Ep. 118: Recognizing and Regulating Stress with Ed Morales- Gilbert, Arizona Police Department Peer Support and Wellness Manager

We are thrilled to share another episode in our Powered By Paragon Series featuring Ed Morales. Ed is the Peer Support and Wellness Manager at the Gilbert, Arizona Police Department, where he has dedicated himself to enacting an innovative approach to ensure officers and support staff are mentally ready for their shifts. Prior to his current work, Ed served in the United States Marine Corps and as a police officer as a SWAT team member. Ed’s approach to the mental and behavioral health of the police force includes a meditation room, behavioral training, and a therapy dog named Cora. Ed is also an avid martial artist and follower of HeartMath to reduce the stress and optimize performance in his own life. We are so thankful for Paragon Performance Evolution for the introduction to Ed, and we are excited to share our conversation with you.

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Show Notes

[3:11] Facing the usual job stresses and whatnot, I ended up in one of those positions that I think a lot of police officers, a lot of first responders find themselves in, managing stress and trauma and things like that and kind of start to dedicated my life to wellness and figuring out how I could improve not only my condition, but overall fulfillment.
[3:52] What I try to do is take the principles of what I've learned and put them into a container that are achievable for the average first responder as far as how to manage stress, anxiety and trauma that you face on the job.
[4:10] I chose a life of service. And so financially I'm very middle class. But as far as spirit, I'm wealthy.
[5:29] I knew that I didn't want to try to push things on people, but really try to make it their idea.
[6:30] If we go into a situation after a critical incident and people are hesitant to talk to Ed, they're not hesitant to pet the dog. And that usually opens up a lot of conversation.
[8:39] The way we've been approaching behavioral health in the law enforcement field may not be culturally appropriate.
[9:36] What we decided was to get out ahead of it. Let's teach people how to manage stress. Let's normalize behavioral health. Let's try to destigmatize behavioral health.
[11:46] I've tried to extract the principles of what I've learned and put it into a way that's attainable, that takes out a lot of the spiritual type of angle and just make it functional.
[12:20] We also have what you can look at as a thought body as well, or a mental body. So we all have thoughts and there's still something very tangible, but they're less tangible than physicality.
[13:20] We have our physicality, our mental body, our emotional body, and then our spiritual body.
[13:32] Your spiritual body is anything less tangible than thoughts or emotions, so it comes down to what we believe. And so anything that we can't prove, anything that we can't show to be true or that is not common between all people, like everyone experiences, anger, happiness, anything that we have to talk about in terms of belief resides in that spiritual self. The interesting thing is that's what really drives everything else.
[14:43] My thoughts, my emotions and my belief systems have to be in alignment with my physical actions on a daily basis.
[16:17] I think as modern people, we're at a disadvantage because of technology, in terms of how we sense ourselves as human beings.
[17:20] There's times where we need to feel stress or anxiety. That's a necessary thing. And so I don't think the goal is to always be free of stress. But if we don't identify when those feelings are coming up, oftentimes now we're pegged out in the red and we don't even know how we got there.
[18:31] Your body is the brain. So when it starts giving you data, we have to first recognize that. We have to identify it and then we have to start diagnosing what that data is trying to tell us.
[20:32] The only thing that affects whether you're experiencing something as a positive stress or a negative stress is your perspective.
[27:27] You can't argue with sincerity. You're either being sincere or you're not, and people know it. Where do you know it? In your heart.
Thank you for joining us on Health Gig. We loved having you with us. We hope you'll tune in again next week. In the meantime, be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast, and follow us on healthgigpod.com.

“The only thing that affects whether you're experiencing something as a positive stress or a negative stress is your perspective.” - Ed Morales
“There's times where we need to feel stress or anxiety. That's a necessary thing. And so I don't think the goal is to always be free of stress. But if we don't identify when those feelings are coming up, oftentimes now we're pegged out in the red and we don't even know how we got there.” - Ed Morales
“Your body is the brain. So when it starts giving you data, we have to first recognize that. We have to identify it and then we have to start diagnosing what that data is trying to tell us.” - Ed Morales

Keywords

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