Addiction Medicine Made Easy | Fighting back against addiction
Addiction is killing us. Over 100,000 Americans died of drug overdose in the last year, and over 100,000 Americans died from alcohol use in the last year. We need to include addiction medicine as a part of everyone's practice! We take topics in addiction medicine and break them down into digestible nuggets and clinical pearls that you can use at the bedside. We are trying to create an army of health care providers all over the world who want to fight back against addiction - and we hope you will join us.*This podcast was previously the Addiction in Emergency Medicine and Acute Care podcast*
Addiction Medicine Made Easy | Fighting back against addiction
How to Build Emotional Resilience
Stress doesn’t wait for a convenient moment, so why should resilience training wait for a crisis? We sit down with Coach Kay, a PhD serving first responders, ER teams, and other high‑stress professionals, to unpack a practical roadmap for emotional resilience you can actually use. We connect the dots between addiction, overwhelm, and the brain’s survival circuitry, then break down simple steps to recruit the prefrontal cortex, label emotions accurately, and respond with intention instead of impulse.
You’ll hear a clear definition of emotional resilience as a learnable skill and a tour of the six domains that make it concrete: vision, composure, reasoning, health, tenacity, and collaboration. We talk through what a first session looks like, why early “small wins” build momentum, and how honest conversation itself shifts brain chemistry. For clinicians and caregivers, we address the bitter edge of burnout and PTSD and show how third‑person perspective and narrative reframing loosen long‑held patterns without minimizing the pain that created them. If you’re supporting people in recovery, you’ll get language to explain limbic activation, why substances become shortcuts, and how proactive habits restore choice.
This conversation is warm, candid, and grounded: practical journaling prompts, mindfulness tactics, and movement as medicine—whether that’s CrossFit or a neighborhood game of basketball. We make the case for teaching resilience to teens during key developmental windows while reminding everyone that it’s never too late to start. The thread throughout is agency: notice what you feel, understand why, and build rituals that help you act on your values when it counts.
If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a colleague who’s carrying too much, and leave a review with one resilience practice you’re trying this week. Your story might be the nudge someone else needs.
To learn more about Coach Kay's work: https://www.psyrescoaching.com/about
To contact Dr. Grover: ammadeeasy@fastmail.com
Welcome to the Addiction Medicine Made Easy podcast. Hey there, I'm Dr. Casey Grover, an addiction medicine doctor based on California's Central Coast. For 14 years, I worked in the emergency department, seeing countless patients struggling with addiction. Now, I'm on the other side of the fight, helping people rebuild their lives when drugs and alcohol take control. Thanks for tuning in. Let's get started. Today we are going to be talking about how to build emotional resilience. Now, what's the backstory behind this episode? Well, this is an interview with Coach Kay. I do CrossFit with her and I asked her after a workout what her day job was, and she said that she had a PhD and worked on building emotional resilience. And so, of course, I was interested as building emotional resilience is a lot of what we try to do when we treat addiction. If you think about it, addiction at its core is using substances to change how we feel, and often that is managing negative emotions. People with addiction often don't have much emotional resilience, and that's why they use substances to self-regulate. So when I heard that she helps build emotional resilience, the first thought that came to my mind was, oh my gosh, I need that for my patients. Coach Kay specializes in helping professionals manage the negative emotions that come with high stress work. People in these professions have some emotional resilience, but need to build more to be able to avoid burnout and quitting their jobs. So her work is not as much with people with addiction, but the approach that she takes is still applicable to people with addiction. A few points that I wanted to clarify that came up during our conversation. Coach Kay mentioned two parts of the brain, and I just wanted to clarify what they are. First, the limbic brain. The limbic brain is a primitive part of the brain that is involved with processing and regulating emotion and memory. It is also home to the behaviors that keep us alive: eating, motivating us to reproduce, and our fight or flight response. And second, the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the most highly evolved part of our brain and is the home of our executive functioning. It does things like thinking through decisions, setting goals, and self-control. So for the sake of our conversation, you can think of the limbic brain as our primitive survival brain and the prefrontal cortex as the home of self-regulation, problem solving, and complex decision making. This was a really enlightening episode for me, and we are hoping to come back and do another episode in the future focused more on how to help people who, for whatever reason, maybe including addiction, have less emotional resilience and really need to build it from the ground up. And with that, here we go. All right. I am so excited to have you on my podcast. Why don't we start by having you tell us who you are and what you do? Yeah. So my name is Dr.
