy that sent you into that job in the first place.
And your dad's a perfect example of that.
So realizing that you can serve in a different capacity and allow yourself that compassion
and empathy.
That's actually what a man is not a white circle, but the yin and the yang.
I mean, that's that's really I resonate with that a lot.
And somehow there is just so much pushback on compassion and empathy and, you know, and
it's making me weak.
And and there are a place for both.
You can hold both at the same time.
You can actually hold the yin and yang at the same time.
Right.
You can be both at the same time.
And oftentimes we think that you have to be one or the other.
And it's divisive.
And I think some of this training that we could do is to show that you can still be
sad and show up for your children.
Like you can still be you could still be upset about something and still be able to navigate
the world.
You don't have to shove it down and have it, you know, and ignore it and not be there.
And the second we open up to it and say, OK, I need to feel an emotion and let me feel
like what sad feels like all of a sudden, it's not the white elephant in the room.
And all of a sudden, you're not not thinking about it, not thinking about it, not thinking
about it.
It's there and it gives you space to think about something else.
And I think that's really important.
And it's one of the things that, you know, I was thinking about this the other day about
this concept of suck it up.
And you know, so many people in law enforcement and fire services and so many of these helping
professions, it's like, you know, you suck it up.
You can't feel your emotion.
You got to suck it up.
And I remember one time when I was like, I don't know, I was maybe seven or eight.
And my dad was teaching me how to do a backflip off the diving board.
And I it took me a little while, but I finally got it.
And he's like, OK, you got to do it over and over again now.
So I did it over, backflip, backflip.
And then I started getting a little cocky and I'm like, oh, I'm going to jump even higher
this time.
So I jumped really high and I was thinking, oh, if I could do like one and a half, wouldn't
that be cool?
Anyway, I went up and when I came back down, I didn't jump out.
I just went straight up and I came down and I hit my head on the board and I just kind
of fell into the water, fell all the way down to the deep end.
I remember like looking up and seeing my arm, my dad's arm trying to reach down.
And I'm like, just fucking get in the pool.
Like why are you sticking your arm down there?
But anyway, I swam up to the top and I got out and I was like, oh, and my head is like
a big knot and I'm crying and he's like, okay, get back on and do it again.
And I was like, no dad, I can't.
And he's like, you got to just suck it up and do it.
And I was like, what an asshole.
And I got up and I did it again and fine.
I landed it.
And you know, the second I did it again, I got out of the pool and I went in the house
and for years I was so mad at him.
I was like, what a jerk, you know, suck it up, suck it up.
And that was his like mentality towards so many things was you just have to suck it up.
And later on in life, upon reflecting, there is a place for sucking it up.
You sometimes do have to suck it up in order to take care of the task at hand, in order
to get the job done, in order to do what you need to do.
And then you can feel your emotions.
It's not to say that suck it up is like a one or a zero.
I feel like suck it up, it has a place.
It has a place sometimes.
But if we then lay it over absolutely every part of our life, that's when we get into
problems.
When we have like these absolutes and these black and whites versus the black and white
yin and yang thing, but like put everything in a black and white box.
All of a sudden we have problems addressing what needs to be addressed.
Instead, if we can say, okay, let's suck it up momentarily so we can take care of what
needs to be taken care of.
As a first responder, if you get carried away by your emotion in the moment of a tragedy,
you're not going to be effective at your job.
That's just, it's impossible.
So you have to put it in a box and be like, okay, I'm going to get back to you.
And then get back to it and go, okay, now I need to make some space to feel the shit
that I felt so I don't feel like such crap.
But I do believe we should sometimes suck it up.
Yeah.
I mean, operationally, absolutely.
You know, if you've got to go over the edge of a building on a rope, that's not the time
to be screaming like a little girl and saying, I don't like high, you know.
But if you then rappel down and God forbid you're retrieving a child who's deceased,
then that's when you're going to have to process that because that's a completely different
part of the psyche then.
Yeah.
Yes.
All right.
Well, I want to get back to your journey into mindfulness.
So you're in high school, you're saying, oh my God, Becky, look at that, but, and all
the other Valley girl stuff that you guys say, what was your initial career aspiration
and how did you find yourself in the world of mindfulness?
Not only just mindfulness, but actually academically studying mindfulness.
Yeah.
So, I mean, of course, like every other person in Los Angeles, I was going to be a movie
star.
No, it was very brief.
It didn't last long, but I did like theater work and stuff like that.
So to my, when I eventually went to university, so my father was a firefighter, mother was
a registered nurse.
Neither of them went to a formal university, right?
They both got their, their certifications and their degrees in nursing and in fire services.
So I, there was not, there was not a lot of focus on education and going to university.
It was never a lot of conversation in our family and it was just like, oh yeah, do what
you want to do.
So I ended up in community college for about six years and then eventually transferred
to a, a UC.
And I, so I am essentially was the first person in our family to have a formal college education.
And while I was in school, I was part of the speech team and ended up going to like nationals
and winning gold championships for speech, not the debate side of speech, but the there's
like pros and all sorts of other sides of speech team.
So and I found this great love in speech and I started to focus on communications as a
major.
So I focused on communications and I initially got into public relations, which I thought,
I don't know, kind of marketing people centric.
I could talk to people.
Let me try that.
And I ended up in, in technology.
And so I was kind of during that technology nineties boom where, you know, startups were
really cool and manageable.
And so I did that for years and really enjoyed it.
And I eventually moved to DC.
I started my own consulting firm after a company that I was at sold to another company and
I got some contracts in DC, moved to DC where I met my husband.
