Speaker 1: 1:11

Not only can we get people to do these roles that are really challenging and really difficult, but not at the expense of their own health and well-being. There has to be a way in which we can look at a long-term, sustainable careers where people can thrive in these environments. But that takes work and that takes a lot of work, and it takes people like yourself to share the knowledge that you have. And it takes organizations like Aussie Frontline, frontline Mental Health and others that are out there to help get around the community that we're talking about mental health and others that are out there to help get around the community that we're talking about shift work community, first responder community, to provide them with the education so that they're best prepared for this challenging role.

Speaker 2: 1:46

Shift work can be brutal, but it doesn't have to be welcome to a healthy shift. My name is rogerutherland, certified nutritionist, veteran law enforcement officer and 24-7 shift worker for almost four decades. Through this podcast, I aim to educate shift workers, using evidence-based methods, to not only survive the rigors of shift work but thrive. My goal is to empower shift workers to improve their health and well-being so they have more energy to do the things they love. Enjoy today's show and welcome back to a Healthy Shift podcast. I'm your host, Roger Sutherland, and today we're going to be talking about how we go about having those conversations with people who we've noticed behavior change in may very well be in a depressed state and their mental health is really starting to suffer. Now, what I do want to do is I want to put a disclaimer on this episode to start off with, because we will be talking about mental health and we will also be talking about having conversations with people around suicide. So if this is something that you're not comfortable with or you've had incidents like this yourself, then please. There's another catalogue out there of a whole range of podcasts that you can listen to Obviously a healthy shift ones, but the most important thing is that you understand that this is the conversation and what we will be talking about.

Speaker 2: 3:18

My guest today is Matt Newlands. Now Matt is a former police officer of 10 years in the South Australian Police and is now the co-founder of Frontline Mental Health, which is an Adelaide-based national company providing customised mental health and workplace training to organisations around Australia. How do we identify in our colleagues that they may in fact be struggling? It's not just an incident and they've tied it to an incident where they're having problems, but it's actually more than that and you can see that their mental health is spiralling. What are we actually looking for? And then, once we start to notice that, how do we broach those conversations? How do we approach them and have a conversation with them around this, and what is there that we can say that could very well make a huge amount of difference?

Speaker 2: 4:10

It's a fantastic episode this. I really, really enjoyed my conversation with Matt. I met him recently at a frontline event after I knew who he was from around the Aussie frontline days. But I finally got to meet the man in person and I was excited to have him on the podcast to address this conversation. So let's have the conversation with him and I bring to you Matt Newlands. Matt, welcome to a Healthy Shift podcast. Can you start by sharing a bit about your background in policing and what it was that actually led you to co-found Frontline Mental?

Speaker 1: 4:45

Health. Yeah, thanks so much, roger. It's a real privilege to be here, coming from Frontline headquarters, so apologies if there's a bit of background noise or the traffic outside, but mate how I got started 10 years with the South Australia Police. I was in from 2006 until 2016. I actually separated from the police in quite dramatic circumstances, but really at its core was around my own personal mental health challenges as a result of service. So I picked up some labels post-traumatic stress, depression on my way out and also struggled with things that I think are well-beaten path for many around suicidality. I struggled with anger. I used alcohol as a coping strategy and spent a couple of years trying to get myself well again.

Speaker 1: 5:25

And then it was 2018, I started to shift my attention to how might I be able to look at sharing some of the things that I learned from other people and from my own experiences, what I might be able to do to bring that to the military and first responder community. So I started to work quite closely in that community and frontline mental health was born in 2023 with a focus and intention of trying to look at education. How can we front load first responders and military personnel with the information, the mental health literacy, the wellbeing practices to help them have, I guess, a long, sustainable career. And that was really the initial focus and we've branched out into a few different areas which we may or may not touch on over the podcast.

Speaker 2: 6:05

Well, let's absolutely touch on them. Matt, I'd heard about you through the Aussie Frontline, which is a not-for-profit organisation in Australia which looks after the front. I think we should give the boys a plug here, because the work that they're doing is phenomenal and you are very involved with them. Now I followed your journey from there and then I heard you speak at the Aussie Frontline event on the Gold Coast last month and I thought it was just so pertinent and your journey actually it's quite ironic.

Speaker 2: 6:35

It actually hit so many raw nerves with me as well because of my own experience of what I'd gone through and here we both are when you look at it that you've turned that into a positive to help people. And I've done the same thing, not so much in the mental health space, although it does help, but I've done it with to support shift workers in what they need to do. So it really resonated and I knew we would just get along like a house on fire and I waited a goddamn ages to try and collar you. You're a very popular man at these conferences and I can understand why because it was a fantastic keynote that you delivered which really resonated. Now, what was the turning point for you in recognising the need for better mental health education and support in our frontline workers.

Speaker 1: 7:22

I'll come back to the point you said about Aussie Frontline, because I think it's directly linked to the turning point. So Marley Brooks, who is one of the directors of Aussie Frontline he is a very good friend of mine and was critical to, I guess, helping support me through an extremely challenging time in my career. So the period there of about 2013 to 2015, where I had become quite unwell, marley was absolutely walking alongside me, supporting me during that time, and so one of the driving supports, if you like, for frontline mental health has been Marley, has been the Aussie frontline guys and that includes Dr Dan Pronk as well, since he's joined forces with Marley and what we wanted to start looking at doing was looking at ways in which we would be able to provide the support that Marley provided me during a difficult time. How can we take that to military and first responders more broadly? And I think, after spending a few years so that 2018 period that I spoke about 2018 forwards to about 2023, spending time with military and first responders who were still navigating challenges it was a realization, I think, around. Well, what did I need during that time when I was unwell, and are there things that I could have known or maybe understood about mental health and well-being more broadly, because, to your point, the shift work you know, diet, nutrition there's so many contributing factors that go into one's mental health and well-being and they are sort of like closely aligned.

Speaker 1: 8:46

So that was really where I guess the turning point for us was to let's focus on education, on education If we can educate and we can provide an opportunity for empowerment, for ownership, for personal responsibility and how we might be able to navigate our shift working careers.

Speaker 1: 9:08

One of the fundamental driving forces is we believe in, I guess, a future that the sacrifice of personal health and wellbeing and sacrifice of relationships does not have to be the cost for these roles. I think that we can find a way that not only can we get people to do these roles that are really challenging and really difficult, but not at the expense of their own health and wellbeing. There has to be a way in which we can look at a long-term, sustainable careers where people can thrive in these environments. But that takes work and that takes a lot of work and it takes people like yourself to share the knowledge that you have, and it takes organizations like Aussie Frontline, frontline Mental Health and others that are out there to help get around the community that we're talking about shift work community, first responder community to provide them with the education so that they're best prepared for this challenging role.

Speaker 2: 10:53

Oh, that's fantastic. There's one phrase that I absolutely hate, which came from supervisors, and I know that you will have heard it yourself, because it would have been said to you at some stage this is what you signed up for, mate. It's just such a terrible term to use, isn't it?

Speaker 1: 11:11

It is. I think it acknowledges that, yes, this is difficult, but it also doesn't give any space for opportunities to learn beyond what we've maybe previously understood or we've previously done and we've learned lots during that process. It would be like trying to, I guess, take a World War II capability in the military and apply that in 2025 and go, hey, you knew what you signed up for. So, no, we've understood things, things have advanced, we've learned more. We've got different strategies, different wellbeing practices now that can help shift workers, help the first responder community, in navigating these careers. So, yes, they're difficult and yes, we still need people to work at three o'clock in the morning and do really difficult and challenging things.

Speaker 1: 11:48

But there's also other things that we've now learned and understood. Why would we not then try to put those support and resources and review the way that we've done things? Is there a better way? Is there an alternate way? And explore what that looks like. Otherwise, we're just accepting that what is, that's it, and that to me doesn't really feel like an evolution or that doesn't really apply with the pragmatic problem solvers. That is the first responder community that we have. We've got a cohort of people in the community that are looking at these things and looking at the challenges and trying to find ways of maybe doing things differently and doing things better, and there's a whole heap of information that people have learned, people have studied and many of us have lived those roles and have found strategies that might contribute to a healthier version.