SPEAKER_02:Kaelin Switzer, and I am the founder of Cyrus, which is a holistic health and wellness coaching model designed to practice proactive mental health with people in high stress environments, specifically first responders, law enforcement, nurses, ER personnel, those kind of occupations. My goal is really to give them the tools to mitigate their stress so that they're able to handle traumatic experiences when they happen, if they happen, rather than needing to seek help after they've experienced something horrible or traumatic. So really just giving them the tools up front to be able to mitigate their own stress and prevent burnout and other long-term issues.
SPEAKER_01:Man, I needed you 10 years ago. I have PTSD from the emergency department. That was my first job. Can I refer colleagues to you?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, of course. And I hear that unfortunately a lot. And that was one of the reasons I decided to go into this field because a lot of specifically when it comes to first responders like law enforcement and ER personnel, a lot of times it's wait for something to happen and then we'll send you to the doctor, we'll send you to the therapist and they'll work with you through what you experience so that you don't burn out. But in reality, it's once you've experienced something super traumatic, if you weren't prepared to handle that stress on your mind, there isn't a whole lot more you can do after the fact to prevent you from burning out because at that point you're you just weren't prepared for it and it was just an overload on your mind. So I think my approach was really one of the first proactive approaches to trying to get ahead of those impacts on these occupations.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we talked about building emotional resilience. Now I know what you meant. Yeah, for sure. Wow. Yeah. I just we just had another doctor start in my practice who, like me, is emergency medicine and addiction medicine. And the first thing I told her was, please take care of your mental health. I had no idea I would get PTSD from the emergency department.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah, it's horrible. It's horrible. And it's we need people in those occupations, right? Those are important fields. And we need these people to remain strong and we need them to be able to do their jobs, and we don't want them burning out. So it blew my mind when I was doing the research that there was really not a whole lot of these proactive approaches to this. Why are we not implementing resilience training and emotional labeling therapy up front so that people can handle this kind of occupational stress over the long run? Why don't we? I think a lot of it comes down to the science is still pretty new as far as what the impacts of resilience training can be, like the positive impacts can be. There was a lot of science being done on burnout specifically, but of course it's all looking at everything retroactively. So until all of that research was published, we didn't really know what the solutions or what the positive impacts of preventative maintenance or preventative mental health were. So it took a lot of time just for the research to be published and conducted to understand what burnout really is and what the main causes of it are and the various ways that we can prevent it and get ahead of it. And I think now that we're starting to understand that, and there's more and more research coming out to show that proactive approaches to resilience training can help prevent burnout and prevent turnover intentions. Now we're starting to consider, okay, how do we implement this on the front end? So it's still pretty new, I would say. It's not something that a whole lot of people were practicing because there wasn't a whole lot of support for it, empirical or otherwise. But now that it's becoming more regular and more well known that it's a helpful tool, it's slowly starting to become implemented in these fields.
SPEAKER_01:So before we talk about what you do, I have one more question about who you work with. Shouldn't every human being on planet Earth be doing this in some way? We all need emotional resilience.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, absolutely. And I work with everybody personally. I actually really enjoy working with people in just day-to-day lives. I love helping people reframe their thought processes and helping them understand that what they went through wasn't personal or it wasn't directed at them, but this is how they can take what they learned from it and do something positive with it. I love getting people to understand that it doesn't really matter what occupation or what your day-to-day looks like. Everybody does need this. My focus has always been those high stress occupations because we are seeing unprecedented levels of burnout and turnover in those fields. And those fields are so incredibly important to our population that I felt very drawn to how can I help them. And in the process, I learned, yes, this is highly beneficial for everybody, not just them. So it's been really great just to be able to practice it with people from all walks of life. But it's been amazing to really learn how it can be impactful on higher stress situations and occupations.
SPEAKER_01:As we talk through this, I just keep thinking my patients who have addiction start with a baseline lower level of emotional resilience than someone who's going to have a successful career. And addiction in and of itself is stressful. I feel like my patients need you even more than first responder who's got a college degree. I'm just curious how that resonates with you.
SPEAKER_02:I I really appreciate that you see the importance of what I'm doing and how it could help a lot of different populations. And I would love to work with anybody who would be willing to sit and listen and work with me on this stuff. One of the hardest kind of scenarios I run into with police officers and other people who have these really crazy occupations, let alone the average person, is that you have to want to do it. And I think one of the biggest problems when it comes to individuals who are suffering from addiction or mental health issues already, or if they have mental health disorders, then if you're already suffering through that, I can't, I can't really get through to you until we get to the root of that problem first. So I've always said that outpatient, absolutely. I could work with somebody to help keep them on track and help keep them accountable and help them build these tools moving forward. But I've also worked with people who I wasn't the right fit for. I really wasn't. They needed a clinician. They needed a therapist who could help them work through what they already were experiencing and what they had already gone through before I was ever going to be effective. And so I think a lot of it comes back to just knowing when I can actually be impactful to somebody and when it's not my turn yet and not maybe not the time for me to step in.
