These fundamentally flawed ideas have become so embedded in our culture that if anyone moves house they’re convinced they must be stressed.  If all these things on life-event scales were inherently stressful then stress would be unavoidable, and for every person who says that moving house stresses them there’ll be another who looks forward to it.

The latest in this catalogue of myths is that worrying will help you recover from acute cardiovascular conditions (published in Anxiety Disorders Association of America, and reported in The Press, 13th April).  From one perspective this might make some sense, since a degree of cardiovascular stimulation could well promote recovery, but can you imagine being told to ‘go home and worry for 10 minutes a day’?  What’s your experience of worry?  When did you last have an unfinished project and decided to worry about it for 10 minutes, after which you simply returned to the job?

Worry is the same as rumination, which is precisely how stress is defined in The Challenge of Change Resilience programme.  And what we know from our own research at the University of York in the UK as well as innumerable studies by other research teams is that ruminating has devastating consequences on cardiovascular and immune function.  Some cardiovascular demand might be useful; worry is not, because it is not something that can be prescribed in dosages like a drug.

The article acknowledges other explanations, such as worriers being more likely to take medication regularly and be more diligent about doing what they’ve been told to do, but all of these things can be done without worry – worrying can hardly be re-cast as a benefit on these grounds.  To give The Press its due, they do include the appropriate qualifiers in reporting unsubstantiated theories: ‘worrying-type anxiety could be protective’; ‘it could be that worriers…’.

However, the media would do a far greater service to the public by bringing their own common sense to bear.  Perhaps a suitable disclaimer: ‘Contrary to established evidence, this publication offers a speculative theory that…’.  Because someone is a doctor or a professor doesn’t mean they’re infallibly right: doctors doctor things, professors merely profess.  How much magical thinking might we have been spared if the notion of ‘life-events’ had been treated in this way from the start.

“We are interested in empirical evidence and so The Challenge of Change was hitting the right chord.”

The Auckland Regional Council (ARC) manages the region’s air and water quality, its growth and development, regional parks, public transport, the coastal and marine environment, and natural and cultural heritage sites.  After a pilot programme mid 2009 ARC rolled out The Challenge of Change programme to employees to assist and support them to develop resilience, readying the organisation for its amalgamation into the Auckland ’super city’.

“The fact that The Challenge of Change is backed by scientific research made it a good fit with our organisation. We are interested in empirical evidence and so the programme was hitting the right chord. This combined with Derek Roger’s presenting style helped cross the board and appeal to many different groups.

We found his approach to be focused on the individual internal approach to change which has eventuated in some definite change to the personal resilience of many of the attendees. Considering the period of change our organisation is going through people felt empowered and able to gain that ‘feeling’ of being in control. Feedback from individuals has been very good – some citing it as the best training they had ever attended.

Over half of our staff members chose to attend the course on a voluntary basis and it’s definitely helped the organisation as a whole. On a personal level Derek Roger has been great to work with, very professional and proactive.”

Julia Wiegandt-Goude, General Manager, Human Resources, Auckland Regional Council & Advisor Auckland Transition Agency

The degree of alertness needed in any situation will depend on how much pressure there is.  Pressure is a demand to perform, and when the fourth piece of work arrives on the table, all of it required yesterday, pressure is high.  The consequence will be activation of the physiological response called fight or flight – levels of adrenaline and cortisol, for example, will have increased to facilitate rapid action.  However, whether we’ve become tense or not is measured by what happens afterwards: are we able to let go, or do we continue with thoughts about what-if and if-only?  In the Challenge of Change Resilience programme stress is defined as ruminating about the worst things that never actually occurred.  Being physically geared up for action is not stress, but becomes stress if it continues when it isn’t needed.  Pressure is turned into stress by rumination, which not only prolongs fight or flight unnecessarily but also makes you miserable.  How long into the holiday does it take you to ‘unwind’?  Stress winds you up, and results in sustained tension.

The Resilience training programme includes a short exercise in relaxation, but the exercise is qualified by emphasising the importance of relaxing the mind and not just the body.  Physical relaxation is useful, but since your body is in essence a lump of meat governed by your mind, the effects are temporary.  Suppose you’re an expert relaxer.  You arrive at work and sit down behind your desk, totally relaxed.  The first piece of work arrives, a reminder that the contract due yesterday hasn’t been delivered; you have two members of the team off sick, and the computer system is on the blink.  In no time your shoulders are hunched and your stomach knotted.  All of it comes from tension in the mind, which is why relaxing your mind is more important than just relaxing your body.  Relaxing the mind happens now, in the present, and the easiest way to do that is to close your eyes and listen.  Thoughts continue to arise, but all you need do is take you attention back to just listening, without being caught by the sounds and starting to create stories with them.  Gradually the thoughts start to subside, and your mind becomes still. 

