PRESSURE AND STRESS

Do you think a bit of stress is good for you? When we put this question to our training audiences, just about everyone says yes. When we then ask, “How do you actually feel when you’re stressed?” the answer is usually some form of misery, which couldn’t possibly be good for you. How many people tell their loved ones what a wonderful day they had because they were so stressed? When you define it properly, stress is never good for you. In fact, all you get from it is a probably shorter and definitely more miserable life. It could never be your friend.

When we put these questions to people, there are always a few who say that stress energizes and motivates them, but they’re not talking about stress at all. The confusion is a result of drawing a false distinction between so-called good and bad stress. Instead, we’ll be distinguishing between pressure and stress. This is not just wordplay. Pressure is defined as a “demand to perform.” The demand might be intense, but there is no stress inherent in it, and as we’ll see, the key to resilience is not to turn pressure into stress.

Pressure starts from the moment you wake up in the morning, when the demand is to get up. If you doze off again, then suddenly jolt awake and realize you’re now going to be late for work, pressure increases. You rush to the office, and because you were late, you’re one step behind all morning. Your boss is waiting for your report, you need to reschedule the meeting you missed, and the new planning project that is on your desk needs a response by the end of the day.

Does that sound like stress? It isn’t stress at all. It’s just pressure. It will become stress only if you add a critical ingredient: rumination, specifically rumination about emotional upset. If you are late, do you accept that it has happened and then get on as quickly and efficiently as you can, or are you filled with guilt about having slept in, anger at yourself for doing so, and fear of the consequences? Do you run red lights in your impatience to get to work, or swear at the driver in front who you think is slow to get going when the lights turn green? That’s stress, and it serves no purpose. Traffic lights don’t change for you because you’re in a hurry. The driver in front doesn’t go any faster, for all of your cursing. Nothing changes the fact that you slept in and now you are late. You might say that you had a critical meeting to get to, so it’s no wonder you are feeling this way. Really? The problem with stress is that it will always justify itself. The simple fact is that you slept in and now you’re late. Period.

As we’ll see, rumination and how to avoid it form a cornerstone of our approach to stress. The important point here is that you have a choice. You’re not genetically programmed to ruminate. It’s a habit you’ve developed and cultivated for years. And because it is habit, it can be changed. In this book, we’ll show you how. The process is very simple, just four steps:

1. Waking up
2. Controlling attention
3. Becoming detached
4. Letting go

Habits are not easy to break overnight, and it is easier said than done. Ask any smokers—they’ll tell you giving up is easy; they’ve done it dozens of times! What you need to help motivate you is a clear reason for making the change, so we’ll also show you exactly what will happen if you continue to ruminate about emotional upsets.

Although the training has been developed and enhanced over the years, the definition of stress as ruminating about emotional upset has remained the core principle around which the program is structured. People sometimes ask whether rumination is the same as worry, and it is. If worry worked, we’d run worry courses to teach people how to perfect it. A simple example: Your teenage son is out for the night. It’s now 2 a.m., and he’s still not home. You’re concerned, but you turn concern into worry by generating imaginary catastrophic scenarios about car accidents. Yes, he might well have been in a car crash, but your worrying had nothing to do with causing it, and it would not have prevented it from happening. Catastrophic events happen from time to time, and if you’ve been worrying about them, your response afterward is likely to be, “I told you so!” as if you knew it would happen. If you’re concerned, take action: call his friends, but avoid becoming unnecessarily stressed by catastrophizing things in your mind.

Defining stress as rumination can be difficult for people to accept, mainly because it removes the opportunity for blame. If I’m stressed because I think my manager acts unfairly, then I’ve exonerated myself and can justify why I’m so stressed. I’ll also take every opportunity to complain about it to anyone who’ll listen, which reinforces the upset and the rumination. Unfortunately, believing that stress is caused by somebody or something has become entrenched in our thinking. We talk about triggers that cause us to be stressed. But think about it for a moment: how many of these so-called triggers can you remove from your life? If you’ve decided they’re stress triggers, you’re bound to be stressed whenever they occur, and you’ve become a victim of your own thinking process. You complain about how stressed your job makes you, so why don’t you move on? Someone sitting at the next desk probably loves doing the same job, and what this tells you is that stress is the response to the event, not the event itself. It isn’t the trigger but what is triggered that’s important. As you’ll see, the way you respond is a habit that you can control and change.