And so fast forward, we started raising children and I started noticing that my level of frustration
and the way I showed up for my children was getting ugly.
And I was still working in technology, but I started noticing with my first two children,
they were my husband's kids from his first marriage.
And so I didn't have, I was a little bit more reserved with them, even though we had them
half the time, I was more reserved because they had a mother and you know, I deferred
to her on everything.
Like she was the mom.
I'm, they call me Nina.
I'm their Nina.
And so, but when we eventually had our own, our youngest kind of like something else inside
me opened and I didn't have to reserve.
And so the ugly side of me came out that I didn't know was there.
And I found that when my daughter was four, I really was aggressive towards her one day
in a way that's not acceptable.
And I just had this epiphany of like, what the fuck am I doing?
This is not okay and why am I doing this?
And do I have control over this?
Obviously not.
Why don't I have control?
That doesn't make sense.
I should be able to control my actions.
And so I started to study the brain.
I was really curious.
I went back to school and I was like, I want to understand the stress response.
I want to understand what part of our brain reacts during stress.
What part of our brain is connected to trauma?
What part of our brain do we have control of?
What part of our brain don't we?
And can we actually train for control?
Like is that a thing?
So I started looking at neuroscience and the stress response system and I fell into mindfulness.
And mindfulness is really interesting because it's an actual training that you do where
you train your brain to think.
It's all about awareness.
It's not like the talk therapy of how did my childhood fuck me up to this point in life?
It's like I'm here right now.
What am I feeling and what can I do about it?
And so I started just studying it more and more and more, which is kind of like why I
named my company Mindful Junkie because once I fell, like some friends of mine actually
said, oh, this would be the perfect name for you once they saw what I was doing, which
was just, I felt like a junkie.
I was consuming more and more mindfulness, getting mindfulness certified, getting teacher
certified, going to school, like all these things.
I'm like, give me more, give me more, give me more.
And eventually got into a master's program, which was the very first mindfulness master's
degree you could get in the United States.
It might even be the only one still.
I don't know.
But I was like one of the first 10 graduates of this mindfulness master's program.
And while I was conducting, I conducted the study and was writing my thesis and all my
research was honing in on first responders.
And I was looking at it because I was interested in the stress response system and I was interested
in chronic stress, right?
So like everybody has stress, but then there's chronic stress and chronic stress says it's
pervasive.
It's just happening all the time.
And the life of a first responder, I mean, your entire job is stress.
Like it's just like, oh, the trauma, the tragedy.
And so I was looking at all of this and I was, I think I mentioned to these this once
when we were talking before, but this lieutenant once said to me, he's like, why are you so
interested in first responders?
And I was like, I don't know, they're just really cool people, badass people who want
to take care of the world and no one's taking care of them.
So why don't we figure out something to take care of them?
And I was like indignantly told my husband, I'm like, this jerk was like, why first responder?
And Jeff, my husband finally was said, pointed out that no, I was raised by two first responders.
And that's why my lens is such and I didn't get it at the time, but not like while I was
doing it.
But now I realize, I mean, that was my lens.
My lens was seeing two people who were so amazing taking care of our community at a
cost at a cost to themselves at a cost to our family.
You know, when the doors closed at the end of the night for us, it was a lot of pain
and suffering.
And yet they were out there in the world every single day taking care of our community, taking
care of others.
And no one was saying who's taking care of the people who are taking care of the people,
what resources do we have?
And so when I started asking all these questions during my study and during my thesis and writing
all of this, like what, what training do you have to help you process?
What trainings do you have to prepare you to go into a traumatic moment?
What trainings do you have when you leave work at the end of the night before getting
home?
How do you learn to regulate?
Like how, what trainings do you have to show up in the world to show up for your family?
And I just kept getting a whole lot of nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.
And so I started looking at mindfulness as a way of going, okay, we can do this.
We can train just like we do a muscle.
We can train our brain to identify being triggered, identify a stress state, identify trauma,
even identify happiness, identify joy, identify gratitude.
And we can train to magnify it or to dim the light on it.
And so I just, after I wrote my thesis, it is, was like the backbone for the curriculum.
I developed a curriculum called Tactical Brain Training and I go in and I train in departments
and agencies.
It's a four hour course and it's the psychoeducation of stress and trauma.
So all the interventions for stress and trauma and it's, and you apply mindfulness throughout,
mindfulness interventions.
And one of the things that I think is a huge misconception with mindfulness, but also with
stress management in general is that there's a fix.
There's one thing you can do when the reality is everybody's trauma is personal.
Everybody's stress is personal.
Everything that brought you to this moment is personal.
And so are the interventions you're going to use for helping to de-stress.
What works for me might not work for you.
What works for you might not work for Joe.
And so part of this training that I do is to help identify a personal strategy to say,
okay, maybe I hate square breathing because it makes me claustrophobic.
So I'm not going to use that to regulate, but I'm going to use a listening intervention.
And maybe if I do this listening intervention right now, it'll take me out of my amygdala,
fight, flight and freeze and into my prefrontal cortex where I can start actively making decisions
and I can get out of ruminating.
I can get out of self judgment and start thinking.
And so it provides like 15 different opportunities and mindfulness interventions to help you
establish what works for you and create like a personal system.
And I started teaching it.
So what were you seeing in that community when you first started teaching it, especially
as far as the resistance and what has been the kind of metamorphosis since then?
That's such a good question.
Okay.
So when I first started teaching it, I called it mindfulness for first responders.
That was like no go.
Open the door in the face.
This ain't happening.