Speaker 2: 12:29

Oh, totally. Just because we've done it this way in the past doesn't mean it's the right way to go moving forward, and unfortunately, I find that. Well, I can only speak about my own organization and I think we are totally stuck in. This is what you signed up for. This is what it is. I think it's just incredibly ignorant. And they all stand there on the podium talking about it, saying we're addressing mental health and we're talking to our people and all the rest of it. We all know that that is not correct and I think people are discarded.

Speaker 2: 12:59

The avenue of this podcast that I wanted to take with you, Matt, which you and I have discussed previously, because I was really excited. We hear that we've got to check in on our mates all the time, but we don't really know what we're looking for. I personally don't think, because we all think, oh, is the person sitting in a dark room at the end of their bed with a gun in their hand? I mean, this is what we think of as depression. I know myself. When I was diagnosed with depression myself, I went. I'm not depressed. I don't sit in a dark room with a gun in my hand wanting to commit suicide. I'm not depressed. What are you talking about? I didn't realize how depression can present in so many different ways to people. Now, we always hear about the importance of checking in on our mates and our colleagues, but in reality, Matt, what is there that we should really be looking for in their behaviours and their demeanour and the way they actually are?

Speaker 1: 13:56

You're right. There is absolutely been a social narrative around trying to, firstly, promote that people can put their hand up and say when they're struggling, but we often say as well that it's really important for individuals to also know well, what does that look like? Well, how would I know if I'm struggling? To then put my hand up, because I don't think people necessarily just wake up one day and then just have these, you know, really challenging thoughts and maybe behaviors that aren't conducive to a healthy lifestyle. These things slowly show up and they creep in, and sometimes we, as the individual who is experiencing them, we might be the last to recognize or the last to see what's happening, and it's those around us that might be able to pick these changes beforehand. So, whilst the social narrative is a really important one, and we have to still continue to address stigmas that might exist to prevent people from seeking help, what we really want to be doing, though, is really fostering a culture of checking in. How can we then lean into these really difficult and meaningful conversations with people that we love and care about? One of the bits of research that came out recently from RUOK was that about almost half the population didn't think that they were the right person to even have the conversation. They either felt that they weren't qualified or maybe they weren't confident to check in and ask the question. Because what I hear in my community, when I go to organizations and talk to people on one-on-one or, you know, big audiences, one of the biggest barriers can be well, what if the person isn't going so great? What if I do ask them how they're going and they say I'm not going very good at all? Oops, what do I do now? That's right. What do we then do? Well, the short answer is we listen to them and we sit alongside them. But I think, coming back to the question, what are the things? There's a nuanced approach to this.

Speaker 1: 15:27

I like to really highlight the fact that, as friends, as family, as colleagues, we are often the experts in each other's words, behaviors, potentially even thoughts, if they've been shared with us because we've spent time getting to know the person. Obviously, like for you and I, roger, we're still, I guess, very new in our friendship, but there's probably already characteristics and things that you've seen in me that might become a usual or an expected or a normal whatever word you want to put to it. And then it's when we start picking up on some of those changes in that. So maybe it might be really obvious things that people are saying around words. Maybe at the end of a night shift I might be coming out to the night shift breakfast, where we all go out at the end of our night shifts before we go into our days off and we all go have breakfast together. Maybe it's the things that I'm saying you know, don't worry, go without me, you guys won't want me there anyway, like I'll just be a dampener on the morning or however it comes across.

Speaker 1: 16:26

Sometimes it's not as overt and direct and it might be just slight things that people say, but then there might be those behaviors. Maybe there is the intentional withdrawal Behaviors might look like I might normally come to the gym and might train with the team before I start my shift, but I'm not showing up anymore. Or I'm coming into the gym and I'm just sitting on the bike over in the corner while everybody else is still in the circuit. Maybe I'm just turning up right on time for my shift. Or maybe I'm turning up super early and I'm just distracting myself with work and I've got so much going on and you might be thinking that's not how Matt usually operates.

Speaker 1: 16:52

Things are slightly off here, so sometimes it can be really over direct stuff of saying things like what's the point? Oh, you should go for that promotion. Oh why, oh, why, like, there's no point, I'm not going to get it anyway. That defeatist attitude can sometimes show up. But I would often just say to people if you think that, like, if you have those fleeting moments, so you go that was a bit out of character for the way that matt just said that, or that's not usually a word he might use, or he's usually here doing these things that's going to be the catalyst, like, like that gut feeling, that's the catalyst to go. You know what, matt, I'm not so sure that things are going so great. Let's have a chat. Let's have a chat about what's going on.

Speaker 2: 17:29

I know in my own I can talk about myself just for a minute when I was diagnosed with depression and I thought what? No, that's not me. When certain things were pointed out to me, I then realized it had nothing to do with isolation and sitting over there by myself. It was chasing the dopamine hit all the time. It was adding to shopping cart online shopping and adding to cart to chase that dopamine hit. It was doing everything else I could possibly do other than dealing with what I had to actually deal with all the time. So it was that distraction and when it was flagged with me and we went through my own behaviours, it wasn't being angry, it wasn't being disappointed, it wasn't being anything else. It was the distraction to not address it, which was a real red flag for my counsellors.

Speaker 2: 18:22

When I was speaking to them, one of the main questions they asked me was how long are you actually spending on the business every day? Oh God, I probably spend 12 hours. I get up first thing in the morning and I'm on it all day, straight away. Their red lights are going and I'm thinking why is that a problem Too much? It's a distraction from actually dealing with those things. So I think that this is something that's really important, and I think also alcohol, pornography, gambling is another one as well, isn't it? And we can talk about all of those. Now, what are some of the key signs? I mean, I've probably covered off on some of mine, but what are some of the key signs and symptoms of declining mental health in frontline workers? And we talk about the military as well when we talk about this. All right, so what are some of the key signs and symptoms of declining mental health in frontline workers that often go unnoticed?

Speaker 1: 19:11

Some of these things that I'll talk about often go unnoticed, because, again, like I was saying before, is that they don't just show up overnight. They slowly creep in and then we normalise them because that's just what everybody else is experiencing as well. So when we start thinking about sleep disturbances or sleep difficulties I know that we'll touch on this in a little bit more detail shortly, that's often a key factor is when we're starting to have difficulties going to sleep, staying asleep, or the levels of sleep that we're getting aren't as good. We're not waking up feeling rested. So these are the things that we can often normalize, because we go oh, it was just a bad night's sleep, I'll catch up or I'll wait till the end of my roster cycle. You know, I'll rest on the weekend, I'll sleep in and I'll do these things, and so we reassure ourselves that it's not that big of a deal. It's certainly something we need to monitor and not just discount and sign off.

Speaker 1: 19:55

Alcohol, as you said, is another one. That was mine. I felt that it was a useful coping strategy and it is. We have to name the elephant in the room. Like alcohol works until it doesn't, like there's actually, you know, it's useful until it's not and it's healthy until it's not. And I think that's where the trap we can fall into is that we think that by maybe having a glass of wine maybe there's that depressant we feel sleepy. It disconnects from some of the emotional responses that we might be having, but we know that it's impacting our sleep in a significant way. So alcohol use or abuse, depending on how people align themselves with it, is certainly a key sign. And again, there's lots of contributing factors as to why we can normalize the drinking culture. Short fuse, I think those of us that can often find ourselves really impatient, more so at home. I would suspect that that shows up for a lot of people and that's a common thing that's reflected back to me. Yeah, there's lots of contributing factors. We can often then just normalize that by saying I'm just tired, I've had a difficult shift, and so we normalize these things.

Speaker 1: 20:53

Heightened anxiety, you know this can often look like going and doing the grocery shopping having significant emotional responses or adverse effects that we don't necessarily rationalize or can't necessarily put our finger as why we're feeling that way. Sometimes we can, you know, leave, we abandon trolleys, we go and sit in the car and go. What the hell Like what was that? Sometimes they're not as significant. We might just notice that we're, you know, breathing a bit quicker and our heart rate's increased in different environments. So these are the things that we want to just be going, that's, you know, just maybe a small red flag that goes up that we go. What's that? What's that about? And what's my body doing? What's it trying to tell me? Am I listening to the messages that my body's telling me in these moments?

