Hey there, welcome to Healthy Ish. This is, of course your daily podcast Frobody and Soul. I am your host for LISTI Harley. Now, we all want to stay calm rather than feel overwhelmed in life's stressful situations, and my guest today is going to help you do just that. He is a paramedic and author of a new book called The Paramedic Mindset. His name is Lee Anderson, and today he joins us to share the tools he uses
to stay calm under pressure in his extremely stressful job. Now, if you want more from Lee, I highly recommend you tune into Extra Healthy Ish, where he talks about how he copes with the trauma involved with his job, and he also shares more tools on how he thrives under pressure. He can search for Extra Healthy Ish wherever you get your podcasts Lee, thank you for joining us on healthy Is today.
Thank you so much for having me, And well done.
On your new book. How does it feel it's out there in the world now.
Yeah, it's It feels like I thought I would be relieved, Like, wow, I can I don't have to stay up till midnight riot I think and deal with the stress of writing a book. Yeah, but I'm kind of a bit nervous now. I'm a bit apprehensive about how it's going to go. Like I've put myself in the public sphere, so that's new to me, so it makes me a bit nervous. But we'll see.
I like that you said that it's stressed for writing a book, yet you've probably been in some of the most stressful situations that any human could possibly be in. Talk to us about this whole concept of the paramedic mindset.
What is it? Yeah, So the paramedic mindset is basically I like to use the word poise, So it's about when we're faced with stress, how can we make really good decisions in that face of that stress, so we don't get that tunnel vision because we like the research shows the most thing that stress does to all of us is make us really poor decision makers. So it's
about clearing your mind to make good decisions. And I just use the paramedic as the example on how to manipulate our biology to make good decisions and prepare for stress and then turning stress. Instead of looking at stress as stress, we can change it and look at it as arousal. So when you look at it as arousal. We start to relate that to performance, so you can see stress is a good thing. It's a thing that
actually enhances our performance and makes our lives better. It just becomes when stress becomes overwhelming and there's a point where we drop off that cliff. So it's about trying to avoid that. So I use the paramedic mindset as usually this word poison. I define that as this self assurance and composure under pressure. So I always imagine it's
like you're walking through a tornado. There's cows flying, cars flying, and you're just walking there composed, solid, shoulders back, and you're able to deal with that situation despite all that chaos around.
That's a good summary. Well, I mean I think it's all good. And while being a paramedic've you spent years perfecting this or perhaps you know, trying to at least how can the everyday person adapt this mindset?
Yeah? So, like I said before, I'm just using the paramedic as the example. So the science and the research that I include in the book is all about how humans react to stress. So every human if you go, like for me, going up and doing public speaking events, which I have to do now for the book, and I get very stressed for public speaking, So I use the exact same tools stuff that manipulate my stress to perform when I public speak, that I learned as a paramedic.
It's just that paramedics are put under stress every day, and you know, the decision making in that moment is can be life threatening. Notes it's do or die. Sometimes it's not always, but it does happen.
So can you give us some tools that can help us well stay calm under pressure and build our poise.
Yeah, so I call them psychological skills. And probably the best one and easiest one to remember or for me anyway, is this acronym called beat the stressful. If you remember mister T from the A Team, I do imagine him and it. Yeah, so it's like beat the stressful. So B is for breathing. So there's a few breathing techniques. Andrew Human made the physiological size sighing, so that's two inhales and one exhale. He made that quite popular recently.
There's also box breathing, which is where you breathe in like you inhale for four seconds, you hold your breath for four seconds. You exhale for four seconds and then hold your breath for another four seconds, so it's like a box YEP. And then TEA is for talk, so that's positive self talk, so you're just having little phrases in your mind to a positive self talk within your
internal dialogue. And another way you can do that is to talk to yourself in refer to yourself in second person, so you say your name, so it's like Lee, I can do this, or Lee you can do this, Lee, you are good, You've done this before those little phrases. That's a bit of positive self talk. And then S is for C so visualization, so it's about closing your eyes and visualizing doing or performing the task before you do it m m and taking that pause to do that.
And the other one is focus, so you use little focus words. I like to in Q words, So you come up with a word before you do something simply as like for a paramedic, it might be smooth, So before you perform a surgical intervention or something, you say smooth, or you say the word focus itself. So you come up with these little Q words, and there's single words that snap you out of that tunnel vision. So beat the stressful.
I like that. I like that. So when you come upon a situation, you know, which could be life and death, is this what's going on your head? The self talk, the breathing. I mean when you're in the ambulance and you're on your way, I mean, how does that work in your mind?
Yeah, Well, there's like a lot of preparation goes in before you put yourself in that situation. We call it stress and oculation. So it's training and education and that sort of thing about mastering your skills. But yeah, essentially, when you're in those pressure moments before you do something, I'll be like, as I'll walk into a scene, I'll be breathing before I perform a task. I'll say a single word or a cognitive pause is another one where
you just physically step back and move your body. Yeah, and you look at the horizon and stand there for thirty seconds, remove yourself from the situation before you make a decision. Yeah, I'll actively do those things. And you can do those things without anyone noticing around you. And that's the beauty of these little tools and skills is that you can perform it next to someone and they don't even know you doing it.
Yeah, you make it sound very simple and very easy to stay calm when under pressure. It was I found that you talk you write about in your book about an experiment that you conducted with your podcast, and the finding was around maintaining poise under pressure. It was more about individual's well being than their experience or preparedness when it came to a stressful situation. Can you tell us more about.
This, Yeah, it was quite fascinating that people prioritize their own well being and they stated that that is a having a what we'd like to call flourishing. So flourishing in life is a key performance indicator of being able to deal with stressful situations when they come up. So if you walked in like it's you know, it sounds pretty if you put it this way, it's pretty simple.
It's like if you're feeling depressed and anxious and then someone throws something at you, it makes you really stressful. You're not going to perform very well. Whether if you walk into it and you're feeling like you're functioning in life. You can deal with obstacles and hurdles that you come across to achieve that is, through achieving well being and probably the biggest thing that sets people up in that
was that they do it in service of others. So it's helping others gives them that resilience in that well being, which I thought was really interesting that it's not about trying to do something for your individual it's about helping other people and that's what gives you resilience.
Is that why you're a paramedic? What was your desire to become a paramedic?
Yeah, yeah, well a part of it, for sure is that desire to help others. But it's also so I was injured and quite sick when I was around fifteen sixteen, and yeah, I had the ambulance come out to me, and I know, they were amazing, and I just looked up to them and thought, you know, what they did for me and how they treated me was incredible. And then at the time, it used to be like a diploma program where you had to apply and you had to have like a lot of life experience before they
would accept you. Yeah, but then the tertiary and universities opened it up and started doing it as a program at university level. And as soon as I saw that, it just it was a calling. I'm enrolled in that course and.
Oh you're an undervalued occupation. Lee, thank you so much for joining us on Healthy.
Is Not a problem. Thank you for having me well.
If you do want more tales from the front line, make sure you grab Lee's new book. It is called The Paramedic Mindset it is. It's really good. Actually, it's got a lot of wisdom in there about how to well flourish under pressure. If you did enjoy this chat, jump on rate and review it, or of course you
can subscribe to this podcast. Anything else, head to Body and Soul dot com dot you followus on socials, grab our print edition which is out in your local Sunday paper, and until tomorrow, stay healthy ish