Crazy lady with the Mohawk is coming in to talk to a bunch of first responders.
This shit ain't flying.
They expected me to be burning incense and wearing little lemon leggings and sitting
on the mat and breathing.
And I don't resonate with that.
So that's not how I show up because that never worked for me.
So I didn't do it.
I mean, a lot of this is like cultural competency we talk about.
And I have the cultural competency only because it's what I resonate with.
And I was raised in the environment of first responders.
There are many different ways of getting there.
This is just my approach.
So I was getting a lot of rejects, a lot of nos, a lot of I started with mindfulness for
first responders and I started with a very tried and true course, which was like an eight
week intervention.
Okay.
No one can give me eight weeks, an agency, a department, no one eight weeks is like impossible,
especially with shift work.
It's like to get everybody in eight weeks to learn something.
It doesn't work.
Paired it down to six weeks.
Let me try six weeks.
No go paired it down to four weeks.
No go.
So I realized that it has to be a planting of a seed.
It can't be an entire training.
It has to be, let's start planting the seed of what mindfulness is so that you can then
take it and grow it into what you want it to be.
And then I had to, when our nervous system is all revved up with like mirror neurons,
you know, with mirror neurons, you show up and you're like angry and the person gets
angry, right?
Like the mood you're in really seeps onto the other person's mood.
And if you're threatened, people feel threatened.
Well, I was noticing that the word mindfulness negatively impacted the nervous system of
people.
And so rather than creating a insurmountable situation to begin with, why not just change
the name of it so that I don't walk in and they're already pissed off at me, make it
something that is manages somebody's nervous system so I can come in and we can start talking
about this shit.
And so years later, I named it tactical brain training.
And that's when I started seeing way more interaction and way more interest.
And it wasn't, it's not a lie.
You could say it's marketing, but it's marketing to the extent of creating it.
It's like people are more open to it and it is what it is.
You're tactically training your brain to identify stress, identify trauma, and then
do something about it.
And so that was like the progression.
And then it became a four hour training that's a planting of a seed.
And it's specifically called tactical brain training because you're training your brain
to think.
It's interesting because the same, same thing that I came across, I mean, not too long ago
way after you had this conversation with yourself, but when there's resistance to using the tools
that we know work when it comes to mental health, having the performance conversation
results in the same exact thing, but you've reframed it.
So you get, you know, a firefighter or police officer is like, Oh, you know, that's just
hippie dippy bullshit, but they're on the SWAT team or they're one of the rescue guys.
It's like, all right, then rock star.
Do you know that you cannot get into flow state with a busy mind?
So if you really want to be at that top operator level as a firefighter or a paramedic or whatever
it is, then these are the tools that the elite athletes use so they can get into a flow state.
So that can be present.
So when you're searching a room and it's all smoked out, that you can actually see that
layout of the room as you're feeling with your hand versus, you know, two corners in
you, you start panicking because you got lost.
So I like that reframing because the result is exactly the same.
You're trying to calm the nervous system.
You're trying to clear the mind, but the operational side is also a good hook for the naysayers.
Yeah.
And it's like, instead of trying to like, I don't know, I screw up these things all
the time, but what is it?
You're like trying to put a square peg in a round hole or a round peg in a square hole.
I don't know whichever one it is.
It's like, instead of trying to do that, we're like trying to shove, we're like, ah, mindfulness,
mindfulness.
And it's like, no, no, no.
Why?
Why not just change it?
Why not just reframe it and make it so that people want to do it?
It's like, it's, one of the things that I have found over and over again is you have
to show up where people are, not where you want them to be.
And rather than trying to say, I want you to be here, I just like offer up ideas and
everything is like also an option.
One of the, you know, what I teach is a very trauma aware mindfulness, which says that
you don't have to sit with your eyes closed and have no thoughts and focus on it.
It's like, it's all about options.
It's like, do you want to close your eyes?
Great.
If you don't, fuck it.
Don't close your eyes.
You don't have to.
If you want to stand the whole time, stand.
If you want to lean back in your chair, lean back.
Like do it that it's going to work for you.
Don't do it in the way that we've created this system that you must comply to.
Absolutely.
Well, you mentioned about the punctuation of shifts.
I've had a guy, Jim Poole on and he's from a company called Newcom.
And if you ever heard of them, N-U-C-A-L-M.
It would absolutely go hand in hand with what you do.
Oh, look them up.
The quick backstory.
I'm sure people listen, they've heard it before, but this technology came from this incredible
scientist that we had in the U S who took 15 years to figure out the frequency that
the brain is at in certain emotional states.
Okay.
He then took another 10 years to figure out, well, can we influence the brain to go into
those states?
And he came up with this device and you put headphones on and it's not the kind of neuro
beats that you can get on a Spotify playlist.
But each song is like a gigs worth of stuff.
So under the music are all these kind of undulations and it's the only one in the world that has
the patent for this particular technology.
And it used to be in the NASA, you know, training rooms and the seal rooms and, you know, NFL
locker rooms, $6,000 box that they had.
Well, now, as we touched on earlier, the technology that we have in our phones, it's an app.
And so I cannot speak highly enough of this and the same with mindfulness.
I've used Headspace for years, but it's passive.
So like you said, trying to get the thoughts to go away.
I think it's also a good gateway drug into mindfulness too.
But so what I've said to a lot of people on the show is find somewhere safe because obviously
you can't relax since you feel safe.
So go back in the bunk room when you've been relieved or, you know, sit in your patrol
car, but within the, you know, within the perimeter of your, you know, station or whatever
it is that you, you go to for meetings.