Speaker 1: 21:31

Some of the other stuff that I know for a lot of people happens is disengagement from, like, social settings or disengagement from things that would normally bring them joy. So often I'm finding in rooms of people who have spent some time in first responder roles is that when I say to them, when was the last time you felt joy and this might be a question for your listeners to consider when was the last time you felt joy? Some of us might find that question quite confronting or challenging, because we don't recall, we don't remember. So that might just be another sign of saying what am I doing to try to bring something that is like an emotional response into my life? And then there's some more really glaringly obvious things as well, like this disconnect from hope or not necessarily considering that, well, anything that I'm doing is worthwhile.

Speaker 1: 22:12

I think law enforcement, everyone's a crook. They just haven't been caught yet. You know, I'm just a consequence to people's bad actions. These are some of the things that I've felt myself, and they might just be key signs that, hey look, maybe I'm not travelling so great. And is that a healthy worldview? Is this an accurate and truthful perspective of the world around me, or is this one that's been conditioned by the environment that I'm spending most of my time in? So there might be a bit there. There's probably a few things that listeners are hearing. Look, there's going to be lots more that people are going to have their own personal experiences with as well.

Speaker 2: 22:47

There's two that I really want to cash in on here, and one is when you talked about the supermarket. I know myself that if you're standing in a line and someone does something silly and you just go off, you can feel yourself go off and then you think, wow, but you normalize that because you just go off. You can feel yourself go off and then you think wow, but you normalize that because you just think, oh God, people are so stupid, what are they doing that for? There's a lot of things that can highly agitate your relationships with certain members of your family. Oh, they just piss me off, they just really annoy me. And what's going on there? That's one that you have to really look at too, because I know that there was situations in my journey, and it wasn't until I started working really quite hard on my mental health with my meditation, breath work and things like that, that I realized the difference. Looking back now as to how goddamn heightened I actually was, that was one of them. You've touched on that as well with yours. You get in the car and you think, geez, where'd that come from? Or you're at a position where you end up at a road rage and you find yourself out of the car yelling and screaming at someone and you think, my God, that's not me. What happened there? That's one.

Speaker 2: 23:52

The other one that I have a major concern with at the moment Matt and I'm doing research around this and in fact, I'm putting together something on social media to address this particular issue and that is these first responders nursing frontline health and people who work in these jobs smashing these energy drinks.

Speaker 2: 24:11

Right, I've got a real opinion on this and I know people are going to really dislike my opinion on it, and that's okay. I accept that One of the biggest problems that we had, and what research is showing as well, is the more of these energy drinks that we consume, the more it dulls our dopamine hit. Now Huberman's covered off on this as well, because while you're smashing these energy drinks, you're having to do more in your job to try and get that dopamine hit to the stage where you won't have any dopamine left. So there will be no fun in the job and it will fall apart for you. Is that an observation that you actually see for mental health as well with this? Because we know that sleep is everything, but these energy drinks contain just absolute bucket loads of caffeine, which is impacting on good, solid, restorative sleep. Sleep is so important, isn't it? Sleep?

Speaker 1: 25:01

is fundamental. It's critical to just well-being, just full stop to the human experience and navigating life. I think Dr Dan Prong has spoken about the importance of sleep in his keynote. In fact he's got a navigating sleep for this reason, a workshop or a course available through the Aussie Frontline page. We know that it's important.

Speaker 1: 25:19

To be fair, I think I hadn't necessarily connected the dopamine to the energy drinks.

Speaker 1: 25:23

As far as consumption, what I will say is that I know that during my experience working in this law enforcement position and working in a proactive role where I was constantly being exposed to, I guess, heightened distress in other people and really challenging, exciting environments, I was almost addicted to the physiological response that was happening in my body when these things happen.

Speaker 1: 25:47

The adrenaline dump, the fear that would potentially come with some of these experiences as well. That becomes something that I'm drawn to and I guess the more exposure to that, the more it's kind of needed or heightened to get the same sort of hit. We're still talking about just chemical changes in one's body. So I think, constantly working in these environments where we are going from one high, intense job to the next and we're constantly cycling through this, and whether that's either through, I guess, introduced chemicals, like we're putting caffeine or energy drinks and things into our body or just being exposed to those environments and we're riding this constant roller coaster of up down that has to be having a significant effect on us physiologically and, in turn, is going to have a significant impact on our mental health and just our overall well-being.

Speaker 2: 26:33

Yeah, what I can't get through to people to understand. I know it's easy from my perspective, but the more caffeine that you consume, the more of it you need to actually cope, and the less you have, the less you actually need it, which people won't believe, but those that have given up caffeine and stopped it, I think have improved, because their sleep improves, which means everything improves in so many different ways. Why do you think there is such a gap in the education and awareness when it comes to mental health in emergency services and frontline health?

Speaker 1: 27:07

Look, there's probably a couple of contributing factors to it. One which you probably touched on already is around like well, this is what we signed up for. So I think, then, that there's maybe previously been and I think we're going a long way to shifting the cultural view on this but there's been, I guess, a narrative around well, you knew what you were getting yourself into, and if you're not able to cope with this and deal with this, then that's probably a reflection on the individual, so maybe just get out of the job and let someone else in. I think we've had warped views on what we think this term resilience means, around when really we've used resilience to describe things like endurance or tolerance, that we've just had this expectation that people will operate at really high levels for long periods of time, and the moment they can't, we then just go oh well, you need to be more resilient, and that's not necessarily a useful conversation either. It's. We have to be looking at well, how do we actually recover from challenge and how do we recover from difficulty so that we're ready to go again? I think one of the analogies I'll just touch on briefly there is, like you don't necessarily see, like elite sport teams. They don't play a game on Saturday and then they play a game on Sunday and then play a game on Monday and then knock out their season inside. You know, two weeks, if you wander around sort of Adelaide or Henley Beach on a Monday morning, there's a good chance you'll see the Crows or Port Adelaide team, you know, wading through the water or sitting and having a coffee or something, because there has to be a recovery, recovery stage, exactly. So I think because, to your point before around, well, this is how we've been, this is how we've always done it. I think there's that and that's changing.

Speaker 1: 28:29

I think we are going a fair way now around trying to change the narrative around education. You know, the work that you do, the podcast that you put out and the information that you provide a value to shift workers helps with that. We hear other people stories, whether that be other podcast series. You know Zero Limits is another good one where we've got different people who have had their own experiences of working in these roles and sharing the lessons that they've learned, and a lot of it is now that shared knowledge of how about? I don't do what you did, and one of the phrases that I love is that life is life's best teacher. So if we can learn from our own life, if we can look back and reflect on the things that maybe we've done that worked well for us, and maybe the things that didn't work so well for us, that can help set us up for success in the future. And if I can learn from others' experiences as well, then again that can help me. So I think we're seeing organizational shifts around trying to look at the education around mental health.

Speaker 1: 29:22

I think we're seeing organizational shifts around trying to look at the education around mental health. I think it's. I think it would be hard pressed to find a leader of first responder organization that's not aware of and maybe considering changes that are required to mental health education. But that's like trying to turn a big ship at sea and it takes time and it's got so many moving parts and so many complex levels. So I think there is a gap. We're doing the best we can to try to help bridge that gap through, you know, whether that be funded programs, where organizations are paid to come in and provide education, or whether it's just also the collateral stuff as well, where we're just hearing someone else's experience and learning maybe the things that they did through podcasts or through downloadable PDFs, or just trying to get a clear picture of what it actually looks like to manage my mental health and wellbeing in this space. I think we've still got a way to go, but we're chipping away.

Speaker 2: 30:10

Yeah, and I think there's some really good books around now that have been written by people isn't there? We saw this at the Aussie Frontline event. There are some fantastic books, like Keith Banks as well, with his books and I can't remember the names of the other guys. I've got to be honest with you but there's a lot of books that are coming out now about people who have been in a crisis. I mean, I've got a bookcase full here of books from people who have been in crisis and how they have navigated their way out of it. There is a common theme though, matt, unfortunately, and I think the common theme is they've had to take the responsibility themselves to navigate out. A lot of them have had great therapists or people that they've been able to talk to that have helped them not from their organisation, which I think is the saddest thing.

Speaker 2: 30:57

I know myself. The diagnosis of PTSD, anxiety and depression literally signed my death warrant. That was the end of it, right, and I think this has to change in, particularly policing and things like that, now that we have to be looking at it because as an injury I know there's a technical term for PTSD and PTSI and it's got to be a disorder because it's got to fit a criteria. I understand that. But I think the most important thing is that we change that into an injury, because people can recover and they do recover well, and I'm testimony to that, because the longer I'm away from touching the fire with my hand and not burning my hand anymore, so I'm getting better and better myself, and I think that's something that's really important.

