You’d think that after years as the Lead Crisis Negotiator for the New Zealand Police, I’d have a brain wired for calm, clarity, and perfectly timed decision-making.
But here’s what I know - my brain can handle armed offenders, but give it a puddle and suddenly it wants to take annual leave.
A few years ago, I was driving home from Northland during Cyclone Gabrielle. Stay up there, it’s safer, I was told by my family. Ha, I’ve got this, I told myself.
Rain sideways, winds howling, trees doing yoga poses they were never designed for.
Ignore that, Google said it can get me home if I go this way, an idea from my dumb brain!
I came around a bend and drove into flooding across the road.
My professional crisis-trained mind said, “We can assess this calmly.”
My amygdala: “Send it.”
Not ideal, but if you go fast enough, the water will disperse, and another idea of my dumb brain.
I drove in, the car stalled instantly, so I went from “experienced crisis negotiator” to “man sitting motionless in a slowly floating car questioning all his life choices.”
I had to call Fire and Emergency New Zealand; I couldn’t open the door due to the water up to window height.
And here’s the best part: by the time they arrived, the water had receded so much that it looked like I’d parked slightly enthusiastically in a damp driveway.
They didn’t have to say anything, the look said it all: “Really? You needed rescuing? Here?”
I wanted to explain neuroscience - how the brain misjudges risks during sensory overload, and how the amygdala hijacks rational thinking.
But honestly, nothing excuses getting defeated by a puddle.
So, I just stood there, nodding, trying to look like someone who called emergency services for a situation that a particularly motivated duck could have walked through.
I was slightly comforted by the fact that I was saturated up to my waist as I got out of the car.
Upon reflection, maybe that’s the point of what happened to me, a reckoning of sorts to bring reality to my training.
We can train for decades, teach emotional regulation, understand human behaviour, and stay calm under real pressure.
Yet real life still finds a way to humble us.
If your brain ever overreacts to the wrong thing or fails to react to the right thing, trust me: you’re not alone.
Even crisis negotiators need rescuing sometimes. Mine just happened to be a puddle.
Let’s talk!
If the world feels heavy, be a counterweight 🙏
If the world feels heavy, be a counterweight!
Controlling Emotions In The Moment.
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.