When It Goes Quiet

Why doing nothing can feel surprisingly uncomfortable after years in the fire service.

I've never been particularly good at doing nothing. Give me a Sunday with absolutely nothing planned and, within about half an hour, I'll find something that apparently desperately needs doing. Mow the lawn. Clean the shed. Wash the car. Go to Bunnings and try to find someone in a red polo who doesn't look personally offended when you ask where the fucking cable ties are.

Sit down for ten minutes and I'll start thinking about what I should be doing instead. For a long time I just figured I liked keeping busy. And maybe I do. But I reckon there's probably a bit more to it than that.

The fire service is a busy job. Even when it isn't. You can be sitting around the station doing absolutely fuck all, but part of you is still waiting. Waiting for the bells. Listening to the radio. Wondering if you're going to get through dinner before something comes in. Rushing through your morning shit because nobody wants a repeat of the Multiple Calls Mid-Dump Disaster of 2013.

You're not necessarily stressed. You're not necessarily anxious. You're just... ready. Do that for long enough and I reckon you get pretty used to it.

Then you go home and apparently you're supposed to relax. Sit on the back deck. Enjoy the peace and quiet. I'm told people swear by it.

Getting off the truck doesn't always mean switching off

There's actually a name used in occupational research for part of this: psychological detachment from work. It doesn't mean becoming emotionally detached from your family or spending your days staring blankly into the middle distance. It basically means being able to mentally leave work when you're not at work.

Research across tens of thousands of workers has found that people who are better able to detach from work during their time off generally report less exhaustion and fatigue, better sleep and a greater sense of recovery. High job demands also tend to make that detachment harder.

That doesn't prove that every firefighter reorganising the garage at 6:30 on a Sunday morning is secretly struggling to switch off. Sometimes the garage genuinely needs reorganising. But it does suggest that what happens when you're off duty matters too. Recovery isn't simply the absence of work. You actually have to get away from it occasionally.

And that's probably a bit more complicated in a job where even the quiet periods aren't completely quiet.

The strange thing about waiting

One of the things I don't think people outside the job necessarily understand is how much time firefighters spend waiting for something to happen. You're having coffee, cooking dinner, cleaning the station, watching television or trying to sleep, but somewhere in the background is the knowledge that the bells could go at any second and whatever you're doing immediately stops.

Most of the time nothing happens. Then suddenly it does.

I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder whether years of moving between those two states of doing ordinary things and then immediately having to respond, might influence how comfortable some of us become with genuine downtime.

That's not a diagnosis. And it's important not to turn every normal behaviour into a symptom of something. Being productive isn't a mental health condition. Neither is mowing your lawn, checking the weather before a storm or preferring to have something going on.

But there's probably a useful question buried in there: Am I busy because I enjoy being busy, or am I uncomfortable when I'm not?

I didn't really ask myself that for a long time.

Sometimes distraction just looks like normal life

The other interesting part is that keeping yourself occupied doesn't necessarily look particularly dramatic. Another job around the house. TV going in the background. Phone in your hand. A podcast while you're driving. Sometimes it's having a beer because you've run out of coffee.

None of those things necessarily mean anything. Sometimes you're just mowing the lawn. Every bloody week, apparently, now that spring's here. I swear I can see the grass growing. Not metaphorically. I can actually see the arsehole moving. It's like it's laughing at me.

Anyway, I think there's a difference between enjoying being busy and not really knowing how to be still. I didn't understand that for a long time. I thought not travelling particularly well meant the obvious stuff. Not sleeping. Nightmares. Losing your shit. All the things people generally talk about.

I hadn't given much thought to whether constantly needing something to occupy your attention could sometimes be worth noticing too.

Not diagnosing. Just noticing.

Recovery isn't another job to get good at

This is probably where an article like this is supposed to give you seven breathing exercises and tell you to start journalling. I'm not going to do that.

Partly because I don't think there's one particular way you're supposed to relax. For one person it might genuinely be sitting quietly on the back deck. For somebody else it's fishing, running, fixing an old car, walking the dog, cooking, surfing or disappearing into the shed for three hours and emerging with something nobody asked them to build.

Research into recovery from work actually supports a fairly broad picture. Psychological detachment is one part of it, but relaxation, having some control over how you spend your downtime and doing activities that give you a sense of accomplishment can all play a role.

And for firefighters, there's another considerably less exciting one: sleep.

Shift work and interrupted sleep are part of the job, and firefighter research has linked better off-shift sleep with lower reported stress and fatigue. Research looking more broadly at sleep in firefighters has also found associations between poorer sleep, poorer cognitive performance and poorer overall health.

So maybe recovery doesn't have to mean becoming really good at sitting cross-legged next to a candle. Maybe part of it is simply finding things that genuinely let you come down from work rather than finding increasingly elaborate ways to remain occupied.

And perhaps occasionally allowing yourself to do absolutely fuck all without immediately deciding you're wasting the day.

There is evidence that people's ability to detach from work can improve. Research looking at interventions designed specifically to help people psychologically detach from work found a modest positive effect overall, although there's no single technique that works for everyone. Which is mildly inconvenient.

I was hoping there'd be a tablet.

Learning what quiet feels like

I don't think the answer is to stop being busy. I like being busy. I like having projects. I like making things. I like having something to do. And sometimes the lawn really does need mowing.

What I've started paying more attention to is whether I can stop. Can I sit there when there's nothing that needs doing? Can I leave the phone alone? Can I enjoy an afternoon without feeling like I should be achieving something with it? Can quiet just be quiet without me immediately trying to fill it?

I'm still working on that one.

Because when you've spent years getting pretty comfortable with noise, chaos and waiting for the next thing to happen, peace can feel surprisingly fucking uncomfortable.

Although, now that I think about it, the shed does genuinely need cleaning.