Speaker 2: 31:41

So I think people need to get hold of some of these books, have a read of them and help them to challenge their way out of what they've got to do. But my message out of that is but you've got to take responsibility yourself and reach out and ask that question. You have to ask the question or I'm struggling, I need some help. Absolutely, that's what it needs to be.

Speaker 1: 32:01

I think you highlight a really important point there around the personal responsibility piece. I think it can sometimes be real easy for us to externalize the responsibility onto others around us, and I think organizations do absolutely play a part in ensuring that appropriate support and resources are available to the people within the organizations to engage with the terms lead a horse to water all that sort of stuff. There does have to be an element of personal responsibility and buy an active engagement in your own well-being and taking the actionable steps that are available to us. And that doesn't mean we have to necessarily go and buy an exclusive gym membership. We don't have to go and engage with these really expensive hyperbaric chambers and ice bars and some of that stuff. Effective, great, yeah, but for, like, what are the things that we can do day in, day out? Am I focusing on my sleep? You know I can do that for free. What am I doing around that? Can I access education and support resources through my organization? Maybe some of us can, some of us can't. So there's work that organizations can do. But can I focus on my caffeine and alcohol intake? Can I look at physical movement and what part that might be playing in my health and well-being. So it does require this collaboration, if you like, of organizations, ensuring that they have the most appropriate response If someone does become unwell, how we might be able to rehabilitate them back to health and back to the version of themselves that might be required to be operational again.

Speaker 1: 33:24

We can't still keep beating this drum of you know. When someone gets unwell, we discard them and we just try to replace them, because we are losing immense experience and a wealth of knowledge, even from the individual's perspective. Like you and I, we've picked up these labels along the way. They don't serve me very well. I don't discount them for other people, but I know that all that tells me is that there's certain challenges in life that I've had to maybe now navigate, but I've got strategies usually that can help me navigate those. So I'm learning from them and I'm adapting and I'm putting things in place.

Speaker 1: 33:57

We start talking about the post-traumatic growth model, which I'm happy to talk a little bit more about if we've got time. But we start talking about those that are able to turn, struggle to strength, those that are able to come beyond the challenge and thrive because of it and not be a victim to it. So there's absolutely a whole heap of research and experiences where this shows that this can happen and it might not be for everybody, but I appreciate that is lost value from an organization's perspective. So I think there has to be a cultural shift that occurs across, really like the entire first responder military community, around how we actually consider mental injuries or mental health challenges in the workplace. And sometimes labels are helpful because it might give us a plan as to how to work with it, but it's more about well, what's that individual experiencing and are they still able to contribute immense wealth to the organisation? Often that's the case, so we have to have a space and conversation around that yeah, totally agree with you.

Speaker 2: 34:56

I hope you're enjoying the show. If you are, please don't forget to rate and review once you've finished. This helps the show's reach enormously. And have you got my free ebook the best way to eat on night shift? Well, this is a comprehensive guide to the overnight fast, why we should fast and how to best go about it. I've even included a few recipes to help you. I've put a link to the ebook in the show notes.

Speaker 2: 35:22

And are you really struggling with shift work and feel like you're just crawling from one shift to the next? Well, I've got you. If you would like to work with me, I can coach you to thrive, not just survive, while undertaking the rigours of 24-7 shift work. I also conduct in-house live health and wellbeing seminars where I will come to your workplace and deliver evidence-based information to help your wellbeing team to reduce unplanned leave and increase productivity in your workplace. I've put the links in the show notes to everything mentioned. You can find me at healthyshiftcom or on Instagram at a underscore healthy, underscore shift.

Speaker 2: 36:07

Now let's get back to the show. There are forums on the internet absolutely chock-a-block full of sad sacks that are crying in their beer. And if you're sitting around waiting for the organisation to come and save you. You're going to be waiting a long time because they're not coming right. You have to take responsibility yourself to open up and ask the question and then people will actually put the strategies and things in place to support you, and that was the best thing I did.

Speaker 2: 36:36

I think the hardest thing to ever ask is for help. That's the hardest thing to admit that you're struggling and to ask for help. We just absolutely have to do that and take that responsibility. And I know in my own keynotes, when I talk to shift working organizations, I tell them that it's a lack of education and it's not your fault. It's absolutely not your fault that you haven't been educated as to how to go about shift work, but it is your responsibility to learn how to go about doing it. Now you've done shift work for 10 years and I did it for a little longer, and you and I both know that shift work is an absolute beast just on its own. By just doing the shift work, let's not talk about the exposure that we're exposed to, but what is your understanding of the impact of circadian misalignment on mental health, of frontline health and first responders? Okay, a lot of this with.

Speaker 1: 37:27

Like I'm no doctor and I would certainly encourage people to explore this themselves. It does come up a lot and it's certainly in, I guess, the counseling role that I have now within frontline mental health and that part of the business. Just speaking to people in general, sleep is one of the first things that we look at. We know that really, like that circadian misalignment, it's absolutely having an impact on our body. We're trying to fight against what our body is default trained to do and it's trying to do and we're trying to put things in place to stop it from doing that. So that is going to have a long-term adverse effect. At some point. There has to be some impact. So we have to just acknowledge that.

Speaker 1: 38:02

Coming back to the point you said around the education piece, we know shift work is hard. We often will then draw on the experiences of those around us to look at how do we manage that. So what are the things we do? And everyone's got a different approach, you know, like I think for me, I don't think I ever really got it down pat and as to what the best approach was, and maybe that's like the answer here is that sometimes I would try to sleep after a night shift, and then I would try to stay up through the day and then go to work at 11 o'clock at night. Other times I would come home at, say, seven, eight o'clock in the morning and I would stay awake and then I'd try to sleep mid afternoon. We're fighting against everything our body is telling us to do because of our environmental factors and things that are saying, hey, look, it's daytime, you need to be up, you need to be moving around. And, conversely, you know we're grabbing our equipment and we're walking out into the dark putting stuff in the car, where all of our external environment factors are saying, hey, now's the time for us to wind down and for us to start looking at sleep. And so then there's two parts that I'll say to the challenges that can come here. One, the health side of things. So the impact of, I guess, that circadian misalignment is resulting in poor sleep, full stop. Poor sleep then results in all of the repair work that our body would be doing physically, mentally, is not getting a chance to do the work that it needs to do. So we know that it's going to have an impact there.

Speaker 1: 39:18

The second part that I would say is the social factors. That is often not considered here as well. We know that humans are a pack animal. We need to be around people, we need to be aligned, we need to be belonging in a tribe, and so what can often happen with shift workers is we default to just hanging out with shift workers. That's not necessarily a bad thing all of the time, except for the fact that it helps perpetuate the normalization of some of the challenges.

Speaker 1: 39:44

So if I'm tired and I'm now coming to you, roger, and going, man, I'm wrecked. Like that night shift just rocked me and you're going, come on, man, like you know, rocked all of us. Just rocked me. And you're going come on, man, like you know, rocked all of us. We're all tired. We've conditioned ourselves in these environments, this space of shared suffering, and I'm not going to complain because the person next to me is in the same shit that I am. So there's no point in it, there's no value. So again, we've normalized it to say sometimes my roster's all over the place, sometimes I sleep, sometimes I don't.

Speaker 1: 40:09

The impact of that results in us disconnecting, either by choice or purely by environmental factors, that we're no longer around other people because we're just not available. Matt's on night shifts. I'm not going to bother inviting him to the group dinner. You know we disconnect often. One of the questions that I often ask people is you know, do you still have civilian friends? And sometimes people laugh at me and there's many rooms where people are like you know, it was one or two hands that might go up to go. Yeah, I still got some friends outside of this environment. There's a protective measure that goes with that, purely because it allows us to have, I guess, an alternate perspective of what is normal.

Speaker 2: 40:45

Reality.

Speaker 1: 40:46

Exactly, and so it helps us challenge these things to go. I recognize that while I'm trying to force myself to be awake when I should be sleeping, it's going to have an impact. So what am I going to do about it? What can I do about it? What are my options? Is there a way? Because we need people to do this. I'm not saying that we just need to.