SPEAKER_01:So I know how I define emotional resilience in my practice, but you're an expert in this. How do you define emotional resilience?
SPEAKER_02:I would define emotional resilience as the capacity to notice, understand, and regulate your internal emotional landscape so that you can really respond to stressors effectively rather than impulsively. So it's your ability to understand this is what I'm feeling, this is why I'm feeling it. And rather than reacting impulsively based on that feeling, I can reassess and regulate that emotion and react in a more cognizant and calm manner. So that's how I would define it. It's more of a skill set than it is something that you just have or something that you're just born with, or something that it's something that everyone can learn and everyone can develop. And even if you already have some of that skill, you can always improve it. It's just this ongoing self-awareness and internal narrative.
SPEAKER_01:So you're trying to say that what I was taught in medical school, which is to shove it down and move on to the next patient, wasn't the right answer?
SPEAKER_02:Not necessarily. I wouldn't think that's the best. It's actually interesting, though, because in my high adversity resilience training, one of the things they do encourage in high stress occupations is compartmentalization, which is something that previously that was frowned upon. They're like, we don't want you to compartmentalize things. That's shoving it down into a box and forgetting about it and not dealing with it. But in these high stress occupations, it's actually becoming more of a regular training to have police officers or ER nurses compartmentalize what they're experiencing so that they don't take it home with them. And it's their way of separating work from home life. So what we were taught in the past, yeah, of course, there's not necessarily a whole lot of validation to everything that we were taught, but we are learning new ways to approach it and teach it and train people effectively on it versus just shove it down and don't think about it anymore.
SPEAKER_01:So for my addiction patients, they just get so overwhelmed so easily, which is largely why they turn to substances, right? I feel overwhelmed by this. I'm gonna pick a downer and that's gonna calm me down and I can function. Where do you start with someone on your first visit? What's it like?
SPEAKER_02:A lot of the times I try to be very transparent and educate someone. I don't try to come at them like, this is what you're doing, this is why you're doing it, this is what you're experiencing, and this is how you fix it. That's really not how to approach anybody in any stage of their training with emotional resilience. I try to be very clear and explain the neuroscience behind it and let them know this is the reality is that emotions drive decision-making behaviors. And so if you cannot regulate your own emotions, you are always going to look for an upper, a downer, or something that can control that emotion for you. So if you're not teaching yourself how to mitigate that or how to manage those emotions, you're gonna look for whatever can, whether it's picking up that pill or having that glass of wine or whatever the case may be, whatever that muse is to settle that emotion, you're gonna seek that out rather than deal with the problem, the root cause of the problem. So I try to be very transparent with people and just the reality is this is the way human brains work. This is limbic brain activation. And the only way to counter it is to activate the prefrontal cortex and to really seriously sit with yourself and think about what you're feeling and why you're feeling it before making an impulsive decision on how to manage what you're feeling.
SPEAKER_01:That is so unfortunate for my patients because in addiction, the prefrontal cortex is underfunctioning and the limbic brain is overfunctioning. Man. So it sounds like first session is just, hey, I'm Dr. K, or how do you introduce yourself?
SPEAKER_02:I actually go by Coach K. I think it's a little bit more approachable. And I like doing that. I like getting people to know that, like, I'm a doctor, sure, but I'm not your therapist. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you what's wrong with you. I'm here to work with you and to help you see that you're not broken, but you're you can get better at anything you want to. And I'll explain how and if we can work together on it. And it's less of I'm telling you and more I'm cooperating with you. Like we're doing this together. So I think Coach K is more approachable. So yeah, I just go in, I'm Coach K, and I'd love to hear what brought you to me and how you think I can help. And I'd love to give you some more information on the neuroscience behind resilience and all of this emotional regulation stuff that you hear about, and we can go from there. And something usually resonates with them. Usually one of those things that we discuss will stick with them and then they'll want to dive deeper into that. And that's my like hook. What is it that draw like drew you to me, drew you to resilience training or coaching? What do you want to get out of it? Because that's where we want to start.
SPEAKER_01:Makes sense that you are focusing on first responders that are very motivated. Do you ever get folks that are brought to you as a you have to see Coach K, or else, like you've got addiction or you got a DUI, or you're disassociating at work and you can't function. You need to get it together.
