By Daniel Vecchiolla
The aroma of dinner flows through the kitchen, seeping into each room one by one, guiding you in that direction. As you start to walk toward the kitchen, you hear your rookie key up the station mic, “Time to eat! Come and get it!” The 5 o’clock news plays in the background as the anchor seamlessly talks about today’s current events.
Suddenly, the tones drop and ripple through the fire station, beating on your eardrums as the dispatcher notifies you of the trapped victims inside the burning building. In that moment, when your brain has assessed the severity of the call, your body’s physiology changes as your autonomic nervous system responds to stress. You are not consciously aware of these changes. Regardless of the physiological changes taking place, firefighters have only one goal in mind: get to that scene as fast as possible and perform.
Firefighters’ bodies are primed to perform in high-stress situations, and it starts early on in a career. On day one in the academy, instructors are face-to-face with recruits, yelling at them, pushing recruits beyond what they considered possible. Why? Just because they are angry? No, they are preparing firefighters by heightening their stress, so when they do have to perform a rescue, they don’t think twice about it.
Not All Stress Is Created Equal
To fully understand stress, let’s define it. Stress is the biological reaction to a dangerous or potentially dangerous situation.1 Firefighters deal with acute stress, episodic acute stress, and chronic stress. Acute stress is the body’s immediate reaction to a new and challenging situation. It’s the stress you feel when you pull up to that burning commercial structure with the trapped victims. Episodic acute stress refers to frequent episodes of acute stress. It most often affects people who take on too much or for those who feel they have both self-imposed pressure and external demands vying for their attention. In relation to our job, this stress can arise from constantly going on stressful, back-to-back calls with no decompression time. Finally, chronic stress is when you are exposed to long periods of stress. In our line of work, going a whole career could potentially be a chronic stress situation.
As firefighters, we constantly confront one of these forms of stress just showing up for work. Remember, when you were new to the fire service and getting to your first station, you undoubtedly experienced some form of stress waiting for calls to come in. Your body and your mind were preparing you for what was about to come. The first couple of shifts at night, you were restless as you tried to sleep. But, as you progressed throughout your career, you learned how to manage that stress and not overthink when a call comes in, just react. Being constantly stressed like that wouldn’t be healthy or sustainable.
Why Stress Is Good
There is a direct role the autonomic nervous system has in the physical response to stress. It is divided into the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system.2 As soon as an individual experiences a stressful situation, the amygdala sends a distress signal to the hypothalamus, which activates the sympathetic nervous system by sending signals through the autonomic nerves to the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands respond by pumping the hormone epinephrine into the bloodstream.3 The sympathetic nervous system then switches on like a light switch, triggering the fight-or-flight response and giving you the energy you need to respond full throttle. Your heart rate increases; your blood vessels dilate; blood starts pumping into your large muscle groups; and your respirations increase, giving you more oxygen to meet the increased workload.
Generally, it is believed that mild stress facilitates an improvement in cognitive function.4 You might have felt this while on scene—a heightened perception of your surroundings, increased attention, and greater decision-making ability.
After a stressful event, the parasympathetic nervous system undoes the work of the sympathetic nervous system. Its primary responsibility is for the body’s rest and digestion response when the body is relaxed, resting, or feeding.
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As with our bodies, our emotions are autonomic, especially when responding to a high-hazard, high-risk emergency event involving people. “The autonomic aspects of emotion are thought to serve important adaptive functions, preparing the body for an appropriate behavioral response to the eliciting situation.”5 The excitement, drive, and fear you feel knowing people need to be rescued are not what you think about or have to talk yourself into; they just happen.
The Downside of Stress
Today, more than ever, the fire service as a whole is more cognizant of stress and how it affects our ability on and off the job. But there are still areas that are less explored but important to our profession. Stress on the fireground affects us all to some degree, and multiple variables affect our stress levels, such as the type of incident, our training, the time of day, and our physical fitness ability. While on scene, we are tasked to make split-second decisions and perform at high levels for extended periods of time; if left unchecked, the effects can be detrimental. “Firefighters who cope with a high workload must mobilize a lot of resources but do not necessarily have time to recover from their effort. Such a situation is likely to produce high levels of stress and lead to a deterioration of health.”6 It is essential to have a well-functioning rehab area set up for units that have been exposed to high heat, prolonged physical activity, and stressful situations. Units must be allotted an ample amount of time to recover before returning to operations.
