Understanding and Managing the Stresses of Police Work

Policing has always been psychological challenging. On any given shift police officers may encounter a range of psychological challenges including domestic violence, interacting with people experiencing mental health issues, violent crime, even attending the aftermath of horrible accidents. The long exhausting shifts can also result in stressful person interactions within one’s personal life. The presence of COVID and political issues related to instances of over-policing have increased these stresses even more. This course has two goals. First, we want to inform officers how their stress system works and why they sometimes feel as they do. With this as a foundation we then describe some strategies officers can use to manage this system, giving themselves much needed breaks from the stress response and overall empowering them with a greater sense of control over how their bodies react to stress.