From Surviving to Advancing: The Model That Cuts Anxiety by 4x for Officers

Behind every badge, there's a story.

A story of courage, sacrifice, and relentless pursuit of justice.

But there's also a story that often goes untold.

A story of the mental and emotional toll that policing takes on those who answer the call.

Welcome to Police Speak, the podcast that delves into the raw realities of police work and explores the path to resilience.

Each week, we'll unpack harrowing police encounters, dissect their psychological impact, and equip you with the tools to safeguard your mental well being.

So turn up the volume and prepare for our next journey.

Welcome to Police Speak.

Police Speak is dedicated to examining the psychological effects of critical incidents in law enforcement.

We share stories that take you into the raw, unfiltered reality of what officers experience during their darkest moments on the job.

But we don't just focus on the traumatic events themselves.

We focus on what comes after the journey of healing the sleepless nights, the strain on families, the struggle to return to duty, and the incredible strength required to continue serving after experiencing the unthinkable.

Throughout this podcast, we utilize the Predictive Six Factor Resilience Model, or PR6, as a framework for understanding how officers navigate trauma and develop resilience.

And over the next several episodes, I want to take a step back from the stories and walk you through this model in detail.

Because here's the thing.

Resilience isn't just something you either have or don't have.

It's not about being mentally tough or just pushing through.

Resilience is a set of skills that can be learned, practiced, and Strengthened.

Understanding the PR6 model can help you prepare for the potential trauma you may face in this job and aid in your recovery when it occurs.

Today we will begin with an overview of the Predictive six Factor Resilience Model.

I'm going to explain what it is, where it comes from, and and why it matters for law enforcement.

Let's start with a fundamental what is resilience?

Many people believe that resilience means being tough and not showing emotion, bouncing back quickly from difficult situations, and just pushing through and moving on.

But that's not what resilience really is.

In fact, such thinking can be harmful.

It can lead officers to suppress their emotions, avoid dealing with trauma, and end up with serious mental health problems down the road.

The PR6 model defines resilience as the capacity to advance despite adversity.

Notice that language advance not just survive, don't just get through it.

Not just bounce back, but to actually move forward, to grow, to become stronger through adversity.

That's a Very different way of thinking about resilience, and it's grounded in solid neuroscience and psychological research.

The PR6 model was developed by researchers seeking to understand what makes some individuals more resilient than others.

They looked at the neurobiology of stress and trauma.

They studied individuals who had undergone challenging experiences and emerged stronger as a result.

And they identified six key domains, six areas of functioning that consistently predicted resilience.

Those six domains are vision, composure, reasoning, tenacity, collaboration, health.

We're going to spend an entire episode on each of these domains.

However, today I would like to provide an overview of the model as a whole and explain why this matters for law enforcement.

Let me explain why having a resilience framework is so important for law enforcement.

The statistics are sobering.

First responders, police officers, firefighters, paramedics have significantly higher rates of PTSD than the general population.

Recent research shows that emergency service workers have a PTSD prevalence rate of about 9.8%.

That's nearly 1 in 10.

Suicide rates among police officers are alarmingly high.

Officers are more likely to die by suicide than in the line of duty.

Burnout is rampant.

Officers are leaving the profession at higher rates than ever.

And those who stay often struggle with depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and relationship problems.

Now, here's what's important to understand.

These outcomes are not inevitable.

They're not just part of the job.

Yes, law enforcement is inherently stressful.

Yes, you're going to be exposed to potentially traumatic events.

That's the nature of the work.

But exposure to trauma doesn't automatically lead to PTSD or depression or suicide.

There's something that determines whether someone develops those problems or whether they're able to process the trauma and move forward.

And that something is resilience.

The officers who develop strong resilience skills are significantly less likely to develop ptsd, depression, or other mental health problems after traumatic incidents.

They're more likely to maintain healthy relationships.

They're more likely to find meaning and satisfaction in their work.

They're more likely to have long, healthy careers.

And here's the really important part.

Resilience can be built.

It's not something you're just born with.

It's a set of skills that can be learned and strengthened over time.

That's where the PR6 model comes in.

It gives us a framework for understanding resilience and a roadmap for building it.

Let me give you a quick overview of the six domains.

Again, we're going to go deep on each of these in future episodes, but I want you to have the big picture.

First, the first domain is vision.

This this is about having a clear sense of purpose and meaning in your life.