Put on the eye mask and the headphones and do the 20 minute power nap.
And what it does is it, it, whether you like it or not, it will down regulate your nervous
system.
And I can't think of, aside from mindfulness, a better way of punctuating between, I just
cut a kid out of a car at 3 a.m. and I'm dad walking through the door at nine.
So talk to me.
I mean, that's, that's that technology, but I mean, mindfulness, again, doing a Headspace
session or, you know, the things that you're going to teach, I think we need a punctuation
between work and home.
So talk to me about that space.
Yeah.
So first of all, Newcom, I feel like might be my new best friend.
I am going to research the shit out of it.
As soon as we're off of this, I can't wait.
I know that there are huge, there's tons of research with sound and brainwaves and how
it all works.
I don't know anything about it.
I just know that it's out there.
And I know there's also something called heart math, which is a, it's like a little, I wonder
if I have it on me.
It's like this little device you put on your ear and it follows your heart rate.
And then you look on your phone and you take the ball and you either try and keep, it's
biofeedback.
I don't know if you've ever done biofeedback.
I did it way back when, when I was a kid.
But anyway, it's a really great way of regulating and keeping you on track.
And it's a great way of practicing mindfulness where it really is mindfulness.
You're focusing on something and when you get distracted, you know, you're getting distracted.
So you come back to being focused, which is what it is, but it's also another great way
of getting there.
And this does speak to this feeling that I have so much, which is there's not one access
point to all of this.
There are so many different access points to creating, being able to manage down regulating
and being able to manage the tragedy, right?
There's new column, there's heart math, there's mindfulness.
There's all like, it behooves us to talk about them all and to not be adamant that one is
the only way to go.
There's a shit ton.
So anyway, yeah, I, so one of the things is mindfulness is great.
It's preventative.
It's great for before you encounter a tragic situation during the moment of, but also afterwards
when you're trying to down regulate, as you mentioned.
Part of the mindfulness practice itself is just, you have to first notice that you're
in a moment where you need to do it.
And after practicing over time, that's when you start noticing that you feel out of your
window of tolerance, you feel hyper or hypovigilant, you're not feeling copacetic, you're not feeling
like things are okay.
You feel uncomfortable.
Then once you notice that discomfort, then you could do something about it.
So a lot of times, even it could be something as simple as when you're driving back from
an incident to actually tune into a sensation.
So you can notice like the feeling of the steering wheel.
All of a sudden you start having thoughts of the situation you just went through and
you go up, I'm thinking, and you redirect and go back to a sensation.
I'm going to feel the steering wheel.
I'm going to feel the door.
I'm going to, I'm listening.
A lot of times I recommend listening to music.
Music, like we were just saying, sound is a great soother.
It's a great way to focus on something else.
And it's not to disappear what has occurred.
It's not to say, I'm not going to think about this.
It's more to say, I'm feeling heightened.
The way I'm thinking about it is dysregulating.
And so I'm going to refocus on something else.
We should be able to sit with our feelings and with our emotions, but we have to do it
in a safe way.
We have to do it in a way that isn't going to take us and spiral us down.
And so there's a way of doing that where you can sit and it, you know, what does this feel
like?
You can sit and name it, right?
So there's a thing, it's name it to tame it.
I'm sure you've heard of that saying before.
It's very neurologically based neurons that fire together, wire together, name it to tame
it.
When you can name something, you somehow take some of its power away, right?
So in the moment when you're feeling sad, notice this is sadness.
And there's a specific mindfulness intervention that you could do where rather than identifying
with it and saying, I am sad, I am angry.
Instead you say, this is sadness.
This is anger because who I am is Gina.
I am not sadness.
I am not frustration.
I am not anger.
I am Gina.
But this feeling I have, this feels like sadness.
This is sadness.
This is pain.
And then once you name it, you go, okay, what can I do to redirect?
So you name it, this is sadness.
Take a breath.
We know through a lot of research that actual breathing helps to decrease cortisol overload.
Cortisol is the stress hormone.
A lot of times it's in our systems, whether we want it or not, we're living in high stress,
everything goes, goes, goes.
You're just like in stress and hormones and cortisol.
And just taking a breath helps to decrease the cortisol levels in our system.
So it's not like you're just taking, oh, you need to calm down and take a breath.
You're actually doing something physiologically to your body.
But you have to remember to take a breath.
And that's another component of mindfulness.
Remembering, remembering to do something.
I need to remember to take a breath.
And we know also through science and through wonderful books like Breathe or Breath, I
can't remember which one it is, that we have two different chambers in our lungs.
And it's like the lower chamber, the deep, deep breath we take, that is connected to
our nervous system.
And so the deeper the breath, the more you're going to be able to down regulate.
So you have stress, you name it, you feel a sensation, take some deep breaths.
Yes, this is sadness.
Okay, now what?
And then you carry on.
I used to use breath work on the way to acute calls.
So obviously there's a lot of calls at the very run of the mill, it doesn't even get
your heart rate up at all.
But then you get that pediatric call or confirmed structure fire.
And it wasn't really box breathing so much.
It was probably, again, just a slow inhale, slow exhale.
But it was amazing how it would just keep it down.
Because obviously you're not trying to be in some sleep state on the way to a call.
You got to have that level of performance.
But just to take the edge off it where it doesn't become overwhelming.
Yeah.
And you mentioned box breathing.
Some people call it square breathing.
Some people call it box breathing.
It's amazing.
In all these, every single time I do a training, I do box breathing, square breathing.
I do open breathing.
I do a shit ton of other things.
