In the course of delivering the Challenge of Change Resilience programme, participants will from time to time suggest that rumination must have a purpose, otherwise it wouldn't have evolved. Evolutionary oversimplifications of this kind are widespread and persistent: as early as 1966 Robert Ardrey claimed in The Territorial Imperative that a human being is 'as much a territorial animal as is a mockingbird singing in the clear California night'.  The basis for his argument was that humans own property, but let's dispense with these sorts of glib notions by looking at the evidence. 

We know that expressing emotion is a vital part of resolving experiences and building resilience.  Those people who soldier on, denying or ignoring their emotions will have a much tougher time dealing with life's rapids.  American Vietnam veterans returned, defeated, to the USA after an unpopular war and felt unable to talk about their experiences. Many took years to re-integrate back into their work and personal lives, some never did, and some suffered flashbacks years later.  In a more everyday context, you may know people who when asked why they are angry, snap back through clenched jaws 'I'm not angry!'  Or the person who tells you in a high pitched voice that they aren't stressed. 

The immediate feedback we receive from our Resilience courses is overwhelmingly positive and very humbling, and speaking to participants we meet later shows that the key messages are remembered by many of them.

There have been many references over the past few years to managers being narcissistic or even psychopathic. Unfortunately there's been no clear definition of these terms, and since we have established conditioned responses to these words they end causing a great deal of confusion.

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.