It's about understanding why you do this work, what matters to you, and what you're working toward.

Research shows that people with a strong sense of purpose are significantly more resilient when faced with adversity.

They're less likely to develop ptsd, less likely to become depressed, and more likely to find meaning even in difficult experiences.

For law enforcement officers, vision might include your commitment to serving your community, protecting the vulnerable, or making a difference.

But it also needs to extend beyond your job, to your family, your values, your larger goals in life.

We call this connected purpose.

It's about connecting your day to day work to a larger sense of meaning.

The second domain is composure.

This is about emotional regulation, your ability to manage your emotions, especially in high stress situations.

In neuroscience terms, composure is about regulating your limbic system, the emotional center of your brain, and engaging your prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for rational thinking and decision making.

When you're in a critical incident, your limbic system is going to activate.

That's natural.

That's your brain's threat response system kicking in.

But if your limbic system stays activated for too long, or if it's constantly being triggered, that's when you start to develop problems.

Composure skills help you down regulate that limbic activation.

They help you stay calm under pressure, they help you process emotions in healthy ways, and they protect you from the long term effects of chronic stress.

The third domain is reasoning.

This is about how you think about and interpret events.

It's about cognitive flexibility, problem solving, and avoiding cognitive traps that can lead to depression and anxiety.

One of the key aspects of reasoning is distinguishing between concrete and abstract processing.

After a traumatic event, some people get stuck asking, why did this happen?

Or what does this say about me?

Those are abstract questions and they often lead to rumination and negative thinking patterns.

Concrete processing, on the other hand, focuses on the specific facts.

What happened?

Who was involved?

What was the sequence of events.

Research shows that concrete processing after trauma is associated with better outcomes and lower rates of ptsd.

The reasoning domain also includes skills like cognitive reappraisal, being able to reframe a situation in a more helpful way, and avoiding thought distortions that can trap you in negative patterns.

The fourth domain is tenacity.

This is about persistence, motivation, and the ability to keep moving forward even when things are difficult.

A key component of tenacity is what we call realistic optimism.

This isn't about being blindly positive or pretending everything is fine.

It's about being able to see both the challenges and the possibilities.

It's about maintaining hope without denying reality.

Tenacity also involves learning from setbacks, managing your energy and motivation, and developing the mental toughness to persevere through difficulties.

For law enforcement officers, tenacity is what keeps you going when you've had a string of difficult calls, when you're exhausted, when you're questioning whether you can keep doing this work.

The fifth domain is collaboration.

This is about relationships and social support.

It's about building and maintaining strong connections with others, your colleagues, your family, your friends.

Research is very clear on this.

Officers who have strong support networks are significantly less likely to develop PTSD or depression after traumatic events.

But here's the law enforcement culture often discourages vulnerability and emotional openness.

There's a stigma around asking for help.

And the nature of the work, the shift schedules, the things you see that you can't talk about, can isolate you from people outside the job.

The collaboration domain teaches skills for building high quality connections, supporting your colleagues, communicating effectively and maintaining relationships, even in the face of the challenges this job creates.

The sixth domain is health, and this might be the most overlooked domain when it comes to resilience.

Health is the physical foundation that everything else rests on.

Your brain is an organ, it's part of your body.

And the health of your body directly impacts your brain's ability to regulate emotions, process trauma and maintain resilience.

The health domain includes sleep, nutrition, exercise and managing the physical demands of shift work.

Recent research has shown that these physical factors directly affect your brain chemistry.

Specifically, they affect production of a protein called brain derived neurotrophic factor or bdnf, which is essential for your brain's ability to adapt and heal from stress.

Officers who are chronically sleep deprived, eating poorly and not exercising are at significantly higher risk of developing ptsd, depression and other mental health problems.

On the other hand, officers who maintain good physical health have stronger resilience across all the other domains.

Now, here's what's important to understand.

These six domains don't work in isolation.

They work together, they support each other, and they can also undermine each other.

For example, if your health domain is weak, if you're not sleeping, not eating well, not exercising, that's going to make it harder for you to regulate your emotions, think clearly, maintain motivation and and connect with others.

On the other hand, if you have a strong sense of purpose, that can help you stay motivated, which can help you maintain healthy habits, which improves your ability to regulate emotions.

This is why the PR6 model is so powerful.

It doesn't just focus on one aspect of resilience.

It gives you a comprehensive framework for understanding how all these different factors work together.