But between box square breathing and open breathing, at the end I have them raise their
hands.
Who preferred square breathing?
Who preferred open breath?
It's almost half and half.
And the people who don't like square breathing feel like they're holding their breath.
They feel claustrophobic.
They feel like they can't breathe.
The people who don't like open breathing feel like it's never ending.
And they can't stop thinking.
And their thoughts just keep going and going and going.
And so again, one is not right.
It's find what works for you and do that.
So for people listening, if they took the course, what would the kind of principles
be that are infused in them?
Learning to identify what's occurring while it's occurring so you have agency over your
actions.
A lot of times we are just in a reactive state and a reactive state takes you to the amygdala,
to the fight, flight and freeze.
A responsive state is prefrontal cortex executive functioning.
So you're learning about the science behind the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, the science
behind the stress response system, your adrenal glands, your cortisol overload, the science
behind ruminating, having thoughts that just keep spinning out of control.
But while you're doing that, the entire time you're practicing an intervention.
And this is kind of how my book flows also.
It's like there's some science and then you actually do a practice.
So I'm not just throwing stuff at you saying, oh, here's all these wonderful ideas.
We're in class in the moment going to practice this shit.
So you do some practice and then you learn some more science and then you do some practice
and you assess over and over and over again.
One of the main principles is self assessment.
You assess what you're like before you do an intervention.
You assess what you're like after an intervention.
And did you like it?
Like maybe you hated it.
Great.
Don't do it.
Don't do the one you hate when you're feeling really bad.
That's going to suck.
And then through the whole thing, it's science practice assessment, science practice assessment.
So at the end of it, when you're done, you have a list of things that work, a list of
things that don't work, and then you could start developing your own program.
And one of the things that's in my book is I was able to convince the publisher to put
QR codes at the end of each chapter so that at the end of each chapter, you can go on
and do a guided meditation, like it takes you to my YouTube channel where they can do
an actual guided meditation on their phone or on their computer.
Brilliant.
I forget who it was.
Someone recently said they wanted to do that in, I think it was one of my English chiropractic
friends actually.
I thought it was just such a brilliant idea because there's text and you can absorb a
lot but there's certainly times where, how do you describe a Turkish getup, for example?
That's really hard to do with words or even pictures.
But yeah, so now you go to a video and then I think the guided meditation is fantastic.
My wife gets a little bit of anxiety and she'll just do literally, I don't even know if it's
a minute, the headspace breathing.
I think it's five breaths and then it's a bird or a balloon or whatever it is.
And within that literally 60 seconds or so, she's kind of downregulated again and she's
good to go.
So yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
Yeah.
And I think that's it too right there.
It's like, just be curious, like try it out.
See if it works.
Try it for two weeks.
Just do, one of the misconceptions is that you have to do a seated meditation for an
hour a day and it's bullshit.
They have shown such high efficacy with 12 minutes a day, 12 minutes, even five minutes,
even like you said, like 60 seconds for your wife or whatever it is.
Just be curious and try it and see how it's showing up for you.
Absolutely.
Well, you mentioned the book, Tactical Brain Training.
So talk to me about what people will find in there aside from the QR codes.
So they'll find it's meant to be an interactive book.
So it's each chapter is like a story.
It's a first responder story.
It starts with like an actual real life situation that occurred without having a mindfulness
lens and then it replays the scenario with a mindfulness lens.
And then it has the science as to why, why did this happen?
Why did this occur?
And then you also, each chapter is a contemplative question.
Like it asks you a question.
When was the last time you were triggered on the job?
What does it look like for you to be an external stressor?
How can you down regulate?
Was this effective?
So like literally in the book, you can write, there's questions that you're writing answers
to based on the previous learnings.
And then there is the self assessment.
So you can write down in the book, you can assess how each intervention works for you
after you do the guided one that you can watch, or you can like listen to someone else.
Maybe you hate my voice, listen to someone else's guided meditation.
That's totally fine.
You could still go through the whole book.
And so it's science, it's practice, it's, it's like processing through questions and
then it's assessing.
Beautiful.
Well, I want to get to where people can find that at the end, but just before we do, we
touched on sleep and sleep deprivation and shift work a little bit before.
I'm just going to give you the microphone.
Talk to me about what you see as far as my community and that issue.
It's a shit show there.
Yeah.
I mean, just to lay it out there.
Sleep deprivation is huge for a multitude of reasons.
One shift work shift work totally screws you up, right?
Like it's just, it's hard.
It's just really hard to be up all night and then stay awake when you get home to be there
for your kids who you now have to make breakfast for, get them out the door, stay awake.
And then you want to be awake when they get home.
I mean, it's just really hard.
Plus when we lay down at night, it's really easy to go into judgment and to go into all
the things you did wrong, all the things you wish you could have done throughout maybe
that bad call that, um, and so it's, it's really, really difficult.
We're all revved up and, um, I think that almost every single first responder I talked
to has sleeping issues.
There are so many different ways of helping with sleep and it's really important.
We know the science behind sleep.
I don't have to go over all the studies, but it really messes up with your brain.
It messes up with your nervous system.
It messes up with your, um, with your ability, you know, your cold, you get sick more often,
your immune system.
I couldn't think of that word.
I just did immune system.
Um, but, and so it has really negative effects on you when you don't have, plus you're just
kind of mean.
Like when I don't get enough sleep, I'm just not that nice.
So at a basic level, you're just kind of mean, but there are some really great exercises
you can do.
Um, a body scan is a great example of, you could literally sit there and listen to a
guided meditation next to your bed on your iPhone.