THE LIFE-EVENT MYTH

The idea of stress triggers came from the life-event model of stress, which led to the development of the familiar life-event scales. There are many of these scales around, and they typically include anywhere between 80 and 100 things that might have happened to you, like changing your job or your children leaving home. People are asked to check off all of the events that have happened to them recently, typically over the past six months. The theory behind the life-event scale is that you have a fixed capacity for coping, and since each event requires some degree of adaptation or adjustment, it will consume some of that capacity. If enough events happen, you use up the capacity and end up suffering from stress, so the more checkmarks there are on your list, the more stressed you’re supposed to be. The scales later had readjustment scores attached to each event, which were arrived at by having a sample of people give a score to each event up to a maximum of 100 and averaging their scores for each event.

The belief that events are the cause of stress has become entrenched in our way of thinking, and hardly a week goes by without some comment in the media endorsing it. A common everyday example is moving house. In a recent radio interview, someone was describing a friend who had experienced a long catalog of changes in her life. She then added that on top of all that, this friend was moving into a new house, an event that she described as being “way up on the list.” By “the list” she meant a life-event scale. If it were true that moving into a new house was inherently stressful, then everyone would be stressed by it, which is self-evidently not the case. Here’s a different way of thinking: moving into a new house is putting stuff in boxes in one place and then taking it out in another. There’s lots to organize, so there’s plenty of pressure, but there’s no stress unless you add rumination.

The different events on life-event scales might be interconnected: you change jobs so you also move into a new house and maybe take on a larger debt to be able to afford it, so the last two events might be an inevitable consequence of the first. The same event may also not be seen in the same way by different people. The many life-event scales generally include items such as Christmas and divorce, and quite apart from the cultural bias in any scale that includes Christmas, the differences among people are immediately apparent. For one person, the prospect of having family around to celebrate Christmas brings joy; for another, misery! The same might be true for the partners involved in a divorce: for one, an absolute disaster; for the other, freedom at last.

To assume that events are equally stressful is plainly nonsense, even in extreme situations such as disasters, but it is important to acknowledge the effect that particular events are likely to have. For example, the event that has the highest readjustment rating on the scales is the death of someone close to you. Even if this person had been released from the suffering of a long and painful illness, it would be unnatural not to grieve, but let’s put this into context: the death of someone close to you is trauma. Bereavement counseling is no different from post-trauma counseling, and the difference between everyday issues and traumatic events is that trauma can overwhelm you emotionally.

Expressing these emotions is an important part of the counseling process, and the need to do so is acknowledged in this book—as we’ll see, inhibiting your feelings contributes to the impact of rumination. However, the aim of the process is to reach resolution. The length of time that may take can’t be dictated, and it will vary from one person to the next, but when it is reached, the memory of the tragedy is no longer overwhelming. These two features—duration and intensity—characterize trauma. The focus of this book is on the other end of the stress continuum, what we call “everyday stress.”

From our perspective, events are not inherently stressful, and we needn’t delve any further into the shortcomings of the life-event approach other than to highlight a comment we hear frequently: the events that make people the most stressed are the ones they can’t control. The fact is that whether or not you can control things is probably distributed about 50/50—half you can control, half you can’t. You should control what you can, but don’t try to control what is uncontrollable because doing so is pointless. Suppose your company is downsizing and your post will be eliminated. What’s the point of ruminating and getting angry and upset about it? The appropriate response is to start brushing up your résumé.

The one thing that you can exercise complete control over all the time is your attention, which we’ll be talking about in Chapter 3.

RESILIENCE AND COPING

Managing stress is often coupled with coping, and a familiar model of coping is “keeping your head above water.” Every now and then, the flood rises, and coping is supposedly being able to hold your breath until the flood subsides. That isn’t coping. It’s surviving. We offer a different perspective: that there’s no water to keep your head above. Being able to see things in this way requires a change in perception, and the real challenge is not so much trying to change the world as changing your mind. There’s a common phrase, “Shit happens.” That’s only half of what it should be: shit happens; misery is optional. That doesn’t mean you should stay in a job you hate, feeling the flood rising the moment you walk into your office. Instead, you could ask, what has stopped you from making the move? Probably fear of imagined consequences—in other words, rumination.

This is why this book is not about stress management. The term implies that stress is ever present and that it has to be controlled and managed, even supposedly made your friend. This book is about resilience. It is not a new concept, and it has been widely researched. It is estimated that over 100 different definitions of resilience have been proffered, depending on whether it is seen as an ability individuals possess, an ability to adapt to difficult circumstances, or whether there were positive changes in the individual’s behavior subsequently. Unfortunately, the wealth of academic definitions hasn’t resulted in greater clarity, and they all tend to presuppose that the situations people are responding to are adverse. How about the ability to see unfolding circumstances simply as ongoing change, without adding the emotional judgment of negativity to it? Resilience is not about being able to keep your head above water but realizing that there’s no water to keep your head above.