Speaker 1: 41:02

Unfortunately, for you know, there's probably lots of contributing factors, but you know, crooks often commit crime at nighttime. You know, I'm sure that ambos are probably busier at night than they are in day. Like I'm making some assumptions here, but you know, when we think about these professions, we need to be on. We know that the impact of trying to force our bodies to stop doing what it's designed to do to then do something else that's probably where your energy drinks and your coffee and all those things come into play Alcohol, then we're trying to chase through the day to try to reduce down some of these things. Yeah, look, it's having an impact from both, like I said, the physical side of things or the health side of things, but then certainly the social impacts as well, which are naturally going to have an impact on us as humans trying to navigate this world experience.

Speaker 2: 41:45

Yeah, and isolation is a massive contributor to poor mental health as well. And even just being at work on an afternoon shift when you know that your wife and kids have gone to a family barbecue and you can't join them, or things like that that all impacts all the time on people. If you're continually having that happen, you could say but that's what you signed up for and that is one of the things. But we still need to be fair around that. We know that we're going to be missing family functions. We know that we're going to have to work Christmas Day and Easter Good Friday and we're going to miss out on those things. We have to come to terms with those sort of things. But we need to be vigilant around that and make sure. I find it interesting with what you said about we do tend to gravitate towards our like type outside of work as well as inside, because they're available. They're not available all the time, which can leave us very isolated.

Speaker 2: 42:41

I think Dr Kilmartin's book was excellent around that Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement or something like that. Law Enforcement, yeah, fantastic book. If you ever look for it on Amazon, it's about 150 bucks now and it's only about that thick, but the thing is, the book is so good because I think what it did was it flagged that we think that 99% of society are absolutely screwed in the head. Right, because we're dealing with 1% of society or even less, way less than 1%, but we think that that's the 99%, but 99% of that 1% are absolutely screwed in the head. And it's a really interesting perspective as well when we look at it and we also become very negative.

Speaker 2: 43:25

I know he spoke, I saw him speak live. He said when I say to you, Scout Leader, what's the first thing you think of? And you'll know, and I will know, the answer to that. And that shows you how cynical we become in life, doesn't it? Which is where we need all of these interactions outside of our profession to actually help us to readjust to. It's not all like that, right, it's just not all like that.

Speaker 1: 43:49

You're touching a couple of key points around, like we know that our brains are learning machines. Yeah, so they're our best friend, but they can also be our worst enemy, because it's constantly looking for efficiencies and looking for pathways that make sense. So, the more we expose it to a certain environment and it validates an experience, we just keep thinking the same thing, because, to your point, you know, you ask us maybe, like, what does the term Scout Leader mean? But you then go. Maybe if you went to a teacher's staff room and you said, hey, when you think Scout Leader, what do you think? Good chance, they'll have a vastly different perspective, because that's the environment that they've been exposed to.

Speaker 1: 44:23

So this is where it's so important for us to start thinking about who are the people that we have in our life that are validating our world perspectives, and are they then a true reflection of what our world looks like? And it doesn't mean that we have to have these like overarching high-level beliefs in political systems and things. I'm talking about just your day-to-day, you know. Is my world a safe one to walk through and to walk in? We've got lots of reasons to think that it's not. We also have to then balance those so that we've got an evidence base to say, well, yeah, maybe at times I'm called, I'm the reason why people might need me in their moments, but it doesn't mean that that's like that for everybody. So we do have to challenge some of these perspectives so that we don't just condition ourselves to think certain things for the rest of our lives.

Speaker 2: 45:05

Yeah, Neuroplasticity is an amazing thing, isn't it? It is, Our brain will adapt to what we're looking for and we are actually educating our brain all the time, which is why I'm so massive on a gratitude practice for people, because we tend to start looking for the good instead of getting sick. This is why I discourage people from hanging out in these crisis forums, because you're just getting confirmation bias in relation to yourself all the time. Absolutely Sleep. Whenever I went and saw my psychologist or psychiatrist, I was always said oh, how's your sleep, Rog? You know, how's your going with your sleep? It's always the first question or one of the first questions. So how does it actually contribute to our health challenges when it comes to things like anxiety, depression and PTSD?

Speaker 1: 45:52

So I think there's probably two parts to this and probably similar. I won't dwell on this too much because we probably touched on it already a bit in the question before. I think I probably sort of overreached on that question, but what we do know is that this sleep, as I was talking about before, we know that that's like a restorative practice for not only our bodies but it's a restorative practice for our minds. It gives us, I guess, that opportunity to process the events that maybe we've been exposed to through the day. It helps us to better regulate our emotions. It readies us, I guess, gives us that energy we might need to then deal with the challenges the following day as well. It helps with cognitive skills, attention, learning, memory, like all of these things that a lack of sleep or difficulty sleep is going to be significantly impacted in a big way. So when we start thinking about being in those environments chronically or for long-term challenges, that's where we can start noticing that we do this for a period of time. We know that we're more vulnerable to, say, those diagnosable conditions or those like disorders that we spoke about you know the anxiety disorders, the depressive disorders, you know terms like PTSD then start to come up, and we also know that we're only talking about like just the work contributing factors.

Speaker 1: 47:00

People have lives outside of work, so they can also have other contributing challenges as well. So if we then take people and put them into these environments that might already be more vulnerable to say some of those longer term illnesses or injuries, we then start disorders, probably a word. We then start overlaying that with lack of sleep on top because of the work role. We might be having a great time at work, we might be new in our career, we're still, you know, live in the honeymoon stage, if you like, or maybe we're long-term in our career and still love the job, because there's lots of people out there like that as well that have been in for a while and still love it.

Speaker 1: 47:33

But the lack of sleep or the difficulties and disruption to our sleep absolutely leaves us exposed to more difficulties.

Speaker 1: 47:41

Dan mentions in his sleep optimization course that there is studies that link sleep deprivation to increased use of force amongst law enforcement and military professions.

Speaker 1: 47:51

So I think when we start thinking about the impact on our cognitive processing, our emotional regulation, the behaviors that we would normally be able to help us through our day work, through some of these challenges.

Speaker 1: 48:03

If lack of sleep leaves us exposed, it challenges at a core, our own sense of self-efficacy. Am I actually capable of dealing with stress and these challenges in my day-to-day? And if I'm starting to stack up evidence that I can't because I'm now making mistakes, I'm using poor judgment or even going as far as making poor decisions that might impact my career in a negative way from an investigative purpose, that's challenging me at my core and potentially my identity. That's a bigger conversation as well, but this absolutely contributes to mental health conditions, how I view myself, how I view my environment. So, coming back to sleep, it's not to say that it's the be all and end all, but it's such a significant contributing factor that if we can't get our sleep under control and really be focusing on it, we just leave ourselves more vulnerable to either worsening of conditions or development of long-term conditions down the path.

Speaker 2: 48:56

Yeah, agreed. And management, it's no good management lining everybody up in a parade and saying to them we have to reduce these complaints, we have to reduce all these complaints of assaulting and everything else, and then the next time you walk into the muster room you look at the roster and your roster is absolutely all over the place with absolutely no logic to it at all. Disconnect.

Speaker 1: 49:17

There's a problem here. Isn't there. There's disconnect, it's a total disconnect.

Speaker 2: 49:20

Yeah, what about if we looked at the rostering and we went with forward rotation rostering and rostering that was looked along the lines of and I say this all the time on the podcast that if I had my way, I'd be stripping down all 24, seven environments and rebuilding them as shift working environments, building in naps, building in forward rotation rosters, fatigue management, et cetera, et cetera. Watch what happens to accidents in the workplace. Watch what happens to complaints that happen in the workplace and mistakes made at a medical level as well. Some of the biggest disasters in the world have been contributed to night shift. Chernobyl was a night shift disaster. The Exxon Valdez was a night shift disaster as well. A lot of those things when people can't think and function properly. So I think this is really good. What practical strategies are there, then, that we can help to mitigate the impact of shift work on our own mental wellbeing?

Speaker 1: 50:13

Yeah, there's going to be lots of people out there that have far more credibility in the medical space that can put substance to this. And I know that you speak about this. This is your wheelhouse so the stuff that comes up for me we've been banging on about this is now prioritizing sleep. We have to just look at our sleep hygiene practice and routines that we've got in place and, if you want a really obvious, almost exaggerated example, we look at how we get babies to go to sleep. We're not letting babies just pick and choose what time they go to bed. We're not letting them scroll on Facebook until like two in the morning or watch Netflix that one last episode. We're putting strategies in place.