These phones are great and listen to a meditation and a body scan takes you progressively.
It's like a progressive muscle relaxation and you go, you like relax your feet and your
knees and you go all the way up to your chest and your head and then you go back down and
it's literally so boring.
You fall asleep.
You're like, that is so boring.
I'm falling asleep.
Um, so, but there are so many different types of meditations you can listen to and you can
either put it on your phone and put a timer on your phone.
They, Amazon has the most amazing headband that has speakers in it, wireless speakers.
So for instance, if you share a bed with someone and they don't want to listen to what you're
listening to, you can sleep with this headband on.
It's like, it's meant, it meant for sleeping and you can listen to a guided meditation,
a body scan, a listening, um, just white noise, dark.
I mean, there's all sorts of noises you can listen to, uh, and then you can also, like
my husband, listen to the history of Rome and just fall asleep by listening to the history
of Rome.
But there are a lot of different ways.
And they did this study once taking, uh, people who were intoxicated and people who had sleep
deprivation and they put them on a driving course and they said, ready, set, go.
And they put them through this driving course and they both sucked and they both failed.
And so when you think about, we are putting our lives in the hands of poor individuals
who cannot sleep and we're asking them to protect and to serve and to not get injured.
And they literally are having a hard time thinking because of sleep deprivation.
That's a problem.
But then not only that, what do we do?
I, I'm working with someone right now who recently, um, thought they were having a heart
attack.
It turns out they probably were, uh, have, has had to go to the hospital numerous times
now.
Um, sleep deprivation, Adderall energy drinks over, over, over, over, repeat, rinse, repeat,
rinse, repeat, rinse.
They can't sleep.
They have to have energy drinks.
They have to take Adderall and then they crash.
And um, and this is something we see a lot, especially night shift, especially, you know,
a lot of people who are working nights, you see this and, and it's obviously a really
dangerous situation.
Um, and I do believe that things like medication, if you're seeing the proper doctor and you're
taking something like Adavan, sometimes that could be very helpful.
And we shouldn't be scared of that if you're seeing the proper doctor, but self-medicating
to help with sleep deprivation is a dangerous, dangerous, um, solution and doing things like
taking 10 minutes before you go to bed to do a mindfulness intervention can really help
to get you into a state where you can sleep better.
And if that doesn't work, listening to a mindfulness intervention while you're sleeping can be
really useful.
It's interesting with the studies where they show, you know, this is the same as a blood
alcohol of 0.1.
Um, because I've had this conversation with some of the neuroscientists.
It's a high, high likelihood that the people that took part in that study were probably
students of that university that were in bed every night.
So for that study, for that period, they were sleep deprived, but probably just for a day
or two.
We're talking about a profession where they're sleep deprived for 10, 20, 30 years.
So I would assume that if you actually broke it down for first responder, it was way worse
than 0.1.
I would agree.
Yeah, I would agree.
God, it reminds me, there was this other study that was out about sleep and the brain and
like atrophying of some area of the brain.
I can't remember it right now, but yeah.
Oh yeah.
The impact is incredible.
Yeah.
Well, even, I mean, speaking of atrophying.
So what I do know is sleep deprivation causes demyelination of the myelin sheath as does
TBI.
So you've got, you know, as combat athlete or, you know, the SWAT member who's a breacher
or an ex-military member that became a firefighter.
And now you're compounding head injury with more head injury.
So that's another under discussed element.
Yes.
TBI's concussions.
That's, yeah, there's a lot there.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, I want to move to some closing questions to be mindful of your time.
The first one I love to ask, is there a book or other books that you love to recommend?
It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated.
Oh my gosh.
Okay.
God, I wish I could remember the name of it.
The Man Who Mistook His Head for a Hat or something like that.
I'll get, let me try to remember it and I could send it to you.
It's just a really great book on connecting, you know, obviously the tried and true, which
is the one about the mind-body connection.
The body keeps the score.
That's a tried and true, but that's a hard one to read.
It's like a lot and really in depth.
This one that I'm trying to recall the name of is a fun way of getting there.
And it's just really, it shows the connection that we have, the mind-body connection, which
our body holds so much information, but if we're not tuned into it, we just don't know.
And so training to tune into our body is really, really key.
And then the second book is called, I think it's called The Gift.
And it's about our intuition.
Do you know that one?
Yes.
I actually had Edith Eager on the show.
Oh really?
I think it was the other one she signed, The Choice.
But yeah, amazing, amazing woman, Auschwitz survivor, Turin psychology.
Yes.
Yeah.
So those are some good ones.
Beautiful.
Well, then what about films and documentaries?
Oh gosh.
Okay.
I can't even touch that.
I am such not a movie, like any pop culture music movie I'm really bad at.
I just watched, it was a two part documentary on the Jerry Springer show.
And obviously we passed away a couple of years ago.
So now they're kind of, you know, putting it out there.
But if you want to see, you know, the kind of origin story of this horrendous kind of
reality TV culture that we've got, but also, I mean, just, there's no other way of putting
it, the lack of ethics, like the horrible human beings that were behind that show that
had no regard whatsoever about the real lives that they were displaying.
It is nauseating.
But then you look at the narcissism on social media and you look at the way our news is
done now and the way that these god awful politicians behave in election time.
It really, you know, there's a lot of kind of Genesis from, you know, that, that was
a turning point where TV just fucking went down the toilet.
So even though it's, it's not a nice thing to, it's not an enjoyable watch because you
just want to reach through the fucking TV and punch them square in the face, but it
really does show you where this kind of idiocracy really started.