SPEAKER_02:I am lucky enough to say that I have not had that yet. I haven't had anyone forced to see me. I don't know how I would handle that, to be honest. I think for me, a big part of my philosophy in working with people is that I want them to see their own value, their own worth. And with first responders who go through something and then they end up having to go to the shrink to see if they're fit for duty, right? They're not gonna want to talk to that person in an honest and open way and give them the realities or the truth of what they experienced because that could be their job, right? That could be their gun and badge. And so I think for me, if I'm working with someone who is sent to me, I can already expect that they're not gonna be fully open with me. They're not gonna be fully willing to absorb what I have to say or how we could work together. And so I think I would have a harder time with that. I think I genuinely want to work with people who want to get something out of it or who are at least curious. Like if you're a little bit curious, that's perfect. That's all I need. I can take you from there and I'll give you all the information you need. At some point, I'm sure something will stick with you and you'll want to do more or learn more. But if you're just there because you have to be, if you don't, if you're not interested in it, then you're not gonna get anything out of it. And I think there's a lot that can be said for pretty much anything in life.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So session one, it sounds like, is I'm Coach K. Let's talk about why you're here, talk about what you want to work on. Let's say you're picking on me. I'm little baby, Dr. Grover. I'm 29 years old. I just finished residency. And I say one of my buddies took care of a woman who had a cardiac arrest while she was pregnant, and they did a perimortem C-section. I don't know how he dealt with that. I'm overwhelmed by being an ER doc for the next 15 years. Where do we go from here?
SPEAKER_02:So the first thing I would say is what is the number one emotion you felt when you heard about that experience or witnessed it or had that come to your mind? What was the first thing you felt? And the word I heard from you just now was overwhelmed. And so overwhelmed is a really unique kind of characteristic because what it's actually implying is that you were unprepared to handle what you experienced or what that input was. Not unprepared in the sense that you don't know what you're doing. Unprepared is in you didn't know that would have an impact on you until you heard it. And now you're not sure what to do with it. And so this is again where that kind of self-awareness of why am I overwhelmed? Because I didn't expect that. That was something unexpected to me. That was an external kind of input that I wasn't necessarily expecting. So if that's the case, you're overwhelmed, okay, sit with it. What's the next biggest emotion that you feel? Well, it was horrible. I feel sad or I feel anxious about it. And instead of phrasing it in that negative context, you can say, I'm transitioning with this. I'm working with this and I'm trying to work through it in my own mind and understand it in a different light. And when you shift from anxious to anticipation or sad to transition, or from frustration to I need clarity, when you have that kind of positive shift from this negative emotion you felt to this is what it could actually be, this positive kind of other side of it, then you're less likely to have it resonate with you in a negative way. And then it sinks and it settles on your head. And suddenly you're feeling down or you're feeling low and you can't understand why you can't get out of this funk. And a lot of it just comes from what we think of a situation or what we think of what people tell us. If it's negative, you're putting in negative information into your brain, and you can only expect that the reaction you have to it will also be negative. So it's in that situation. These are the realities. Sure. I'm sure people would say that. Like these are the realities of the job, deal with it. But are you actually dealing with it? Are you working through it? Are you sitting there and thinking about how it made you feel, why it made you feel that way? What you what can you learn from it? What can you take away from that experience that can help better prepare you for a similar experience moving forward or something else in the future? And then walking away from it with I learned something about myself, or I learned something about this job, or I learned something about my friend. Those are all positive takeaways from a potentially really negative experience.
SPEAKER_01:So back when I was an ER doc, I tried to keep everything simple because you have to know a little bit about everything. Yeah. So what I'm hearing is step one is to work on emotional awareness. Yes. Yep. Does that sound right?
SPEAKER_02:Yes. Yep. Think about what you're feeling. What are you feeling? What are you feeling? Why are you feeling it? And if you can identify those two things, you're halfway there because you're bringing awareness to your own mind and your own thought processes and how your thought processes connect to your emotions and how as a result, your emotions can connect to your behaviors. So just bringing awareness to those two things can help you mitigate that pathway from negative emotions straight to impulsive or negative behavior. And instead, you're identifying something negative potentially, but here's the flip side of it. And here's how it could potentially be better or beneficial or helpful. So it's forcing yourself to flip the script or change the narrative and understand it from a different perspective so that you're not just absorbing negativity constantly.