During firefighting and rescue operations, firefighters must constantly communicate with command and other firefighters to report the ongoing situation or to call for a Mayday. The units assigned to primary search deal with the added stressors of looking for victims who may be trapped in different parts of the fire scene. These units must be able to clearly hear victims’ voices in immediately dangerous to life or health conditions and to communicate with them. That communication provides an opportunity to save lives and property without delay and error. To fulfill the extra demanding responsibilities, firefighters must have good auditory and cognitive function capacity, but the heightened physical demand that firefighters encounter during fire and rescue operations has a major impact on their attention, information processing, and working memory.
These impacts also extend to visual and auditory states.7 Think about that for one second. As the workload increases, our cognitive ability decreases. This explains why there is a lot of confusion during major operations.
How to Move Forward
Firefighters should focus on two key areas—training and physical fitness—to handle fireground stress. Training is fundamental to reducing stress on the fireground. “Train like you fight, fight like you train” should be the motto for everyone in the fire service. Making training conditions identical to an actual situation is not plausible or safe. Still, you can mimic those conditions to safely create a stressful environment. Using smoke machines, blacked-out masks, a controlled live fire, firefighter victims instead of manikins, and moderate physical activity to elevate your heart rate before a drill all promote stress in a controlled and safe environment. Getting proficient in a training environment makes the real situation more manageable.
Besides training, physical fitness should be a priority for everyone in the fire service. Most fire stations have some form of exercise equipment. Even if your station doesn’t have the equipment, bodyweight exercises, running, and even walking make the difference on the fireground. Firefighters with a higher aerobic capacity and a lower fat mass perform job tasks faster and with increased efficiency while working with their self‐contained breathing apparatus.8
More and more departments are now designating peer fitness trainers and implementing wellness programs to assist firefighters with their physical fitness regimen. These programs provide firefighters with the resources they need to continually improve their job performance and their health. I recommend taking full advantage of this if your department offers it.
Our profession tops the list of stressful jobs every single year.9 As firefighters, when responding to a call, we want to be able to handle the stress that is being thrown at us. The public relies on us to perform in any situation and, as a company officer, I want to provide them with that service. Even though eliminating stress entirely at an emergency call is impossible, it should be our priority to reduce that factor to the lowest level. With proper training and a physical fitness regimen, we increase the capacity for a higher success rate in a stressful, unpredictable environment.
References
1. Team, HL. (2020, February 25). Everything You Need to Know About Stress. Retrieved from Healthline: https://bit.ly/3mI74Sr.
2. Karemaker, J. (2017). An Introduction into Autonomic Nervous Function. Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine, 38(5), 89-118.
3. health.harvard.edu. (2020, July 6). Staying Healthy: Understanding the stress response. Retrieved from Harvard Health Publishing: https://bit.ly/3Aw1JT8.
4. Yaribeygi, H. (n.d.). The Impact of Stress on Body Function: A Review. Retrieved from Dr.miller.com: https://bit.ly/2YC3wJv.
5. Shiota, MN, Neufeld, SL, Yeung, WH, Moser, SE, & Perea, EF. (2011). Feeling Good: Autonomic Nervous System Responding in Five Positive Emotions. Emotion, 11(6), 1368 –1378.
6. Sandrin, É, Gillet, N, Ferne, C, Leloup, M, & Depin Rouault, C. (2019). Effects of Motivation and Workload on Firefighters’ Perceived Health, Stress, and Performance. Stress and Health (35), 447-456.
7. Hemmatjo, R, Hajaghazadeh, M, Allahyari, T, Zare, S, & Kazemi, R. (2020). The Effects of Live-Fire Drills on Visual and Auditory Cognitive Performance among Firefighters. Annals of Global Health, 86(1), 1-8.
8. Andrews, KL, Gallagher, S, & Herring, MP. (2019). The effects of exercise interventions on health and fitness of firefighters: A meta analysis. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 29(6), 780-790.
9. Min, S. (2019, March 7). The 10 Most and Least Stressful Jobs in America. Retrieved from CBSnews.com: https://cbsn.ws/3oMy5GW.
DANIEL VECCHIOLLA is a captain for Navy Region Mid-Atlantic Fire. He began his fire service career with the Chesapeake (VA) Fire Department, serving for four years. He transitioned into the Department of Defense system five years ago and is stationed at Naval Air Station Oceana. He has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in public administration from Old Dominion University. He received his Fire Officer designation through the Center for Public and Safety Excellence, for which he serves as a peer reviewer, and is a Virginia-certified fire investigator.