But it is, it is interesting.
I can't wait to watch that.
I'm going to watch it.
And it's interesting to think that we looked at that and we're like, God, this is disgusting.
I can't, I can't believe we got here in life.
And now look where we are.
Exactly.
It could just, it just evolves.
Doesn't it?
It's like building blocks of shit.
Exactly.
It's that, you know, well, I'll watch this because then I can feel better about my life
versus why don't I improve my life?
You know, and it's a very sad state of affairs.
And I'm obsessed with like narcissism.
I mean, it is narcissism and psychopathy.
Like both those, for some reason, I, it's just, I can, I never get enough of that.
But yeah, I want to watch this Jerry Springer.
That's a shit show that ruined tons of people's lives.
Absolutely.
Well, one of the cases they highlight, it was a murder suicide as well from three guests.
Yep.
Yeah.
That's horrifying.
Yeah.
Actually, it's not murder suicide.
It was, forgive me.
It was a murder, brutal murder, you know, with his, with his hands and feet, but yeah.
And it was all really amplified by the fact that they, they ridiculed them all on television.
Yeah.
Was it the one episode where this person came out as gay and he, he, he talked to his, this
guy that he was attracted to and the other guy was straight.
That was, that wasn't the Jerry Springer show.
I know what you're talking about.
And that I think was a different show, but this one was, he was married to this woman,
I think, or dating this woman, I forget, but he was from Germany.
He was now with another woman.
The way that this woman was told the show was going to go was complete, you know, smoke
and mirrors bait switch.
Yeah.
You know, she, she good for her.
She basically realized it was bullshit and just kind of walked off and left the set.
She's like, Oh, you want to be with her?
Fine.
You know, whatever.
But anyway, they ended up getting, he, he weaseled his way back into her life for a
moment and then, yeah, he killed her in her home.
He basically was caught order because he was abusive to get out of their house and, you
know, restraining order and he went to the house and killed her.
But there is no doubt.
And then the whole Jerry Springer, you know, TV show, all the people there, they all denied
that, you know, it had anything to do with it, but they were lied to, you know, this
woman was lied to and then publicly ridiculed.
And it was after the show aired, this, the killer, the husband or ex-husband or whatever
he was, um, was at a bar.
And I'm sure they were probably all laughing at him at the bar.
And that's when he went round and did what he did.
To say that the TV show had nothing to do with it is absolute bollocks.
Right.
Yes.
It is bollocks.
Yeah.
Great word for that.
Great, great word.
But on a lighter side, I did remember my favorite movie, which is The Matrix for whatever that's
worth favorite movie.
Brilliant.
Beautiful.
All right.
Well, speaking of good people, is there a person that you recommend to come on this
podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated professions of the
world?
I'm going to think about that because that's a heavy question in a good way.
Um, this industry is interesting.
It's like, I mean, people cut sometimes are like, they say, Oh, I understand if you don't
want to share your slides or if you don't want to share your workbook.
And I'm always like, no, just take it all because there are just so few people doing
this.
And I'm not saying like, Oh, I'm out there doing the work.
I don't mean it like that.
I just mean there's plenty of people out there that need help.
And the more people we have doing it, the better we are.
So having said that, I don't know many people specifically that are doing this kind of work.
I do have someone in mind who does some critical incident training, but that's in law enforcement,
but that would work too.
That I can pass your way.
Patrick, Patrick Halpern, I can't remember his last name, but I'll, I'll remember it
and get back to you on that.
Okay.
Thank you so much.
All right.
Well, then the last question before we make sure people know where to find you, the classes,
the book, what do you do to decompress?
Well, of course I do mindfulness.
And if I didn't say that, you know, I think that you should, everyone should fire me.
So one, I do mindfulness, but mindfulness isn't always just sitting and doing a meditation.
So oftentimes all while I'm doing the dishes, I'm practicing, I'm just noticing my breath
while I'm doing the dishes, or I'll just sit and take a moment to notice what I'm feeling
in this exact moment.
So it's like these weird little moments in between.
And then also I do jujitsu.
I love jujitsu.
It's my happy place.
I literally can't think of anything else, but what I'm doing in the moment while I'm
doing it, I have to focus.
I can't think about what I'm making for dinner or the contract I didn't sign, or I'm thinking,
oh my God, I'm about to choke and die.
So let me figure out what to do to get out of this.
So jujitsu is probably a very, a huge outlet for me.
Beautiful.
Yeah.
I do jujitsu as well.
And it was the same thing yesterday.
I had a, you know, nothing wrong with it at all, but what we would call a spazzy white
belt.
Yeah, there was no, no thinking about the bills or relationship issues when this guy
was trying to smother me with his groin.
So it kept me very mindful.
I so relate to that.
Yes.
All right.
Well, then where first can people find mindful junkie and then where can they find the book?
Okay.
So mindful junkie is at www.mindfuljunkie.com and it's J-U-N-K-I-E.
So M-I-N-D-F-U-L-J-U-N-K-I-E.com.
And then the book you could, it has most every outlet has it online.
So whether it's Amazon or Barnes and Noble, or you could just search tactical brain training
and it will come up.
But you can also go to my Instagram, which is at mindful junkie.
And I have it in my link tree, my link in bio.
There's a link for it.
So I think if you just did a search, you would find it.
Beautiful.
I have a question for you, James.
Wait, before we go, what do you do to down regulate and what do you do to practice kind
of mindfulness?
Yeah.
So the jujitsu, you know, my gym, I do strength and conditioning classes.
So that the physicality side is definitely part of that.
