Possibly one of the biggest misconceptions about traumatic events is that we should be able to control our emotions in the moment.
Neuroscience shows the opposite. When something overwhelming happens, the brain takes over:
🧠 The amygdala, our threat detection centre, fires instantly, triggering an involuntary survival response.
🧠 The prefrontal cortex, the part we use to regulate emotions, temporarily shuts down.
🧠 Adrenaline and cortisol surge through the body, pushing us into fight, flight, freeze, or dissociation.
So whatever emotion you showed during the event – whether fear, numbness, confusion, or silence - wasn’t a choice.
Afterwards, the brain begins a different process:
🧠 The hippocampus struggles to organise the memory clearly, which is why things feel fragmented at first.
🧠 The stress system can stay active for days or weeks, affecting sleep, irritability, and concentration.
🧠 Biological markers like cortisol and inflammation can remain altered for months. Your body remembers the event long after your mind thinks it should be “over it.”
Expressing emotion afterwards is not only normal, but also healthy.
Research consistently shows that suppressing emotion keeps the survival system activated, while safe expression helps the brain re regulate and integrate the experience.
So, if you didn’t feel in control during the incident, that’s exactly how the human brain works.
If emotions surface days or weeks later, that’s recovery, not weakness.
If you’re still processing something months on, you’re not broken, you’re human.
I’ll share more neuroscience-backed tools for recovery in future posts.
Let me know what you’d like to see.
Let’s talk!
Our Biology is Mostly the Same!
Over the past few years, I’ve worked alongside 35+ councils as their teams navigate devastating weather events and community tragedies.
Each time, the pattern is the same: people look outward at the destruction when the real storm often happens inside.
With the increasing frequency and intensity of weather events and critical incidents, many of us are carrying more emotional weight than we realise.
What can you expect in yourself, biologically and psychologically, as you go through and recover from significant events?
While every person’s psychological response is unique – our background, history, support, culture, resilience and experiences – our biological response is consistent.
When we face major stress or trauma, the body moves through a reasonably predictable sequence of changes over days, weeks, and months.
When danger hits, our brain goes into survival mode. Research shows the amygdala (the brain’s alarm system) becomes hyperactive, firing before we’ve had time to think.
At the same time, the body releases adrenaline and cortisol to heighten focus, increase heart rate, and prepare us to act.
This is biology doing what it was designed to do.
As the immediate threat passes, the body tries to regain balance, but it doesn’t always succeed quickly.
During this period:
🧠 The hippocampus (memory centre) struggles to organise the event clearly. This is why people often feel foggy or confused.
🧠 The prefrontal cortex (logic, planning, decision-making) remains partially offline — meaning our emotions can run ahead of rational thought.
🧠 The autonomic nervous system can remain on high alert, creating restlessness, irritability, or we may have trouble sleeping.
These reactions are usual; they’re your biology trying to find steady ground.
If the pressure continues, the body’s stress systems can remain alert, meaning recovery can take longer for council and emergency management teams, given how busy they are.
Research confirms that:
📝 The HPA axis (our stress-response engine) can become dysregulated with prolonged stress.
📝 Cortisol can drop below normal levels after extended strain, a sign of burnout or exhaustion.
📝 Immune system markers can change with inflammation increasing, and protective immune responses decreasing.
Even when people feel emotionally fine, their body remembers the event long after the danger is gone.
This is why some people, months later, feel fatigue, heightened emotional reactions, difficulty concentrating or sudden dips in motivation or confidence.
As the world throws more at us, our greatest challenge isn’t just rebuilding roads and repairing buildings.
It’s supporting people through the biological journey their mind and body go through afterwards.
When people understand what’s happening inside them, the fear reduces, the shame disappears, and healing can begin.
Every major event leaves a mark, but it’s also an invitation to pause, to connect and to support each other.
Let’s talk!
A Lifetime of ADHD
A lifetime of working with undiagnosed ADHD leaves its mark.
Back then, it wasn’t recognised. It was labelled as anger, and misunderstood as attitude, disobedience, or trouble.
I wasn’t difficult, I was unsupported. I pushed through school without knowing why I couldn’t focus, why I reacted so quickly, or why everything felt harder than it should.
Nobody knew, I didn’t know. When I got into trouble, and my parents asked why, I simply said, “I don’t know.”
Then, at 35, I learned how to learn. Imagine that - halfway through life, finally understanding how my brain worked.
It changed everything, but the real shift came later.
Three years of intense depression while in the police, three years of hiding the struggle behind a uniform, three years of thinking I just had to ‘harden up.’
That was the start of my real journey. Not the badges, not the cases, not the rank.
Understanding people, understanding pain, understanding the brain. And eventually, understanding myself.
Although they hurt me, those years didn’t break me. They shaped me.
They moved me towards helping others before they reach the point I once did.
Today, I know this:
🧠 When you’ve lived inside the chaos, you recognise it in others.
🧠 When you’ve felt the weight of depression, you see the signs others hide.
🧠 When your own brain has been a battlefield, you learn how to guide people out of their own.
May I say I am proud of the work we do now, which isn’t about theory; it’s about lived experience.
I share this with you for one reason - whatever you’re carrying, you’re not alone.
Brains can be rewired, lives can be redirected, and sometimes the hardest years become the most meaningful.
You’ve got this.
Let’s talk.
A Simple Sigh!
Have you ever wondered why we tend to sigh a lot at the moment, and why we often yawn?
Why do they arrive without warning, as if our body knows something that our mind doesn't?
A sigh usually shows up when we feel stressed and tired.
Inside our brains, nothing is ever random. A sigh or yawn is a rescue mission.
It’s an inhale the brainstem triggers on purpose, and a long, slow exhale that says “I’ve got you.”
A sigh resets the lungs; it reopens the alveoli that stress has collapsed and restores oxygen the way clarity restores hope.
The vagus nerve lights up, our heart rate softens, and the amygdala loosens its grip.
Our prefrontal cortex, the part of us that thinks clearly, finally comes back online.
A yawn does something similar; it resets attention when our mind is overloaded or exhausted.
It’s the body’s way of saying, “Stay awake, stay alert, we’ve got something else to do.”
A sigh or yawn is an emotional release disguised as biology, a small moment of regulation.
They show up when life gets heavy, when the mind gets busy, and when the world demands so much of us.
Sometimes we just need to breathe.
So, the next time you sigh – don’t apologise, don’t hide it, don’t brush it away – embrace it.
It’s our brain trying to take care of us, one breath at a time.
Let’s talk!
The Importance of Being Earnest.
The Importance of Being Earnest - I don’t mean the movie, I mean real life.
Being earnest, being sincere, being real and being genuine.
Somewhere along the line, we learned to hide the truth about how we feel.
To stay strong, to keep going, to not rock the boat.
And in doing so, we trained our nervous system to stay on alert – always managing impressions, always performing, rarely relaxing into who we really are.
But neuroscience shows us that when we speak honestly and connect genuinely, our brains release oxytocin, the bonding chemical. Oxytocin lowers stress hormones like cortisol and signals to the nervous system, You’re safe.
In real-life experience, it is even clearer. When you’re earnest, people relax around you, conversations become human instead of transactional, and trust builds without effort.
Emotional honesty is not weakness; it’s not oversharing, nor is it vulnerability for its own sake.
Its alignment, its safety, its connection. It’s the moment our brain and body stop fighting each other.
Sincerity strengthens our brain. In a world full of noise, filters, and performance, maybe the bravest thing we could do is to say what is true, while being mindful not to hurt others.
Because when you speak earnestly, people feel safe with you. And that’s where every meaningful relationship begins.
Let’s talk