Stresses that Go Along with the Profession of Firefighting

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Stresses that Go Along with the Profession of Firefighting

What types of stresses go along with the profession of firefighting? Here is an example. It's 3am and you are sound asleep, out of nowhere you hear…"Beep, beep, beep, beep beep: Attention Winters Fire Personnel, structure fire!" That sure wakes you up! It is the sound of our fire pagers alerting us to go down to the fire station. Right away our adrenaline gets going. The events that proceed after this are all in a days work, a stressful days work.

Stress is a very common thing for everybody. Life without stress is not possible. I am researching what types of stresses revolve around a fire department because I am a firefighter myself. Members of the fire department thrive off of stress. It's pretty much what the profession is about. After survive the stressful situation, we feel satisfaction and reward.

Firefighters incur many different levels of stress. They range from minor, to moderate, to severe. Based on a person's tolerance level and personality, one may handle these stresses differently. Some of the firefighters in our department are very cool, calm, and collected at the scene of a call, others are frantic and can't remember what to do next. From my personal observation I have noticed that at the fire station, Captain Louis Jones tends to get stressed out easily over small things like having to deal with paper work, or having to discipline on of the junior firefighters (3). Like I said, these stresses affect everybody differently. I may think that something is no big deal, while someone else may be heavily fretting over the same issue.

These different types of stresses can be considered acute, chronic, accumulative, or delayed. Acute stress is when the stress lasts for only a short time. Chronic stress would therefore be a stress that is lasting for a long period of time. Accumulative stress is when different instances keep building up over a long period of time and finally the effects of those instances appear all at once. Delayed stress is when a single incident happens and the effects of that incident don't appear for a while after. When relating to the emergency service, I think that the most common types of stresses are the acute and the accumulative.

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