Here’s a scenario that illustrates what we’re talking about. You’re on a white-water rafting trip, and you’ve just come through the first set of terrifying rapids. You’ve rounded a bend, and the river has widened and slowed. You can hear the rush of more rapids ahead, but there’s a tall cliff that prevents you from seeing around the bend. How do you feel at that moment? You don’t need to have experienced it to imagine relief at being in calm water, but what else do you feel? Exhilarated and excited, but perhaps also anxious and fearful about what might be around the corner.

The river is a useful metaphor for our lives. In the river of life there are very few people who are permanently in the equivalent of rapids, and even the toughest times generally come to an end. In the same way, just as few people would say they were permanently in calm water. Life alternates between rapids and calm, so if you’re in calm now, you can be sure there are rapids to come. You can’t avoid the rapids, but they’re not inherently stressful. What increases as you approach the next set is not stress but pressure, which, as we’ve said, is just a demand to perform. Pressure varies from the demand to get up in the morning to what happens when a plan goes wrong at work. Pressure can be motivating and helpful, but as the raft approaches the next rapid in our scenario, what might happen is that half the people in it start to panic. The consequence is that the raft will capsize, and you won’t get through. What these people have done is to turn pressure into stress. Resilient people don’t lose perspective, and resilience can be defined as the ability to negotiate the rapids of life without becoming stressed.

Here’s what stress is: Imagine you have a pet cat asleep on the floor, and you walk into the room so quietly it doesn’t hear you come in. At the last moment the cat wakes up, and it jumps into the air with its back arched and its hair standing on end. This response is called fight or flight, and it happens because of a dramatic increase in adrenaline. The next second, the cat recognizes you, and its hair flattens and it relaxes again. The outer calm that you see is because of inner calm—the excess adrenaline is quickly metabolized because it’s no longer required, and the cat returns to a resting level. What your cat doesn’t then do is go on thinking, “Whoa, that might have been the Alsatian from next door! What about the dogs on the other side? What if they’re in the garden? If only I didn’t have to live on this street!” If the cat did think like this, its hair would continue to stand on end.

Now relate the story to your own personal experience. Think back to the last time someone said or did something that really irritated or upset you. How often, and for how long did you go on thinking about it afterward? Every time you did, you provoked a fight-or-flight response, with the surge of adrenaline you saw in your pet cat. Adrenaline is not a stress hormone. It is just a hormone doing exactly what it’s designed to do: facilitate action. The problem isn’t the increase in adrenaline but whether or not it is needed. When you ruminate on what-ifs and if-onlys, what are you fighting or fleeing from? Just a thought in your head. After an argument that you feel you lost, you continue rerunning it in your mind, usually with you winning every time. Nothing changes: you lost, but your continuing to churn over all those imagined slights and resentments sustains the anger and upset as well as the physiological strain that comes from elevated adrenaline.

The advantage of having a clear and simple definition of stress as rumination is that it makes sense of another confusing distinction, between acute and chronic stress. Much of the evidence suggests that chronic stress is the source of the negative consequences on our health, but what’s really the difference between them? We can simplify the issue by not adding stress to the acute version at all. “Acute stress” is the short-lived effect you saw in your pet cat: a temporary increase in pressure that recedes just as all pressure does. Chronic stress is what stress actually is. What makes pressure chronic? One cause might be genuine sustained demand, such as caring for a relative suffering from dementia. As we’ll see when we look more closely at the physiology of stress, rumination also leads to sustained elevation in another hormone called cortisol, and the consequence over time is compromised immune function. There is direct experimental evidence that dementia caregivers show significantly delayed wound healing as a result of this impaired immunity.

RUMINATION VERSUS REFLECTION

In the example of the caregivers, there is no letup from the constant demand, but in practice, that’s very rare. More typically, bouts of pressure are separated by opportunities for downtime, but if you go on churning about emotional upsets, the demand becomes constant. You might say that you’re thinking things through to arrive at a conclusion. Thinking over a problem to arrive at a solution we’ll call reflection, but to be able to reflect requires taking a detached perspective. This is not to suggest adopting a superficial or unengaged way of problem solving—the thinking about it might be pretty intense, but what it doesn’t include is negative emotion. With reflection, what-if becomes, “What if we tried this approach? Hmm, maybe not. What else could we try?” When negative emotion is added, what-if becomes, “What if we fail? What if I lose my job? What if my family ends up on the street?” What is missing from reflection is catastrophizing.