Speaker 1: 50:48

Shift workers don't necessarily get the luxury of knowing that at six o'clock every night they're going to get wrapped up, swaddled, sung a lullaby, read a book and put to sleep. But what are the things that we're doing in those couple of hours in the lead up to us? Trying to get to sleep is going to be critical in the quality and quantity of sleep that we have, and if listeners want more information on that, then you're in the right spot because, like Rogerger and healthy shift have so much information around this and around real healthy strategies and things we can put in place. You know, avoiding caffeine, heavy meals, alcohol, all of those stuff that roger will be able to talk to. One of the other things that I'll say is, like you know, sleep debt's a thing as well is that we have to also be looking at if we are having poor night's sleep, not just normalizing that experience, but just like. That's an opportunity now for us to really double down on what are the contributing factors to get dialed in, because the longer that goes, the more significant the impact To navigate shift work as well and mental health and wellbeing is really around focusing on that social piece that we spoke about before, because when we condition ourselves to just the normalcy of shift work and the challenges that come with maybe not being available on weekends and having friends, that can be really hard, especially when life comes up.

Speaker 1: 51:59

Maybe we've got children, we've got other competing needs, some of us might even work multiple jobs, prioritizing connection with other people, even if that's on the drive home. You're just calling mom and having a check-in, calling your mates and just talking about just stuff, like whatever that may be. It's an opportunity for us to start down-regulating our nervous systems, that physiological response. Ideally, we will have people in our life that might be our important three to fives that we can actually talk about to say, hey, roger, I just had a really difficult shift, or I've got this really difficult thing going on at home. Roger, I just had a really difficult shift, or I've got this really difficult thing going on at home. I just needed someone to hear me out and just to say we know disclosure is such a healthy part of us as humans just having an ability to sit around and talk.

Speaker 1: 52:43

People have been sitting around campfires sharing stories for thousands of years, but we've lost the ability to do that. We've lost, maybe, the trust in who we can share those stories with and we've lost the ability to do that. We've lost, maybe, the trust in who we wellbeing practices have you got in place? Gratitude is a really great place. Humans are designed for a negative bias. Gratitude breaks that. Are we meditating? And if you're not sure about meditation I know that Roger probably spoken about this. Dan Pronk speaks about meditation as well Insight timer download the app.

Speaker 1: 53:31

There's heaps of free ones. 10 minute, just give yourself a break, give your brain a break. Wellbeing practices journaling goes back to that disclosure piece. If you've got stories to tell but you don't have anyone around you yet that you trust to tell them, to tell them to yourself, write them down, burn the paper if you need to afterwards. But creating space to process that experience and to write it out is going to absolutely have an impact in your overall well-being as well. So it's probably just three key things that I would suggest would be for people to prioritize and you should start noticing some improvements or, at the very least, for those that are going great, this will help sustain that.

Speaker 2: 54:06

And you know what's even better about what you just said about all of those practices? They're all free. They're free, every single one of them is free Yep of those practices.

Speaker 2: 54:13

They're all free. Every single one of them is free Stopping and thinking, mindful practice free Breath work, free Meditation, free Insight timer. Listen to them, free. People are running around spending money on supplements and trying to fix this, and alcohol and ciggies and drugs and everything else. These are all free strategies and I know I talk about this all the time For some reason and I don't understand why, but the public, or clients or people that follow me, are all looking for this magic pill that they can order online and when I talk to them about gratitude and they think, oh, that's stupid, that won't work. Once you understand the science behind neuroplasticity and gratitude, all the successful people in the world meditators, gratitude, breath work all take time for their own self-care as well. Really, really important. So hang off that one, peeps, because this is really important. Matt, I wanted to ask you about this one as well. How can we differentiate between someone just having a rough week Because we all have them and we do A rough week versus someone that's really, really struggling now with their mental health?

Speaker 1: 55:22

That conversation comes up a lot, and so there's a couple of key things. I'm conscious of how much time we have left as well, roger, so I'm mindful of that. I don't want to drag this on for your listeners, but a couple of key things that I would say to this. Duration would be a consideration. So if someone who's having a bad day or bad week, they might be having like those feelings in those moments, but once that situation resolves itself, you'd like to think that they're coming back to the usual sense of self, whereas we start thinking about maybe those that might longer term depression sometimes there might not necessarily be a time end for that and it might go. Certainly if it's going longer than two weeks. You know doctors would start saying, hey, we'd probably need to start looking at some interventions here and some support strategies. But if we're talking about longer term stuff duration wise then these are the red flags that might be going up. Another thing I'd say to that is intensity, those that I guess might just be having a difficult time. You'll like to expect to see it as almost situational, circumstantial. I'm feeling this way because this thing just happened. It makes sense, if you've just had a significant relationship breakdown, for you to have some quite intense emotional responses to that. That doesn't necessarily mean you're depressed. Maybe you've had a family pet that has died or be put down. I would expect people to be experiencing sadness and grief. I wouldn't be, like you know, chucking labels of depression on that. So, again, situational, circumstantial for those, then, the intensity we're now starting to see over longer periods of time it's starting to impair their functioning. So we're starting to see longer term, you know, inability to do the things that would normally be able to do, decreased work performance, maybe not showing up at work at all, impact on sleep, focus, appetite, all these things longer term. That's where we start to go. You know what? I'm going to track this and see if this doesn't resolve itself. I'm going to need to put some strategies in place. Yeah, I think there's probably a couple of other things just around triggers or reasons.

Speaker 1: 57:07

Sometimes we can explain why we might feel this way. Generally speaking, those that are having just a difficult time can attach it to a certain. It's stressful at work. Right now I've just been. Maybe there's been a redundancy in the family that's put financial pressure, or there's difficulties in the marriage. We can name it. We can say, hey, this is a. I'm sure that once this thing resolves itself, I'll be good For those of us that might just be going. I don't actually know why I feel like this, because everything feels like it's lined up and the planets have aligned. I'm having a. You know, life looks great. Those can sometimes be the more obvious signs to go. You know what, maybe I'm not just having a difficult time. Maybe I need to engage some external supports to help me.

Speaker 2: 57:45

I love that. So if you could attach it to a particular incident, like a relationship breakup or or you've had a car accident or you've clashed with something at work or you got an incident, if you can attach it to something like that, then it's probably temporary, but if it seems to have come from nowhere and it's going long-term, then that's something that needs to be investigated further. That's great advice. I really really like that because that does absolutely make sense. Now our families, wives, kids they're all sitting at home here and they're watching us because for some reason and I know you'll relate to this we do tend to take it out on the people that are closest to it because we think we can get away with it. Right, how can our partners actually approach that conversation? Now I know when I was very heightened I can talk about it Melissa was walking around on eggshells and wasn't sure she had to pick her moments and things like that. So how can our partner what's a really good opening conversation to have with someone to address this? Timing is important.

Speaker 1: 58:47

I think, to say the least, maybe sitting down to the table over dinner and the kids are. The kids are all there and it's all a bit chaotic, and you know you've got the project on the TV probably not the best time to go. Hey, rog, you know you're not operating at your best right now, like what's going on, so timing is really important. I think I always like to say to people, like, if you're coming into these conversations with genuine love and care, you're to actually cause any harm here. So I appreciate that people want to find the right words. Look, we're not going to give scripts out necessarily. You want to make it genuine, you want to make it authentic. One of the key things here, though, is really around to what we've been saying as well is naming the things that we've noticed. We don't want to necessarily, like, put the person on the back foot and have them defensive, which means that if I'm now having a chat to you, rog, because we're best mates or you know I see you all the time, or we're brothers and I'm catching up with you regularly, it's like this is what I've noticed and I'm worried about you. Yeah, I think is the approach. Rather than going, you know like You're being a dick. You're just being a dick. You're such an arsehole all the time, yeah, and You're like. Now. I feel like I have to defend myself and go like, well, how about you're being a dick Maybe if you weren't such like and you can see where this spirals, as opposed to going, hey, like you know, you just don't see him yourself. Like I've noticed that you're not sleeping. I've heard you get up through the night. I've seen that you're withdrawn when you've come home. It sounds like. You know you've told a normal response for people to be trying to work through that, you know. Do you want to like let me in, tell me what's going on? I'm here to listen.