SPEAKER_01:And are you going through scenarios with people in your sessions only? Or is it like self-guided work, like journaling? I'm assuming it's a probably a combination of both. What does the work actually look like?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's definitely a combination of both. I love to sit with people for anywhere from one to four hours a month. So it's usually one hour sessions, and just talk to them. And a lot of it's just, I want to just hear from them. What's the worst thing you've ever experienced? What's the best thing you've ever experienced? What's something that changed your life entirely? What's something you wish you would have done or something you regret? And just getting to understand what motivates them and what influences their decisions and what gets them excited to get out of bed in the morning and what just drives them absolutely crazy. Because if you just get to know somebody, it becomes a lot easier to help them draw their own path through resilience training. And so from there, it's journaling exercises, it's mindfulness exercises, composure exercises. And sometimes it's even as simple as what intrinsically motivates you. What's your why? What makes you want to get out of bed in the morning? Because if you're in the completely wrong field and you're only doing it because you need the paycheck, or you're only doing it because, you know, your dad told you you had to, or whatever the case may be, then you're never going to feel really fulfilled or really positive about your experiences in that stage of your life. And so sometimes it's literally as simple as what's your passion, what's your purpose? Do you know your why? What's your vision? What is it that you want to do with your life? Because a lot of people haven't really thought that far ahead. They're just, this is the job, this is what I've got, this is what I've been doing, and this, I'm content here. But they don't understand how that can be so impactful on their mind in the long run. They just settle, they get complacent. So it can be anywhere from what's your why to what's your composure, to how do you reason with something? What's your health? Because that's a big part of it that we don't talk about. And that's the foundational element of are you hydrating? Are you exercising? And are you keeping up with social relationships? Are you not isolating yourself too much? Or so it's just like getting a vibe for where they are in their life and these various different domains and how they handle it, and then the little exercises that you can give them to help in each of those domains.
SPEAKER_01:ER doc oversimplification again. It's almost like you're going wine tasting with their various emotions and identities and tasting each one and seeing which one tastes the worst and needs the most work.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. Yeah. That's a great way to say it. Yeah. Yeah. And it's it is, it's based on six domains. So the resilience domains are vision, your purpose, your why. There's composure. So how you handle stress and how you react to situations. There's reasoning. So can you be resourceful and figure out a solution to a problem as it comes up? There's health, which is again the basics. Are you hydrating? Are you sleeping? Are you eating a proper diet and are you working out? That kind of thing. There's tenacity, which is really self-motivation, the ability to keep yourself going without any external kind of motivators. And there's collaboration, which collaboration is one of the most understated parts of resilience, but you really do need to invest in social relationships and invest in the people in your life who make up your social network, because at the end of the day, those are the people you can rely on and count on to help you out of a bad place, whether that's mentally or physically. And so those are the six domains. And so I will, I'll pick a question or two in each of those domains and I'll get a vibe for the person on each of those domains. I do have a survey instrument I can give them that will actually give me the results and the scores in all six of those domains, and I can see exactly which one I need to work on with them first. But I like to figure it out, puzzle it together and see which one maybe they would want to work on first. And then from there, it's just the little exercises I can give them in each of those domains to help them improve in that various part of their life.
SPEAKER_01:I am seeing all the domains I've been deficient in for many years as a professional. Yeah. Yeah, my therapist always gets on me of did you ask for help? I'm like, ah, I forgot. Okay. So do you find that you get more work done when you work on things that people are not good at, or you help enhance the things that they are already good at? Or I'm assuming it depends person to person, but generally, which do you find works better?
SPEAKER_02:I'm a big advocate for small wins. So if I can make them a little bit better in a category that they're already pretty good at and show them like, look how good you did with that, right? Like that little boost of, oh, I did really good with that. That's enough to keep them coming back. So if I can give them that little serotonin boost of, hey, this is what I feel and this is why I feel it. And oh yeah, I did that for myself. Then all of a sudden they're seeing how these little things can help in the long run. And it's less of something I did, and it's more, you're already really good at that. Look how good you did that. You know? And so I'm would rather work on the things they're good at and point out those positive attributes of theirs before I dive into this. This is what you suck at. So let's work on that. That's not nobody wants to hear that. And nobody really wants to like work with someone who's just gonna point out the negatives all the time.
SPEAKER_00:Makes perfect sense.
SPEAKER_01:So you give them education around identifying their emotions, you have them sample out some different emotional states and emotions, go for the easy wins. How much does that help build someone's emotional resilience? Just those first three steps.
