What Impermanence Has to Do With Surviving a Career in Public Safety
- CMPS Faculty
- Mar 16
- 6 min read
There's a concept that comes up again and again in mindfulness practice that holds some of the most practical wisdom available to anyone working in corrections, law enforcement, or emergency services — and that concept is impermanence.
Now, I realize that word might not sound like it belongs in a briefing room or a sally port. But bear with me, because what the research is showing — and what we've been witnessing directly in our work with correctional officers and first responders over the past several years — is that the inability to work skillfully with impermanence may be one of the central drivers of the chronic stress, burnout, and health crises devastating the public safety workforce right now.
The Hidden Cost of Holding On
Officers are more likely to die by suicide than in the line of duty.¹ Let that land for a moment. The crisis unfolding in correctional facilities and law enforcement agencies across this country isn't primarily about physical danger — it's about what happens to the human nervous system and the human psyche when we're chronically unable to let go.
What does that mean in practice? It means carrying the weight of yesterday's critical incident into today's shift. It means taking the institutional drama home to your family. It means staying physiologically locked in the threat response — flooded with cortisol, noradrenaline, and adrenaline — long after you've driven out of the parking lot. Law enforcement officers endorse higher rates of harmful coping strategies such as emotional avoidance and alcohol use, and these patterns are directly linked to higher levels of burnout.² Traditionally, as we've heard from so many officers, that's what the bar was for.
Drink it off. Try to sleep. Come back and do it again.
This is what happens when we have no training in impermanence — no tools, no framework, no practice for recognizing that this moment, this shift, this incident is not permanent. It will pass. But only if we know how to let it.
What Impermanence Actually Means
Impermanence is a straightforward idea: everything is in constant flux. Nothing is fixed. Nothing stays. The difficult shift ends. The flood of adrenaline will subside. The anger, the fear, the accumulated weight of a career spent in high-stress environments — none of it has to be a life sentence.
This isn't mystical thinking. It's how reality actually works, and it's something that mindfulness practice trains us to perceive directly, in the body, in real time. Foundational mindfulness teachings encourage practitioners to maintain awareness of their bodily functions, sensations, and mental states while observing that those experiences are always changing.³ That observation — that nothing you're feeling right now is permanent — turns out to be profoundly stabilizing rather than destabilizing, once you've had enough direct experience of it.
The reason impermanence matters so much to our physiology is that accepting an experience — really accepting it rather than fighting it — allows us to recognize emotional reactivity without conflict, suppression, or self-blame, and opens the door to stepping back from our habitual reactions.⁴ In plain terms: when we understand at a visceral level that this stress response — this wave of activation — is temporary and will pass, we stop fighting it, which paradoxically allows it to move through us faster. We stop adding the second layer of suffering — the dread, the resistance, the "I can't handle this" narrative — on top of the initial experience.
What the Research Is Showing
Both dispositional and practiced mindfulness skills have been found to be beneficial to the health of law enforcement officers. Accepting without judgment and acting with awareness have emerged as the most salient mindfulness traits specific to first responders.⁵
Acceptance — the practical, applied face of working with impermanence — is at the core of what's helping people.
Over time, this process of stepping back from stress appraisals may disrupt the default activation of threat-related patterns in the brain, gradually extinguishing habitual conditioned stress responses.⁴ In other words, the practice rewires the brain. Officers who develop the capacity to observe a difficult experience without being consumed by it — who can note "this is intense, and it will pass" — are building the neurological foundation for genuine resilience.
Research has shown that increased mindfulness is directly related to increased resilience, which in turn is related to decreased burnout.² This is the chain reaction we're after. Not just symptom management — actual transformation of the underlying patterns.
And the effects are lasting. A three-month mindfulness training program demonstrated strong evidence of reducing perceived stress and increasing cognitive flexibility — and notably, those gains persisted three months after the training sessions ended.⁶ We're not talking about a technique that works only in the training room. This travels with you into the facility, into your car, into your living room at home.
How We're Applying This in Our Work
We don't walk into a briefing room and lead with abstract concepts about the nature of experience. What we do is introduce the practical, lived reality of impermanence through the body — because that's where most of us first encounter it.
