In the Challenge of Change Resilience training programme we emphasise that there is no 'good stress', and that all that stress offers is a life that may be shorter and will definitely be more miserable.  Once you define stress properly, as ruminating about emotional upset, the miserable part is self-evident to everyone.  We illustrate the 'short' part during the training by referring to the impact on your health of sustained high levels of adrenaline and cortisol, which are secreted when the system involving the hypothalamus and the pituitary and adrenal glands (the h-p-a axis) is activated.  The dramatic increase in adrenaline and cortisol in response to demand is called 'fight or flight', and these are not 'stress hormones' at all – they're doing exactly what they're designed to do, facilitate action, but they're adaptive only in the short term. 

The new buzz-word is 'mindfulness'.  You might be forgiven for thinking this is some brand-new psychological construct, but it isn't – mindfulness is one of the central practices of Buddhism, and has been around for as long as people have asked the fundamental question of philosophy: 'what am I?'  As has so often happened, something profound and practical has been hijacked by psychobabblers, and has been completely misinterpreted along the way.

One of Cynthia's abiding interests is employee engagement, which HR people have long known is highly correlated with a variety of measures such as productivity, absenteeism, retention, and customer satisfaction.  Some excellent work has been done by organisations to lift employee engagement, which has resulted in improved organisational outcomes, but Cynthia noticed that this work was mostly organisationally driven. 

A recent TED talk by Kelly McGonigal was an opportunity to demonstrate that the earth is not after all flat.  It was an opportunity missed – instead the talk ended up merely adding to the accumulated misinformation about stress.

The research programme that underpins the Challenge of Change Resilience programme was based on the fundamental question in science – what's wrong?  We quickly discovered that in the context of stress and stress management, the answer is pretty well everything.  What's needed is a paradigm shift.   There was a time when people were convinced the earth was flat, and despite evidence to the contrary, the shift from a flat-earth to a round-earth paradigm took a long time.  So it would seem with stress management too: ideas like life-events as a cause of stress have been so endorsed by psychologists that people continue to think they're true.  The evidence tells you otherwise: for any so-called 'stressful job' there'll be people who enjoy it and don't find it at all stressful.