SPEAKER_02:A lot. And I think the one thing that in all three of just me sitting with someone and doing that is it taps into the collaboration domain. And whether they recognize it or not, them talking to me and explaining what they're feeling and what they've experienced and why they do what they do, that releases little positive chemicals in their brain that make them feel better. And so when you actually talk about something, even if it's something negative with another human being, not AI and not the wall or not your phone or anything else, not texting, when you're talking face to face with a human, it releases the chemicals in your brain that make you happy. And it's as simple as that. And so when they leave the first call with me, they should feel lightheaded in a positive way. Oh, that wasn't what I thought it was gonna be, but I feel okay. And that was okay. And that kind of moment is what I lean on the most. That's where I'm like, let's chat again. Let's just talk. It's not a session, it's not a therapy session. I'm not gonna diagnose you, I'm not gonna talk to you about what you did wrong, what you could have done better. I just want to talk to you. I want to get to know you. And you should leave feeling that much better because you just were able to say it exactly the way you felt and exactly the way it came across to you, to someone who's not judging you for it and isn't gonna take away anything from you because of it. I'm just here to listen and to be there and work through it with you. And I think that's one of the most important things that comes away from just something as simple as that introductory first meeting with them.
SPEAKER_01:So we talked about the first three steps, and obviously there's so much more to this, but again, ER doc brain keeps it simple. Those first three steps we talk about. How many sessions is that to get that sort of work done?
SPEAKER_02:Probably three to four, I would say, to really get to the nitty-gritty, because the first one is always a little uncomfortable. They don't really know what to expect. And maybe I'll ask a question, they'll give me a very dry or generic answer, but they're not really giving me any detail. And so it takes a couple of sessions just to get them comfortable to talk and to really recognize that I'm not here to take that information and retaliate or do anything with it, really. I'm just here for them if they want to talk. And once they open up to that, then it becomes a lot easier to be, okay, this is the domain I'm seeing, or this is the word I'm hearing, or this is great what you did in that situation. I think that's awesome. And those are the little sparks that I could throw in as they start to open up and talk to me. So it can take three to four sessions, depending on the person. Some people come to me and they're like, listen, this is everything that I've been dealing with, and I need you to tell me where to start. And that's great too. Okay, let's jump in. But just depends on the person.
SPEAKER_01:So I got some physician coaching a few years ago. I was a new chief of staff at my hospital, and we got an educational stipend to learn and take classes, and so I signed up for some physician coaching. And I didn't know I had PTSD at the time. And I'll get to my question, but let me just give it the scenario. Yeah. So I was a new chief of staff. I want to advocate for my fellow doctors. I want to work on burnout. And so I started working with my coach, and he was asking me all this stuff, and he gave me some things. And the one thing he really wanted me to work on is when people stop and say thank you, to actually stop and listen and attend to it and feel the gratitude. And I was so bitter still at that time in emergency medicine, I couldn't do it. I could not stop and enjoy the thank you. And so, my question to you is that was 10 years into being a doctor with yet undiagnosed PTSD. Once someone already goes down a negative path with worsening emotional resilience, burnout, even post-traumatic stress disorder, how much can you pull them back?
SPEAKER_02:As much as they are willing to work for it, you can go all the way back to square one. You can get that much better. But at first, I really stand by just transparency. So this is the reality. This is where you are. Let's figure out how you got here and let's work our way back from there. So, in that case, where you couldn't accept the thank you, you couldn't look somebody in the face and really feel that. You just brush it off and keep going with your day. Why? Why were you doing that? Do you remember a specific instance where that started happening for you? Do you remember the first time someone said thank you and you could tell that it wasn't sincere? Do you remember what that was? And why did that resonate with you more than someone's genuine appreciation for what you did? And just trickling back through where did it all crumble and getting to the root of that situation can sometimes make it easier to then moving forward. Thank you. Of course, thank you for saying that and thank you for your support. And suddenly it can be a little bit more intensive. And starting with one scenario at a time, one emotion at a time. It's not tackle the person and get to the root of all of their problems. That's a great example. You have a hard time with people saying thank you and taking it sincerely. Why? Let's figure out why. Let's backtrack through our lives and figure out all the scenarios where somebody may have said that to you. And somewhere along the way, I bet you there was a situation where you felt that was them feeling obligated to say it, but you knew they didn't mean it, or you felt, I didn't deserve it. I didn't deserve that. And so where did that happen? And how can we rework through that scenario retroactively and reframe it and change the narrative and shift the perspective so that you can experience it in a new light and walk away from it differently? So it's a little bit more if we're talking kind of retroactive resilience training, it's reliving it to some degree, but in an effort to understand it rather than that's what happened and that's the end of it.