A conventional approach to managing stress based on fundamentally misguided ideas couldn’t possibly work. If events were inherently stressful, there wouldn’t be anything you could do except try to escape from the events or people you’re attributing stress to, and you would end up defining yourself as a victim of circumstance and using blame as a justification for your behavior. Defining stress properly as rumination shifts the source of stress to learned and hence changeable behavior, and change may well be urgently needed. Stress has a significant impact on your mental and physical health and couldn’t, in any way, be good for you. Rumination allows us to define clearly what we’re talking about when we distinguish between acute and chronic stress, and between pressure and stress.

We also draw a clear distinction between post-traumatic stress and everyday stress. A condition is diagnosed by identifying symptoms, and people suffering from post-traumatic stress show a range of changes in their behavior that can legitimately be used to make a diagnosis, such as flashbacks to the events, disturbed sleep, depression, or anxiety. These obvious changes are likely to occur only when the demand is traumatic—when it is so intense that it overwhelms the person’s ability to maintain perspective. In contrast, with everyday stress, people can very effectively cover up how they are feeling, and there is such a wide range of potential symptoms, it would be difficult to link them to stress.

So how do you know if someone is stressed? Rather than trying to pin down specific symptoms, a useful approach is to be alert to changes in behavior, without assuming that they necessarily indicate stress. Smokers might well start smoking more than usual, but there are all sorts of other reasons why they might do so—stress is only one of them. Tiredness or a lack of enthusiasm is something most of us experience from time to time, and maybe we just need change or a break. Everyday stress is likely to be signaled by small changes such as mood swings, rather than the clinical anxiety or depression that might accompany post-traumatic stress. People generally tend to become more irritable and short-tempered when they’re suffering from everyday stress, which has a lot to do with a loss of attention control. This also helps to explain why stressed people will often become more absent-minded. However, whatever you do observe, whether in yourself or in others, the important point is that the changes are likely to be maladaptive. A good example is the well-recognized tendency to drink more than usual as a way of coping. Unfortunately, if you want to deal with stress by drinking, you do need to stay drunk: when you eventually come around, things will either be the same or more likely worse! There is evidence that alcohol might have some cardiovascular benefits, and a normally functioning liver can certainly deal with modest amounts of alcohol without deleterious effects, but the only relief that drinking offers as a way of dealing with stress is temporary oblivion.

What we do know is that stress leads to a greater susceptibility to illness, but again, we need to be cautious. Conventional wisdom has it that stress causes illness and that the more stress you have, the more ill you’re likely to become. The difficulty with this is that stress is in the mind when it is defined as rumination. Illness, on the other hand, is represented by measurable physical states. What’s therefore being implied is that thoughts cause illness, which they do not—the impact of stress on your health is hugely overstated. Cancer, for example, is primarily a genetic disease resulting from a random mutation or a genetic predisposition. It might require exposure to a carcinogen such as tobacco smoke to trigger lung cancer, but while one person might smoke his whole life and live into his eighties, another might come down with the disease just from secondhand cigarette smoke. The latter in this example was most likely genetically predisposed; the former was not.

While stress does not cause diseases such as cancer, when the effects of genetic and environmental variables are factored out, stress still does significantly impact your health. One of the effects of habitual rumination is compromised immune function, making you more susceptible to diseases or to their spreading once you have them. What is more obvious is that stress has an enormous impact on feelings of well-being. When people become stressed, they feel miserable. Coupled with the effect it has on your physical health, the only outcome is a probably shorter and definitely more miserable life. You might have really robust genes, in which case, you may end up with a long miserable life! What is most important is that unlike genes, stress is something you can control: resilience is a skill that can be acquired through training and practice.

Defining stress as rumination might be seen as placing the burden exclusively on the individual, exonerating the role of management—“If people get stressed, they should just stop ruminating. It has nothing to do with me.” Add on what that statement implies: “I’ll just go on behaving however I like.” Managers with this view are just that: managers, not leaders. Stress may be no more than rumination, but if you yell when people make mistakes and always blame your reports when things go wrong (“It’s your problem,” as opposed to “It’s our problem”), you don’t deserve the title of leader. You’re just a manager, and a bad one at that. If you do behave like this, now’s the time to change, rather than justifying your actions with comments like, “I sometimes have a nuclear explosion, but minutes later I’m my wonderful self again.” Your reports suffer the fallout. Organizations do play a role, and that is to ensure that pressure isn’t transformed into stress. The way to start doing that is to follow a simple principle: don’t give people anything to ruminate about.