Speaker 1: 1:00:16

I think the key things here are, like really trying to park any judgment. You know it'll be fine, you'll be okay, like this is just a period of time. It's like no, it's real for them right now, and so that's important for us just to not impose our own judgments. We are wanting to do that because we love them and we care for them. We're trying to reassure them, but it's about going yeah, you know what that sounds awful, I get that and I'm here. I want this to be a place where you can come and disclose. As we said, share the things, share those challenges. With that comes acceptance of silence, asking questions, open questions and then just leaving it. That's where it gets really weird and uncomfortable for lots of people because they're not necessarily comfortable in that space. But asking the question what's going on for you, and just sitting in silence, because we might not know necessarily how long it takes for them to formulate what's going on, and you might hear this I don't know to start with, if you sit and sit and longer.

Speaker 2: 1:01:08

It's natural for people to want to fill the void, isn't it?

Speaker 1: 1:01:10

It's so true because we all feel that awkwardness and that takes practice. So, rather than like trying to fill it with, oh, I think it's this, I think it's that, it's like, no, well, you know I'm here and I'm listening, so give it some thought, take a minute, give it some thought and share with me what you think might be going on. That's how we might frame it up and then, at the back end of that, also recognizing that we're the loved one, we're the partner, we're not the fixer, we're not the person who's going to go right. Okay, well, I'm going to send an email that you can then send. I'll draft this, I'll do this, I'll call the bank. All right, how about we slow all that down?

Speaker 1: 1:01:43

And just more often than not, people know what they need to do to resolve these things. Maybe they're feeling a bit overwhelmed. They don't necessarily know which step to take. First, the power of hearing ourselves say things out loud most of my job, really when people go oh, thank you so much. You know, you've saved my marriage, you've? I want to stay in the job now, and all this. I'm like, but I didn't do anything. All I did was told you what you tell me, and I just told it in a different way. I haven't given you any advice, I haven't structured your response. It's just I'm in this with you and now there's role clarity around what role I'm playing. So if we can, as a friend, as a partner, sitting with our friend or partner to say I'm not here to fix this, knowing that in our head, stop speaking, just let them talk out loud, ask questions, and that's going to be the best approach.

Speaker 2: 1:02:30

I love that I'm in this with you. I think that's just such a powerful line that when you're sitting there talking to someone and you're talking to them and they're starting to break down a little bit, just by saying to them I'm in this with you Because that statement makes so many statements, doesn't it? In itself, it shows compassion. It shows, hey, I'm right here with you working through this. It's not an opposition. I'm not telling you what you should do or how. I'm in here with you. All you've got to do is guide me. What do you want me to do? And I can help you with this and go through that. That sort of leads me on into the next question.

Speaker 2: 1:03:05

But I think that statement actually answers the next question, because I was going to ask what advice do you have for partners of frontline workers who are supporting someone? Because I've got a lot of wives, husbands, that have got partners in frontline health and emergency services military that listen to this podcast as well. They're trying to find strategies to help their partners. So what is there that they can do? And I think that line is the answer, isn't it? Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 1:03:29

I'm in this with you and I think, even if, as a partner, we may have done all the research in the world, we know that a healthy shift exists. We know there's podcasts available, we know there's websites, we know there's these really great books by Banksy, troy Knight, dan Prong all these people we know they exist. Don't lead with that. It's like, hey, this looks like about how we're going to navigate these challenges together. It's like, hey, did you know? I was looking on the internet last night and I saw this, this looks interesting. Or I heard this podcast. I was reading this book the other night and I heard this thing you might like to read this book too. Maybe you'll get value from it. These are the ways in which we can then provide that ongoing support. It's like I was listening to this. Really good, they were talking about sleep.

Speaker 1: 1:04:10

Did you know that circadian misalignment has such an impact on our own mental health and wellbeing? And people might go what the hell are you talking about? It's like, well, look, I'm no doctor. Listen to the podcast that Rog talks about it. You know what I mean. Like. So this is how we can then provide that support. Is I'm in this? I'm like a foot soldier in your support army, that I'm going to go off and I'm going to go find some stuff and we're going to just work together. We're going to put this challenge on the table in front of both of us and we're going to go. Well, this is what I've learned. What do you think might be useful? What do you connect with? And that changes all of the time throughout life. So, yeah, I think there's probably a few things in there.

Speaker 2: 1:04:44

Absolutely brilliant. Yeah, there's an information night on. I'll come with you to it. How about we go to this on that night? Do you know what I mean? Like you're showing support, you're not opposing, because I think when it's in the heat of the battle and it's when I say the heat of the battle, when it's really heightened it can be real like opposite pole magnets pushing against each other all the time. I think if you flip your magnet around and you draw yourself in and say, hey, I'm in this with you, it's such a powerful comment, I'm going to stick with it. I'm going to live with that. I love that one.

Speaker 2: 1:05:14

Now, I do want to talk about this topic. It's taken us a while to get there, but I want people to earmark this and get to this, because this is a really important conversation. I heard this the other day. I actually called you and said hey, we need to talk about this because it's important. I think one of the biggest problems that we have that a lot of people don't realize is they think that with suicide or people that want to complete suicide, that it's because of the pain themselves and they just want to end their own life. It's more than that, isn't it?

Speaker 1: 1:05:42

Yeah, it is so for me. I'll talk to my own experience and then those that have also shared with me. So I've heard a few times in the community where the people can sometimes feel like it might be a person just trying to find a way out of their own, to your point. Sometimes people have even gone so far as to say it's a cowardly move. How could they do that to people around them and frame it that way? And look, I understand that we are trying to get to the understanding of maybe what that person's decision-making process was. So I think that sense of feeling as though we're a burden is absolutely a contributing factor to, more often than not, to decisions around suicide. And this is just in my experience. I can't necessarily back this up with any research other than I've spoken to people who have considered suicide or maybe they've had behaviors towards suicide and my own experience.

Speaker 1: 1:06:25

The reason why I was making decisions you know, when I was unwell around considering suicide as an option was because I truly believed that those around me would be better off without me. It wasn't so much that I was going. I can't do this anymore. I've lost energy. I'm going to give these problems to someone else. It was. I'm feeling as though I am a burden to those around me and this might be a useful way for me to alleviate the burden on other people. Now, I appreciate that's not going to be in every situation, but that is often a contributing consideration and I know that some of the surveys, research that RUOK came up with a couple of years ago, was very much around this, almost like a trifecta of vulnerability or concern or risk to suicide whatever word is most appropriate for you and the contributing factors, the three contributing factors where the person felt as if they were a burden to those around them. They were isolated. Now that doesn't mean necessarily geographically. That might mean there's a sense of I'm not connected, I don't belong anywhere. So we might have a robust social environment around us but might not necessarily feel connected to it and then having the means to actually take their life in whichever way they'd planned that out. But that key point around that feeling as though we're a burden.

Speaker 1: 1:07:35

So I find now and I know that we've had these conversations previously, roger is that I know now that when I'm speaking to people who have had thoughts in the past or maybe you're thinking about suicide now as an option I'm very intentional around almost trying to use that word. This is not burdensome. You are not burdensome. I want you to speak to me. I'm not taking responsibility for your problems, your challenges. What I'm doing is you're not in this on your own. I'm going to sit here with you in this and together we are going to find out ways that is going to help us navigate through this challenge that we're facing together.

Speaker 1: 1:08:08

So it's not a burden, because we know that we've all been impacted in a big way by suicide and I think every one of the listeners would be able to draw on their own personal experience of having lost someone or coming close to losing someone, or maybe had their own experiences themselves. I'm sure that for most of us, we would not ever consider that a burden to be available for someone else in their moments of most significant and challenge or distress. So we need to be very careful around how much we might be perpetuating social stigmas around. You know to take to consider this is a cowardly move, because I know for me like that's probably the last thing I needed to hear or to consider when I was already thinking I was a burden to those around me, to have people then think that I'm not capable and I am just a coward for considering getting out of this environment. We have to just be conscious of the words that we're using there and opening ourselves up to different perspectives.

