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When I was in the police, nobody ever talked to me about the drive home and the transition from the intensity of police work to life at home. I could spend a shift dealing with arguments, people in crisis, blue-light runs, arrests, unpredictability and the constant need to be watching what was happening around me, then it was over, I signed off, got changed, got in my car and went home.
There was no real transition between the two. I remember plenty of times when the shift had finished but I had not. I might be physically tired, but my head was still busy. I would go over things that had happened, think about what I could have done differently or just feel generally wired. Even when nothing particularly dramatic had happened, it could take a while to properly come down from being switched on all day.
At the time I did not think about any of this in terms of my nervous system. I certainly was not analysing what my brain was doing. I just thought I was not very good at switching off. Looking back now, that makes much more sense to me.
Police work asks you to notice things that most people can afford to ignore. You are watching body language, tone of voice, hands, exits, cars, who is standing where, who is getting agitated and what might happen next. Sometimes you are listening to the radio at the same time and already thinking several steps ahead.
That level of awareness is useful. You need it, but the brain gets used to what it does repeatedly, and if you spend enough time practising alertness it can become quite good at staying there. That is the part I think we sometimes miss when we talk about police wellbeing. There is a lot of focus on whether somebody is coping with the really difficult incidents, and obviously that matters, but it is not only the big jobs that have an effect. There is also the ordinary repetition of being ready for something to happen.
Then you go home and your family might want to talk about their day, the dog needs walking or someone asks what you want for dinner. Meanwhile, part of your brain may still be operating as though you are at work.
For some people that shows up as irritability, poor sleep, feeling restless when things are quiet, needing the television on, endlessly scrolling your phone or replaying conversations from the shift. You might notice every sound outside or find yourself checking things without really thinking about it. None of that necessarily means there is something seriously wrong. Sometimes it simply means the system has not had much chance to change gear.
I work in neuroplasticity and nervous-system education now, and one of the things I wish I had understood earlier is how much repetition matters. If the brain repeatedly experiences high alert as normal, it can become quicker to go there and slower to come back out of it. That also means it is worth deliberately practising the other direction.
I do not mean turning the end of every shift into another task you have to get right. In fact, I think that would be the quickest way to make it useless. It can be very simple. I now think much more about the few minutes between finishing work and driving home, sitting for a minute rather than immediately reaching for the phone, recognising, consciously, that there is nothing I need to respond to right now.
The same thing can happen at home change clothes, have a shower, walk the dog or make a cup of tea. Whatever gives your brain a fairly boring, repeatable signal that work has finished. It is not about pretending everything is fine after a difficult shift, and it is not a replacement for proper support when somebody is struggling. It is just one small way of helping the body catch up with the fact that the environment has changed.
I wish somebody had explained that to me when I was serving. I think I would have been less likely to see being constantly switched on as simply part of who I was. I would have understood that some of it was learned through the job, which also means it is something the brain can gradually learn to do differently.
Police officers need to be good at going into alert mode. That is never going to change. What I think we could get much better at is teaching people how to come back out of it afterwards.
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