And it gives you a roadmap for building resilience across all six domains.

Now, I want to share some really important research that came out recently about the PR6 model.

Researchers have identified what they call the 85% resilience threshold.

Here's what that means.

When people score 85% or higher across all six domains of the PR6 assessment, something significant happens.

They reach a tipping point where they have robust protection against mental health challenges.

The research found that when you reach that 85% threshold across all six domains, your brain has significant protection against PTSD, depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges.

You're dramatically more resilient to the trauma and stress you face in this job.

But here's the key.

You need to work on all six domains.

You can't just be strong in two or three areas and weaken the others.

Resilience is comprehensive.

It's about building strength across the board.

And that's what we're going to focus on in this series.

Before we wrap up today's episode, I want to mention two training programs that are built on the PR6 Resilience First Aid and Heart High Adversity Resilience Training.

Resilience First Aid, or rfa, is a peer support program designed to help people support each other through difficult times.

It teaches you how to recognize when someone is struggling, how to have supportive conversations, and how to help people build resilience across all six PR6 domains.

Recent research on RFA showed that participants had a 14.5% increase in personal resilience and a 7.8% increase in peer support skills.

Importantly, participants showed a 30% improvement in their ability to recognize suicide warning signs.

Heart High Adversity Resilience Training is specifically designed for first responders, military personnel, healthcare workers, and others in high adversity occupations.

It's a comprehensive program that addresses not just individual resilience skills, but but also organizational and relational factors that affect resilience in high stress environments.

Both of these programs use the PR6 model as their foundation, and both have shown significant results in building resilience and protecting mental health.

I mention these because if you're interested in going deeper with resilience training after this series, these programs are excellent resources.

But even if you never take a formal training, the information we're going to cover in this podcast series will give you practical tools you can start using today.

So here's what's coming in the rest of this series.

In the next episode, we're going to dive deep into vision, understanding your sense of purpose, developing what we call connected purpose, and maintaining meaning, even in the face of trauma.

After that, we'll cover composure, learning to regulate your emotions, manage your stress response, and develop the cognitive reappraisal skills that protect you from ptsd.

Then we'll tackle reasoning, understanding how your thinking patterns affect your resilience, learning to use concrete versus abstract processing, and avoiding the cognitive traps that lead to depression and anxiety.

We'll explore tenacity, building realistic optimism, maintaining motivation through difficult times, and developing the persistence to keep moving forward.

We'll discuss collaboration, building strong relationships, creating effective peer support, and maintaining connections even when this job tries to isolate you.

And we'll finish with health, understanding the physical foundation of resilience, and learning practical strategies for sleep, nutrition, exercise, and managing shift work.

Each episode is going to give you both the science and the practical skills.

I want you to understand why these domains matter, and I want you to walk away with tools you can actually use.

The research is clear.

Resilience can be built.

It's not some mysterious quality that you either have or don't have.

It's a set of skills across six domains that can be learned, practiced and strengthened.

This job is going to test you.

It's going to expose you to things that most people never have to see.

It's going to ask you to run toward danger when everyone else is running away.

That's what we signed up for.

But you don't have to do it without protection.

You don't have to just hope that you'll be okay.

You can actively build the resilience that will help you not just survive this job, but thrive in it.

That's what the PR6 model offers.

A framework for understanding resilience and a roadmap for building it.

So I hope you'll stick with me through this series.

I hope you'll take the time to really think about each domain and how you can strengthen it in your own life.

Because at the end of the day, building resilience isn't just about protecting yourself from PTSD or depression.

It's about being able to do this incredibly important work for the long haul.

It's about being there for your family.

It's about finding meaning and satisfaction in your career.

It's about having a life outside the badge that brings you joy.

That's what resilience makes possible.

Thank you for listening to police speak.

Stay safe out there.

Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Police Speak.

We hope you found today's story and insights valuable.

We aim to inform, educate and inspire through the stories we share.

Do you have a powerful story from your time on duty that you'd like to share?

Perhaps a moment that tested your resilience or left a lasting impact?

Sharing your experiences can help fellow officers learn and strengthen their resilience.

Your story could make a real difference in someone else's life.

Please visit the link in the show notes and complete the form.

We'll keep your information confidential and work with you to ensure your story is told in a way that feels comfortable and meaningful to you.

Together, we can build a stronger, healthier law enforcement community.