In the Challenge of Change Resilience Training we dispense with the conventional idea of ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ stress. The distinction makes no sense – if they’re both called stress, how do you know the difference? We resolve the issue by distinguishing instead between pressure and stress, which is not mere wordplay: pressure can be defined precisely, as a demand to perform.

The primary biochemical mechanism that facilitates fight-or-flight involves activation of the h-p-a axis — the link between the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland at the base of the brain, and the two adrenal glands above our kidneys. However, we’re not necessarily running or fighting for our lives — the fight-or-flight is simply a consequence of the activation of the sympathetic nervous system, and it will happen even when we’ve been in waking sleep and someone calls our name. In this case the physiological effect will be very small and hardly

One of the most enduring concepts in the field of individual differences is optimism, usually described by invoking what is conventionally thought to be its opposite: optimism-pessimism. That turns out to be oversimplified: rather than being at opposite ends of a single dimension, the statistics suggest that while they are related, they represent discrete dimensions.

Optimism is often thought of as hope: the hope that things will be better in the future. In the nature of things, that’s likely for only part of the time: things also get worse! The difficulty with ‘better’ and ‘worse’ is that they have an emotional connotation; an alternative is to think about it as the inevitability of change. Better or worse actually means better or worse for ‘me’. Here’s an example: you’d very much like to see one particular candidate appointed to the management role in your team, but one of your colleagues would rather it was a different candidate.

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.