The simple breathing techniques we teach — the basic tools for down-regulation — are, at their core, impermanence practices. When an officer learns to recognize that they're flooded, and then uses a simple breath-based technique to begin to shift their physiology, they're experiencing impermanence directly and kinesthetically: this state is not fixed. I can move through it. Techniques like box breathing engage the parasympathetic nervous system — the body's natural relaxation response — helping to lower stress levels and interrupt the cycle of chronic activation.⁷ That's not just a breathing trick. It's an experiential proof of concept that the state you're in right now is not the state you're stuck in forever.
What we consistently hear from the officers we work with — what comes up again and again — is that three things make the biggest difference: the physiological tools, the ability to unhook from workplace drama, and having genuine peer conversations. All three, when you look closely, are impermanence practices. Managing your physiology is recognizing that the threat response is a passing wave, not a permanent condition. Unhooking from drama is recognizing that the stories we're telling — about who wronged whom, who's to blame, who's the victim — are constructions we're choosing to keep alive. Genuine peer conversation is what happens when we stop pretending that every shift is the same as the last one, and start actually talking about what's moving through us.
The Bigger Picture
Mindfulness and meditation practices can promote healing and increase resilience to the many stressors that come with the territory of being a first responder — and the benefits extend well beyond the individual officer to their families and communities.⁸ That last part matters enormously. When a correctional officer develops the capacity to recognize that the hypervigilance they're carrying out of the facility is a temporary physiological state — and has tools to work with it — their children don't get a parent who's still essentially on shift at the dinner table. Their partners don't get someone who's somewhere else even when they're in the same room.
What we've found, and what the research bears out, is that learning to work with impermanence isn't about becoming passive or detached. It's about becoming more present — more genuinely available to whatever is actually happening right now, rather than running on the accumulated residue of everything that happened before.
That's not just good for officer wellness. That's better public safety. More grounded officers make better decisions in critical incidents. More resilient professionals stay in their careers longer and bring greater skill and humanity to an extraordinarily difficult job.
The insight that nothing is permanent wasn't developed in a vacuum. It has been refined across centuries by human beings trying to navigate the full weight of human experience. The men and women working in our correctional facilities and on our streets are carrying a version of that weight every single day. They deserve tools that are actually equal to what they're facing.
That's what this work is about.
About the Center for Mindfulness in Public Safety
The Center for Mindfulness in Public Safety (CMPS) offers evidence-informed mindfulness training designed specifically for corrections professionals, law enforcement, and first responders. Our programs meet public safety culture where it is — with practical, no-nonsense tools for managing stress, building resilience, and sustaining a career without sacrificing your health or your relationships. From our flagship 10-week cohort program to our free weekly Mindful Public Safety Hour (Wednesdays, 8 PM ET on Zoom), we're here to support the people who show up every day so the rest of us don't have to. Learn more at https://www.mindfulpublicsafety.org/
Footnotes
Miller, L. (2006). Practical police psychology: Stress management and crisis intervention for law enforcement. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas.
Kadehjian, L. et al. (2017). Role of resilience in mindfulness training for first responders. Mindfulness, 8(5), 1373–1380. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8412411/
Keng, S.L., Smoski, M.J., & Robins, C.J. (2011). Effects of mindfulness on psychological health: A review of empirical studies. Clinical Psychology Review, 31(6), 1041–1056. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3679190/
Garland, E.L. et al. (2017). Biobehavioral mechanisms of mindfulness as a treatment for chronic stress: An RDoC perspective. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1373(1), 69–89. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5565157/
Kaplan, J.B., et al. (2017). Mindfulness-based psychotherapy approaches for first responders. American Journal of Psychotherapy. https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.20180015
Bréchet, C. et al. (2023). Mindfulness training, cognitive performance and stress reduction. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 217, 533–545. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268123003888
After Action Care. (2024). Mindfulness and meditation: First responders. https://afteraction.care/mindfulness-meditation-first-responders/
Barnes, M. (2023). How mindfulness, meditation, and yoga can help first responders. Mindful Teachers. https://www.mindfulteachers.org/blog/first-responders
Comments