SPEAKER_01:So in other words, it's the same process, emotional awareness, sampling the different emotions and trying to focus on the easy wins, but it's almost like your your approach is different or like you're zooming in or zooming out as it pertains to the particular thing that's troublesome. How interesting. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I like to tell people, I want you to revisit what that experience was, but from a bird's eye view or from a fly on the wall. See it from someone who is watching from a third-party perspective and not from where you were and who you were facing, but from a side angle. Because what they'll notice are little things like that person was really frustrated and wasn't in the right state of mind to really be talking to me like that or saying anything to me, or vice versa. I was really frustrated, I had a long day, I wasn't in the right mind or mental state to really be responsive to that. And if you have that objective, wait a second, this was not personal, this was not intentional. There were other external influencers at the time that were feeding into that scenario. Suddenly it takes the Otis off of the impact it had on you. And it's okay, I understand that that was impactful to me, but there's plenty of other things that were influencing that situation. And it wasn't just me or it wasn't just directed at me. And so looking at it from the third-party perspective, that's one of the best ways to get people to understand more of what they were experiencing at the time.
SPEAKER_01:So it's almost like the work of helping someone who has struggled with emotional resilience, trying to bring them back is similar to work that you do for someone who is new in their career, you've gotten the easy wins, and now you're tackling the harder stuff. Does that sound right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. I don't think that it changes a whole lot. And that's the beauty of it is that when it comes to resilience training and emotional resilience coaching, you can start at any point. You can start when you're super burnt out and already have experienced the worst of the worst, or you can start when you're brand new to a field or brand new to a job and you're just trying to get your feet wet, right? Those are completely different parts or positions in life, but both of those people can gain a lot from it and can grow a lot from it. And it doesn't have to be, oh, you're young and you haven't really experienced anything yet. So what do you need to worry about? Or, man, you're too far gone. There's nothing I can do for you. There's no one part of the spectrum that is the best for emotional resilience coaching and training. It's anybody in any stage of their life can learn and grow from it and be better because of it.
SPEAKER_00:Have you read the book, The Upside of Stress?
SPEAKER_02:I have not. I've heard a lot of good things about it, though. People keep recommending it to me.
SPEAKER_01:It sounds a lot like what you do, which is to basically stop, be aware of what you're feeling, recognize that there can be positivity in what you do, even if it's hard.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's exactly it. And getting people to learn that not even learn it, but just recognize it on a regular basis is really tricky. It's really tricky.
SPEAKER_00:How about the book Grit?
SPEAKER_02:Grit is a great book. Yes.
SPEAKER_01:Love that book. Angela Duckworth, yes. Great read and very interesting. Have you taken your grit score? I have not. Did you know there was a grit score? I didn't. Yeah. So apparently you can actually go online and take your grit score and you can get a sense of how gritty you are. In other words, how much I look at it, how much emotional resilience are you born with?
SPEAKER_02:That's pretty cool. Have you done it?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I was highly resilient.
SPEAKER_02:Look at that.
SPEAKER_01:Shockered. That's how I survived med school and residency with a two-hour commute and a child and an infant and a long distance relationship. And somehow seemed to come out okay.
SPEAKER_02:So resilient. So resilient. I love it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. One thing I wanted to ask you is when I began to work with my therapist, we talked about the fact that not everyone who is in a job like mine develops post-traumatic stress disorder. Can you talk about someone's emotional predisposition to develop post-traumatic stress disorder or not develop post-traumatic stress disorder?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's a great question. I get asked this quite a bit. One of the workshops that I was doing, someone had asked how ACEs or adverse childhood experiences play into PTSD and other negative mental health problems in the future. And when it comes to predisposition, anybody can experience something like post-traumatic stress disorder, regardless of what your childhood was like, regardless of how nurturing your mother was or wasn't, or if your father was in the picture, or we like to pinpoint these different parts of people's lives and attribute why they were less resilient in life to something that happened. But in reality, there's people who experience adverse childhood experiences and are some of the most resilient people you'll meet. And that's not really indicative. And I think I have a hard time saying that certain people are more predisposed to adverse experiences in life or negative mental health effects or are less likely to be resilient because depending on the person, they could experience all of those negative things or have a history of mental health deficits in the family and still grow to be very resilient people. And so I don't really buy too much into predisposition as a as it stands. But as far as the research, it's those kind of things. It's what aces did you potentially experience? What was your family life like? Have you ever been raped? Have you been assaulted? Have you been mugged? Have you witnessed that or anything of the sort? And a lot of the time, people who are severely traumatized and have an issue with resilience are people who maybe it didn't happen directly to them, but they witnessed it or they were privy to it at some point in a young developmental stage. And as a result, they didn't know how to handle it then. They were never taught how to handle it later. And so they just close in on themselves when something of that nature happens to them in the future, or when something traumatic or scary happens to them in the future. And those people, it's more of less predisposition. And more of just, man, I wish I would have gotten to you sooner. I wish I would have known you sooner. I wish somebody would have grabbed your hand and talked to you sooner because again, you're not broken. You just nobody helped you or nobody told taught you. Nobody talked to you. Nobody took your hand and walked you through it when it happened. And now you're feeling like it's who you are fundamentally for the rest of your life. And that's the scariest part is that people just get left behind and then they are deemed less resilient. And really it's, I just was never, I was never told. I was never taught. I was never trained. So I'm dealing with it the only way my body knows how, which is usually negatively.