Speaker 2: 1:08:59

That's all I would urge listeners to do yeah and I think what you've said about the trifecta of risk goes back to that statement. Again, I'm in here with you takes the isolation away so they don't feel isolated, they feel like they've got someone there. It also gives you a really good opportunity to assess if they've got the means themselves and how they're actually thinking. And also, they're not a burden because you're sitting there with them. So they know they're not a burden because you're right there and you've told them. So, yeah, the statement again comes back to that. Let's start to wrap it up. So for any first responders or frontline workers that are listening, who might be actually struggling and have listened into this because Matt Newlands is on the Healthy Shift podcast what message would you have for them if they're struggling at the moment?

Speaker 1: 1:09:40

Yeah, look, I think there's probably three key things that I'd ask them to consider, and these are the three sort of significant contributing factors to the post traumatic growth roadmap. We talk about education, regulation and disclosure. So what I would say to that, if you're feeling as though you're struggling, trust that gut feeling Like you're an expert in your life as well, and, yep, we appreciate that sometimes people might pick up on it first, but if you're having these thoughts, having these you know, I'm not so certain reach out and learn more stuff, whether that's like listening to podcasts, watch YouTube, you know, read the books. If you're not sure where to start, what I would urge people to do is Aussie Frontline provide free, sponsored counselling sessions that are available through Frontline Mental Health. What I have found is that for some first responders, they are literally using a session to learn more, and so we will just spend an hour together just talking about ways of which, you know, well-being practices can be implemented, maybe things that they're struggling with, and that might be the only touch point that we have. Others, you know, might go on to have more and more sessions, but seeking that education piece is such an important part, and I would say that if they're listening to this podcast and they're feeling that way, there's a good chance they're already well down that path of seeking out some information already. So, like, pat yourself on the back and just continue that forward momentum.

Speaker 1: 1:10:56

The other piece around regulation is what we're talking about there. What are the wellbeing practices we're utilizing to help regulate our emotional responses to the environments that we're in and the circumstances we're subjected to? So again, if you need some things, stuff like gratitude is really important. You know, even just considering that question as you're driving to work, what am I grateful for today? And don't just name it as I'm grateful for my coffee. Give me a reason like say because and fill that in I'm grateful for a podcast because it gives me an opportunity to learn more about other people's shift work experience. You know we want to put a reason for it at the other end. So gratitude is an important one.

Speaker 1: 1:11:34

Breathing box breathing I know that people speak about that a lot. In for four, hold for four, out for four, these sort of things. Four, seven, eights. In for four, hold for seven, out for eights. There's lots of different techniques that are available for people. Use those in those moments of heightened distress if you're struggling, but, yeah, we want to be really talking about well-being practices that can help us regulate some of these responses sleep hygiene would also fall into that. And disclosure find people you can talk to and if you're not sure, then again aussie frontline contacting frontline mental health, directly contacting a healthy shift. Send us messages on Instagram. Whatever you need to do, send us emails, speak to people who are in positions that we are more than happy to listen. You're not alone. You're not in this on your own. So, yeah, that would be three key things that I'd really encourage people to do Education, wellbeing practices and sharing story.

Speaker 2: 1:12:24

Yeah, just reach out to people that have been there that can guide you and help you and make you not feel alone.

Speaker 2: 1:12:30

I think the biggest positive that I've got is I'd seen other people come through it and come out of it, and it gave me the hope that, yeah, I can do this as well, and albeit that my own depression distracted me to throw myself into the business I know my psychologist and psychiatrist as well said to me that the best thing that you can possibly do is do what you're doing at the moment as a way out of what you're doing. Fantastic. Now, matt, you've been amazing, and I do highly encourage people to seek out the Aussie Frontline. I've got about five of their t-shirts, so I've certainly supported half of one session at least, because for every t-shirt or every piece of merch that they sell, they actually donate $10 towards sessions with Matt or a counsellor as well. I think that's really important that people understand that, and also that people understand too, matt, that if someone from Victoria Police was to approach and was to speak to you, it's absolutely in confidence and away from the organisation, isn't it?

Speaker 1: 1:13:29

Absolutely so. Both Aussie Frontline and Frontline Mental Health. They are two separate entities, are separate from organisations. So we might have like collaborative connections and relationships with the first responder agencies that support the work that we're doing, but we're not reporting back to anybody and in fact even the information that comes from Aussie Frontline to us. It's one way it is. If you were to contact Aussie Frontline and said I'd really appreciate speaking to someone. We are just giving your contact details and it stops there. So as much as you know, marley and Dan and I we're all very close friends. We don't sit around and talk about you know the challenges absolutely in confidence and I would lose any of my professional registration if I was to breach that confidentiality as well. So the legal component requires that.

Speaker 2: 1:14:12

If something that you've said today resonates or people really want to reach out to you as well. Where can people find out more about Frontline Mental Health and the work that you're actually doing, mate?

Speaker 1: 1:14:21

Yeah, so we've got a website, frontlinemhcomau. You've got to find out a bit about the education, the programs that we provide to organizations around the country. They're not exclusive to military and first responder communities. So if you're from the corporate sector local government, councils, corrections, like whichever category you fit yourself into please reach out to us. If you like the way that we talk, the way that we operate, then please let us know. Linkedin we're quite active on there. We do our best to try to bring value to our LinkedIn following and community as well. We talk about different things each month and try to bring some videos and content. And then my personal Insta page, maddienewlands. You'll be able to find me there. Feel free to send me a private message. And then I would encourage people to check out Aussie Frontline as well.

Speaker 2: 1:15:03

The whole lot. It's all linked in there together and I will put the links to that into the show notes for anybody that goes into the show notes. The links to Matt, frontline Health, the LinkedIn, will all be in the show notes, matt, I have to have one closer. I've got one question that I always ask my guests and, because you've given up your time, I haven't told you. But I've recently won a billion dollars and I'm in a position where I can buy you a house or build it anywhere that you want in the world. Right, right, whereabouts am I going to build you a house Now? You can go by yourself and have some quiet, mad time, or you can take the missus and kids or do whatever you want to do, but where would you like me to buy or build it for you?

Speaker 1: 1:15:41

Sure, I think the first thing that comes to mind. I intentionally didn't like prepare for this question. We generally, as a family, we like to spend time in Bali, we like to try to find the quiet times in Bali, and I think, really, the connection there, though, is just a beach. I just need somewhere close to the ocean, somewhere that's warm and doesn't really have too many people around me.

Speaker 2: 1:15:58

So, yeah, Beautiful and it's cheap. I've got most of my billion dollars left. That's fantastic.

Speaker 1: 1:16:04

But we'll build something special.

Speaker 2: 1:16:14

No doubt you'll want a plunge pool and the spa and sauna, and you're going to have to have an infrared sauna and all the good gear that goes with that. Matt, I'm very, very humbled that you've come on the podcast and I'm very grateful for the work that you are doing for our frontline health and first responders, military, everybody. It's a real credit to you that you've recovered from what you've recovered from yourself, and I'm well aware of that because I heard you speak at the event and that's what really resonated with me as well. We've been basically along pretty much the same journey. Well done on doing what you're doing. It gives you a new zest to life, doesn't it?

Speaker 1: 1:16:39

It's fantastic, it certainly does I think there's so much to be said about people having a meaning or purpose in their life, and I know that you know that's something that you would probably align with as well, and a lot of our first responder community. It's often the driving force for why it is that we do what we do. So yeah, I mean I really appreciate the invitation to be involved. I hope people have got value out of the last hour or so of our conversations and if people have questions then I'd certainly welcome them to flick them through to me and always happy to chat. So really appreciate it, roger, and thanks for all the stuff that you're doing as well. It's hugely impactful.

Speaker 2: 1:17:06

And there you have it. That's Matt Newlands. That's a really, really important conversation, because it's just not enough to just check in with people and say are you okay? It's a close question. Someone says, yeah, I'm fine, or not? I think we need to have these conversations and understand how to, and also the impacts and what these type of things can have on us, and how we need to choose our words quite carefully because of how a person may very well be feeling.

Speaker 2: 1:17:34

If you got any value out of the podcast, please reach out to either Matt or myself. We will steer you in absolutely the right direction. There's no problems. And also, don't forget, please share this podcast with your colleagues so that they can learn more evidence-based strategies around shift work and coping with mental health, et cetera, et cetera. I will catch you on the next one. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so you get notified whenever a new episode is released. It would also be ever so helpful if you could leave a rating and review on the app you're currently listening on. If you want to know more about me or work with me, you can go to ahealthyshiftcom. I'll catch you on the next one.