Singling out leaders for this example shouldn’t be taken to imply that resilience is more important for them than for anyone else. Resilience at any level of an organization will improve efficiency and productivity, and the benefits are not just for work. Think back to the last argument you had with your partner, probably about something as trivial as who should tidy up the kids’ mess. If you’re a ruminator, you’ll generate any number of angry scenarios afterward, and they’ll usually generalize to all the other things your partner does that irritate you. Look more closely: they irritate you only because you’d do it differently, so in your mind your way must be better. Rumination poisons life at work and at home, and learning to become more resilient is for everyone in all situations. However, in a work context, senior staff provide the model for how an organization operates, so we will be including examples and strategies that focus on how leaders can become more resilient.

RESILIENCE AND MINDFULNESS

To be resilient in the way we’re describing means monitoring what you say and do, and that introduces another popular idea that needs to be clarified: mindfulness. “Being mindful” has become a buzz phrase, as “stress management” was in the 1980s, but what exactly does it mean? You might be forgiven for thinking it was invented in the last decade by psychologists, who hijacked it from an ancient Buddhist principle. It is currently used in corporate contexts to describe a technique for improving performance. The Buddha wasn’t interested in improving performance. The purpose of Buddhism is enlightenment, and enlightenment is about getting who you think you are out of the way. Mindfulness is also used in psychotherapy, where it is aimed at making people less unhappy. The Buddha wasn’t interested in happiness and unhappiness. He saw them as the same: just passing thoughts.

A different approach to using mindfulness principles is to ask the fundamental question that the word implies: what is your mind full of? If you’re stressed, your mind is full of negative ruminative thoughts. You may simply be preoccupied with what you might do next weekend, and you are not ruminating about emotional upsets at all. We have a name for that: waking sleep. Being in waking sleep is rather like daydreaming, except that if there isn’t any particular pressure on us, we might intentionally wonder what the holiday we have planned for next week will be like. A holiday daydream like this might well turn into waking sleep, when our attention becomes completely absorbed in the thoughts about it. Like a dream at night, the thoughts become a virtual reality: a colleague asks a question, and we are literally woken up from a dream. Waking sleep doesn’t cause the harm that rumination does, but the question is whether there is something else you’re supposed to be doing—reviewing the report on your desk, for example. If you’re in waking sleep, you’re not reviewing it, and if it continues long enough, you’ll be increasing the pressure to get it done when you do eventually wake up.

Waking sleep is not the same as reflection. The tendency to daydream varies from person to person, and those who do it less are bound to be more efficient, but the aim is not to be awake all the time but rather to be more awake more of the time. This isn’t important only in a work context. How often do your friends or partner have to repeat something they’ve just said because you didn’t hear it the first time? Waking sleep might occur because there isn’t anything particular to do at the time, but it also results from boredom. Familiarity does indeed breed contempt. The key to being awake is attention, or rather keeping control of attention. Our attention gets snatched away, but we can learn to exercise control over it.

THE EVIDENCE BASE

We’re making a lot of claims for this book, and you’d no doubt like to see some evidence. Unfortunately everyone offering training claims that it is evidence based, but on closer inspection much of what is presented as evidence is at best anecdotal. One of the main strengths of our approach is that it is genuinely based on evidence, originating in the research program Derek initiated in 1980. Research requires measuring tools, which led to the development of psychometric scales to assess the differences in personality traits that might predispose people to feeling stressed. Testing these individual differences showed that rumination was the key measure, and my research team spent the next decade running controlled laboratory experiments to establish how and why rumination was implicated in stress. The research moved away from psychology into neuroscience, emphasizing the role of rumination in the physiology and biochemistry of the stress response.

Although rumination remains the primary index, we also tested a range of other measures. These have been brought together in a questionnaire completed by training participants, called the Challenge of Change Resilience Profile, which comprises a total of eight discrete scales. Interpreting and clarifying individual profiles requires sensitivity and care, and it forms a significant proportion of the training session. For this reason the profile itself is not accessible outside of the sessions, but in Chapter 5, we will nonetheless be describing in detail the characteristic behaviors associated with each of the scales.

Our subsequent case studies showed that such behaviors as ruminating about emotional upsets can be changed. Ruminating is primarily a conditioned habit. The influence of genetics can’t be discounted, and indeed, our view is that DNA is likely lurking to some degree in most of our behavior. The debate about nature versus nurture needs to be placed in the context of proportion. Eye color, for example, is genetically determined, and in a predictable way, depending on the dominance or recessiveness of the genes in question. Early resilience theories included a consideration of innate as opposed to acquired resilience, and our findings indicate that because the key component—rumination—can be changed with practice, resilience lies toward the other end of the spectrum. The aim of our book is to show you what needs to be changed and how to change it. The first step is to wake up, which is the theme of Chapter 2.