How often do we hear someone say they’re stressed because they’re moving house or getting a new job? They must be stressed, because moving house is ‘way up there on the list’. The list will be one of the so-called life-event scales – lists of things that happen to us in our lives, all the way down to losing your keys on some of them! You’re asked to tick all of the ones that have actually happened to you in the past 6 months, and the more ticks there are the more ‘stress’ you’re supposed to be under.

A moment’s reflection will tell you that if all these things on the lists were stressful there’d be no such thing as stress management. After all, how many of the things you have to deal with on a day-to-day basis can just be ignored? You have to deal with them, and if they’re inherently stressful then stress becomes unavoidable. Another moment’s reflection will tell you that for every person who says that moving house stresses them, there’ll be another who is excited by it and looking forward to it.

People will equally unthinkingly agree that a bit of stress is good for you. Pressure may be useful, but it should be called what it is: pressure, not stress. There isn’t ‘useful stress’. Pressure is a demand for a response, and can be hugely motivational, but all that stress offers is misery. Of course, this depends on how you define stress. The old-fashioned flat-earth ideas saw stress as the accumulation of events that eventually overwhelm you, but most of us will know resilient people who can seemingly cope with much more than others. In our own experience, we’ve all had days when work has gone like a dream, but the next day feels like wading through treacle. The job hasn’t changed, what’s changed is our minds. Stress is all in the mind, which is just as well – you can’t change everything you don’t like about the world, but you can certainly change your perception of it.

The Challenge of Change defines stress as a particular process in mind called rumination – the tendency to go on dwelling on things after they’ve happened. This is not reflective practice, discovering what went wrong in an emotionally objective way and putting things in place to prevent it happening again, it is just endlessly thinking ‘what if’and ‘if only’. As Mark Twain said, ‘some of the worst things in my life never happened’. All that events do is to offer you something to ruminate about; whether you do so or not is a choice. Giving people the knowledge to make that choice is what real empowerment is about.