Most people have heard the phrase ‘fight-or-flight’, which describes a response to perceived threat: faced with an aggressive competitor for food or mates, animals have the choice either to respond in kind (fight) or to run (flight). The choice is simple, but it will be influenced by a variety of factors. If the animal is protecting eggs or young from a predator, for example, it might be more likely to fight than to flee; confronted with an overwhelming threat like a wildfire, animals will always choose flight. The emotional components of fight or flight might be different – aggression or fear – but the physiological response involves the same cascade of hormones. The most prominent of these is adrenaline, which facilitates action by increasing heart-rate and blood pressure. There is always adrenaline in your system, but the inner part of the adrenal gland is specialised to secrete large amounts of it very rapidly in response to demand.

The physiological process of fight-or-flight is the same in all animals, including humans, and the intensity of the demand determines the amount of adrenaline produced. To use a human example, if you’re quietly reading a book and someone calls your name, you look around to see who it is. This orienting response involves an increase in adrenaline, but the physiological effect is almost imperceptible.

One of the scales on the Challenge of Change questionnaire is titled Perfect Control. The higher your score the stronger your perfectionist and controlling tendencies are, and on the course we emphasise that low scores are the goal. We are not saying the work is never perfect – books have to balance and you can’t have a spelling mistake on a billboard – but that’s not the sort of work that trips up people high in perfect control. More typically, these are the people you see going over and over (and over!) plans, graphs, emails, etc., double-checking and checking again that it’s “right”. They’re also likely to be the people staying late, putting on the finishing touches and making the presentation just perfect – they find it almost impossible to say “enough now”, and the cost is when they find themselves spending too much time and effort on one task when their attention needs to be given to another.

The field of stress and stress management has more myths than the traditions of ancient Greece and Rome together.  One of the explicit aims of the research that forms the evidence-base for the Challenge of Change Resilience Training is to expose these myths for what they are, and to offer an alternative way of thinking about stress.  Here are some of the myths that we routinely encounter in our training sessions, and the evidence that contradicts them:

In the Challenge of Change Resilience Training we define stress as ruminating about emotional upset, and there’s a question that is almost always asked: ‘Why do we ruminate?’  The widespread oversimplification of evolutionary processes leads many to assume that it is somehow embedded in our genes, and that it got there because when we lived in caves we had to be vigilant about the predators around us.  For a behaviour to evolve there has first to be an accident, a fault in DNA transcription.  This mutation will be selected for and passed on only if it enhances sexual selection or access to food – hence aggression is positively selected, since the more aggressive animal mates more often and more effectively chases competitors for food from its territory.