When I walk my dog, which usually twice a day, I leave my phone at home.
So I try and be mindful on those walks.
And the obviously things will ruminate a little bit, but I do try and catch myself and just,
you know, again, listen to the birds and, you know, just try and be present there.
So that's a solid hour of a day just on the dog walk inside.
Newcom, I do that a lot.
Headspace.
Yes.
Yeah.
So I'll do that.
Usually the power nap.
I'm sorry.
Say it again.
How often do you think you do Newcom?
I like to try and do it when I was writing the book, it would be almost every day.
I'd do at least the power naps.
That's a 20 minute one.
They've got them all the way through to I think it's 70 minutes.
But you know, if you're tired, if you're a first responder and you've come off shift
and everyone's gone to work and you're home, but you can't sleep, I could never, I could
never nap.
Just not a napper.
Yeah.
Then I'd lie down and do maybe a 40, 50 minute what they call rescue.
And then they have thing called focus, which is the other way and that works really well.
When I was writing my book, a lot of times I put that in the headphones.
So those are really good.
And then the headspace.
So I like that guided meditation.
So like a 15 minute morning meditation when I'm in that kind of routine, I like doing
that as well.
So I'm very deliberate in my down regulation, obviously learning what I'd have and knowing
that 14 years in uniform, you know, you've got to keep topping it up.
Otherwise, you know, it will, it will come at a cost.
So and my big thing is asleep.
I sleep, but I'm still working on the sleep quality, trying to get that deep, deep sleep.
And that's the juggling because I'll stop drinking for a while and wait for these supposed
amazing revelations that everyone on Instagram tells me, I just stopped drinking for seven
days and now I'm, you know, able to do the splits and, you know, I can run around the
earth without taking a breath and all these other bullshit claims that they have.
I feel worse off and not drinking for a long time.
So it's trying to unpack that.
Why do I feel worse when I stopped taking this poison in my body?
So it's just an unending, you know, work in progress, but that's, that's what happens.
You know, if you want to continue to, to thrive in the world, then as you get older, it just
takes more and more work.
It's just, it is what it is.
Yeah.
So why are you making yourself uncomfortable, like doing something that you're not used to doing is uncomfortable.
So why wouldn't you revert back to what you were doing before, which was, was comfortable.
Yep, exactly.
But there's no question.
My body hates alcohol, even though I ignore it sometimes.
I mean, even just my GI tract, you know, if I have just two glasses of wine, you know,
I'll have to be careful not to leave, you know, be too far from a toilet for that morning.
So yeah, it lets me know that it hates it.
But especially when we're older, it really, really has an effect on our bodies.
And they're now coming up with all this research about cancer, you know, the surgeon general
warning wanting to put that it's, you know, cancer connected to alcohol and on the labels.
I don't know.
It's yeah, it is poison, but we've normalized it.
Yeah.
Like the phrase I've always said is I've never woken up having not drunk the night before
wishing I had.
God, that's a lot of double negatives.
And I know what you're saying.
But what is the voice that you listen to when you listen to the calm app?
Who's who's what kind of voice do you choose?
I actually do Andy Podokum, so the founder of Headspace.
I had him on the show a while ago.
He's disappeared into ether now.
I think he's probably doing monk retreats again, which is what sent to the first place.
But I like his is very kind of like, you know, like a bloke you meet at the pub versus, you
know, maybe some kind of earthy, more traditional what you think is a guru or whatever.
So because it's just so normal, for some reason, that resonates with me a lot.
So Andy's voice is one I still listen to.
Yeah, it cracks me up because in the mindfulness space, one of the main mindfulness people
that like everybody, you know, bows down to and is like, oh, mindfulness person.
I cannot stand their voice.
Like it sends nails through my my face.
It's like greeting to me.
And so it's so interesting to me because people like it just we all have discernment and you
have to find something that you resonate with, whether it's the tone or the sound or the
gender or, you know, the presentation.
There are so many different literal voices out there that we just have to be comfortable
with sorting through them to find something that we resonate with, because I don't ever
say who it is that I can't stand because I would be like outcast from the world.
They'd be like, you are not a mindful person.
And meanwhile, I'm like, la la la la la, please stop talking.
Yeah, yeah.
Even I love Rodney Yee, who does the Gaia yoga videos, but I don't know if it's his
wife or it's just his yoga partner, whatever it is.
But there's a lady in there and no disrespect to her at all.
But I don't want to do her one.
And so I'd rather have a shirtless Asian dude leave me than and it's just like you said,
we're just we can't explain it, but we just fickle like that.
So it's okay.
Find that thing that works for you.
If you want Idris Elba leading you through meditation, so be it or Jason Statham.
Just try not to think about anything.
Whatever works for you.
Then find your fit.
Find your voice.
That's all.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, then we've gone over all the stuff.
So is there anything else that you want to make sure that we do discuss before we close
out?
No, you're amazing.
I really appreciate what you're doing and how you're putting all this information out
there.
I think it's so beneficial to people and you really touch on so many different great subjects
that it's you know, I think that your audience is so appreciative and there's something there
for everybody.
So I just I appreciate what you're doing.
Well, I want to thank you too.
I mean, coming on, sharing your work and the mindfulness is needed in our professions,
obviously, especially if we can get these work weeks, you know, shortened to what they
should be.
Then we can really start leaning in not just, you know, how not to die, but the performance
died, getting into that flow state as a firefighter, as a police officer.
So I want to thank you too for being so generous with your time and coming on the Behind the
Shield podcast.
Well, take it easy and let's connect again.