SPEAKER_01:You and I both love CrossFit. So I want to throw my an athletic idea at you and see what you think and then bring it back to your work. So I have always wondered why do we not teach people how to run? So you look, and some people run naturally beautifully, and others it just looks like it hurts. So bringing that back, we don't teach kids how to run. We don't teach kids how to be emotionally resilient. We should. At what age do you think that should probably start?
SPEAKER_02:So in my research, I talk about how people's lives are shaped and their generational narratives are shaped in key developmental periods of life. And those key developmental periods are usually somewhere between 13 years old, probably to about 18 years old. So from 13 to 18 is where really, if you experience something horrific or if something traumatic happens, it's more likely to have a long-lasting impact on you. This is how generational narratives are created. This is why when you look at generations and what differentiates us from each other, a lot of it is what was the key or the critical monumental incident that happened when we were in our key developmental stages. So for Gen X, a lot of it was focused around 9-11. For millennials, a lot of it's focused around COVID. So it's these critical developmental occurrences that happen when we're young, but our brain is still processing and absorbing in a really intensive way. So I would give anything to sit down with high school seniors and teach them this stuff. Because I think not only are we not being taught the basics of living, like balancing a checkbook or credits, but then we're also not being taught how to be social and how to be human in a world that's really relying heavily on technology now. And so if we could get to these populations, high school seniors or even younger anywhere in high school from freshman to senior year, and just teach them these traits and these skill sets, I think you see very drastically different outcomes in the long run as far as how they can manage their stress, how they manage their relationships and what they take away from what they want to do with life and what they take away from what they're learning in school and a lot more. Emotional resilience for all. Yes, definitely. Definitely.
SPEAKER_01:Regrettably, we have reached the end of the time we set aside. Did we miss anything about the work that you do?
SPEAKER_02:I don't think so. Yeah, I know. That's in a nutshell what I do. And it's it changes all the time. I am constantly learning. Learning just never stops. So it's a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, if it's okay with you, I think I'll provide your information about your practice to my former ER group. Just that if anyone wants to work on developing and growing emotional resilience, I wish I had known about this sort of work 10 years ago. I'd be a very different doctor now.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I would absolutely love to work with anybody who'd be willing to sit down with me for even just for a few sessions and talk about it.
SPEAKER_01:All right. Coach K, I'm super impressed. I did not know what you did when we came into this. I know we've done CrossFit together, but I love the work that you do, building emotional resilience.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I appreciate it. And I love the work you do. We're just out here having an impact on people. It's great.
SPEAKER_01:One last question as we go to wrap up. How do you incorporate exercise into someone's emotional resilience?
SPEAKER_02:I think it's so critical. I try to encourage people to get into some sort of exercise routine. And it doesn't have to be CrossFit. I try to very be very clear. Go do a sport, go play volleyball, go golfing, go play basketball with your friends, anything, any sport you want to do, just go be active because getting out and being active, it does so much for your body physically and and your mind as well. So it's just, it's an incredible tool and having fun is the cost of it. And so that's, I think that's something that people sh really need to incorporate in on their day-to-day.
SPEAKER_01:All right. I think we will probably need to come back and dig into this a little bit deeper because we talked about the high-functioning person that you do emotional resilience work with. I'd love to come back and talk about when somebody is not as well resourced and what it's like really helping someone to really level up when they don't have a lot of resilience at baseline. Yeah, definitely. All right. On that, I thank you for your time and I really appreciate coming on and teaching me.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, of course. I look forward to chatting with you again soon.
SPEAKER_01:Before we wrap up, a huge thank you to the Montage Health Foundation for backing my mission to create fun, engaging education on addiction. And a shout out to the nonprofit Central Coast Overdose Prevention for teaming up with me on this podcast. Our partnership helps me get the word out about how to treat addiction and prevent overdoses. To those healthcare providers out there treating patients with addiction, you're doing life-saving work and thank you for what you do. For everyone else tuning in, thank you for taking the time to learn about addiction. It's a fight we cannot win without awareness and action. There's still so much we can do to improve how addiction is treated. Together, we can make it happen. Thanks for listening. And remember, treating addiction saves lives.