More in this section: The Need · Police and Law Enforcement · Fire and EMS · Training the Chiefs · The Evidence: Table 17
The hidden cost carried by those who heal, and by the leaders who carry them.
We send nurses and physicians into other people’s suffering every day and expect them to remain steady in it. Then a pandemic asked them to do it under impossible load, and the strain that was already there became a national emergency.
The scale, in today’s numbers
Female nurses die by suicide at roughly twice the rate of other women (Davis et al., JAMA Psychiatry, 2021). Physician burnout reached 62.8 percent at its 2021 peak and remains near half the profession (American Medical Association and Mayo Clinic). Even before the pandemic, some 40 percent of nurses intended to leave practice within two years. In 2022 the U.S. Surgeon General took the rare step of issuing a formal Advisory warning that health-worker burnout had reached “crisis levels” and threatened the nation’s health infrastructure.
The cost to the institution, not only the clinician
Physician burnout alone drains an estimated $4.6 billion dollars a year from the U.S. health system (Han et al., 2019), and burnout is consistently linked to higher medical-error rates, lower patient satisfaction, and greater absenteeism. There is no clean national dataset isolating the stress of healthcare administrators and supervisors themselves, but they are the ones who carry this workforce, and they carry its losses on their budgets and their consciences and in their hearts and minds.
The root under the symptom
Behind these numbers is one common thread, and naming it correctly is the whole point. When the U.S. government ran its landmark survey of police stress, more than 2,200 officers across 19 departments, it found that anxiety was correlated with more problems than any other single factor measured: more behavioral, more medical, and more psychological problems than anything else in the study (Hurrell, Pate, and Kliesmet, for NIOSH, 1984). A symptom you can only manage is a very different thing from a root you can change. Anxiety has a measurable signature in the brain’s own electrical activity, and that signature can be trained. That is EEG Alpha activity and when Alpha is trained to go above a pre-training Eyes-Closed baseline, and to stay there for a sufficiently long period of time (Biocybernaut has 7 consecutive day Alpha trainings), then anxiety drops, reliably drops, demonstrably drops and it is now scientifically proven to drop.
A measured, trainable answer
The evidence comes from policing. Here is why it reaches you.
The number itself is worth carrying into any conversation with a hospital board. Across more than 2,200 officers in 19 departments, Anxiety recorded 27 significant relationships at the .01 level. Depression, next highest, recorded 14. Nothing else in the entire study reached 15.
The largest federal survey of this kind studied police officers, and it speaks only about police officers. It did not study your hospital, your unit, or your operating theatre. I will not pretend otherwise.
But when that survey counted which factor connected to the most problems across behavior, physical complaints, health disorders and accidents, anxiety came first by nearly double, and it did so among people who described themselves as calm. There is nothing about that mechanism which is specific to a badge. A nurse thirteen hours into a shift and an officer thirteen hours into a shift are running the same machinery.
That is an inference, and I am marking it as one. It is also the question worth asking about your own people, because nobody has yet asked it with instruments.
For over fifty years my work has asked one question: can a person learn to change the electrical activity of their own brain, and does it help? And in how many different ways does it help? The answer, documented and published, is a resounding YES!
- In the journal Science in 1978, Dr. Joe Kamiya and I showed that anxiety is inversely related to the brain’s Alpha activity, and that teaching people to raise their Alpha lowers both momentary anxiety and the deeper, trait anxiety that behaves like a fixed part of the personality.
- Peniston and Kulkosky reported an 80 percent recovery rate in chronic alcoholics with this kind of training, showed it changed the brain’s own beta-endorphin chemistry, and then reported success in treating post-traumatic stress in Vietnam veterans.
- In 1985 I trained two twelve-man teams of U.S. Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. In direct proportion to the Alpha they gained, their depression, paranoia, and rigidity of thinking fell and their intuition, self-regard, and self-actualizing values rose, several at high statistical significance. Two-thirds chose extra sessions on their own free time.
- The approach is drug-free and occupation-agnostic: it trains the nervous system, whether the person wears a badge or a stethoscope. Dr. Hardt’s research history also includes stress in executives and recovery from heart-bypass surgery, work adjacent to the healthcare world it now speaks to.
- With San Jose, CA’s Chief of Police, Dr. Joe McNamara’s enthusiastic support, this research became the subject of a formal grant application to the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, to run a Biocybernaut Alpha training program as a controlled study of 200 Police officers. The Alpha training does not ask a suffering person to be stronger. It measures the root cause and trains it away. None of this is a promise of cure or a piece of medical advice; it is a case for measuring the thing that is actually driving the harm, and training it down by training the brain’s Alpha activity up. Alpha up leads to anxiety down, reliably.
If you carry this condition, or you command those who do
If you lead a hospital, a nursing service, a physician group, or a health system, the numbers above are your people, and the cost above is already on your books. And if you are the person in that role yourself, quietly carrying more than you can say to anyone, this page is for you most of all.
Please talk with us. My assistants will hear you out properly, with no pressure and no performance review, and they will tell you honestly what they think, including if they think this Alpha training program is not the right fit. Where a conversation goes further, it can sometimes come as far as me directly. I will not pretend that is automatic, because it is not, but people do ask, and it is a fair thing to ask for.
You can reach us at biocybernaut.com/contact-us, or call 855-798-3814. That line reaches Alexis directly, including after hours, and can forward to Kate O’Connor.
And if you are in immediate danger right now, please reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) or your local emergency number first. That help exists this minute; we do not replace it.
References
Davis, M.A. et al. Nurse suicide in the United States. JAMA Psychiatry, 2021.
American Medical Association & Mayo Clinic, national physician burnout study (Shanafelt et al.), 2023.
U.S. Surgeon General. Advisory on Health Worker Burnout, 2022.
Han, S. et al. Estimating the Attributable Cost of Physician Burnout in the U.S. Annals of Internal Medicine, 2019.
Hurrell, J.J., Pate, A., & Kliesmet, R. Stress Among Police Officers. NIOSH Technical Report 84-108, 1984 (the anxiety-as-root finding).
Hardt, J.V. & Kamiya, J. Science, 201, 79-81, 1978. Peniston & Kulkosky, 1989/1993.