Participants in the training sometimes comment that this seems like meditation, and it is similar.  Stilling the mind is a first step, a precursor to meditation, though deep meditation takes the final step of surrendering everything, including the ‘listener’.  The relaxation exercise is more like mindfulness.  Contrary to what psychologists would have us believe mindfulness is not a psychological concept invented in the last decade, and on closer examination their idea about mindfulness is compromised by being passed through ‘psychological’ thinking.  Mindfulness is simply being present.  In everyday life it might include drawing on experience and making plans, but all of it with attention under control and keeping the present as the frame of reference.

Hence the practice of stopping and connecting your attention with listening, though connecting with any of your senses will do, since they all only work in the present – you can’t hear yesterday or tomorrow!   The thoughts you have about what happened last week or might happen next week are just thoughts, but we become completely lost in them.  This is described in the Resilience programme as waking sleep, and is different from dreaming sleep only in degree.  When you’re dreaming, the dream is real until you wake up; when you start thinking about next weekend you end up there too, until you wake up.  When negative emotion is added to the thoughts we end up in the nightmare of rumination.

To ensure that tension doesn’t build up and become habitual, it is useful to just stop and let go whenever you remember to do so.  It doesn’t matter that when you check again 10 minutes later some tension has returned – whenever you remember, break the cycle by stopping, relaxing and listening.  Tension that carries over into weekends or holidays is a consequence of continuing to worry, which is pointless.  If worry worked there’d be worry courses.  Nothing is actually being done but you’re left feeling wound up, and what’s required is letting go and regaining presence of mind.

The problem comes from not practising all the way to the final step in the programme, which is letting go. People sometimes have to take work home in a briefcase, but mostly they take work home in their heads, worrying about what they’ve not finished today and the crisis they imagine coming tomorrow. This isn’t work, it’s just worry. Nothing actually gets done, and if you’re going to do this you should stop pretending you’re at home and just stay at work: you’re somewhere else, and not available for anyone. How often has your wife/husband/partner had to ask ‘Hello! Are you there?’ The correct answer is ‘no’, but at least you then have a choice: either go back to worrying about what you haven’t done and will have to do tomorrow - and have a short miserable life in the process - or wake up, control your attention, see all this for what it is and let it go.

If you continue to worry, it doesn’t get left behind when you eventually get to sleep, which is why what you’re worrying about is the first thing on your mind when you do wake up at 3.00am. There are some simple strategies, like having a pencil and paper by your bed so you can write down whatever it is you need to remember to do. Unfortunately, it might not be something that a written note will resolve until morning, so you go on worrying. Or you might imagine writing it down, crumpling up the paper and throwing it away. Again, it might work for some people or some situations, but not always.

If you are woken at 3.00am by worry, the simplest solution is not to struggle to get back to sleep. We all know that doesn’t work - two hours later you’re still tossing and turning. The strategy for waking up and being in the present in the Challenge of Change programme is to connect with your senses, to just listen, for example. The problem at 3.00am is that it’s generally dead quiet and pitch dark, so the best thing is to get up and find something to do: reading, for example, or watching television. What you’re actually doing is taking control of your attention, actively and intentionally giving it to something other than the thoughts in your mind.

This isn’t just using a distraction. If you get up and read something, you’ll generally get to bottom of the first page not having read a word, because the thoughts continue to bubble away and divide your attention. The strategy is not to try to shut the thoughts out, but to just keep returning to reading the page when you find the thoughts have come back. It won’t take long before whatever was worrying you is put back into perspective, and you’ll be ready for sleep again. This might take half an hour or even an hour, but far better than spending two hours struggling for sleep.

Strategies like getting up and doing something instead of tossing and turning provide an immediate, short-term benefit. In the longer term, the aim is to neither struggle to get to sleep nor to be woken up and kept awake by worry at all. What feeds and sustains worry is habitually drifting into ‘waking sleep’ during the day - in other words, having your attention snatched away by what-ifs and if-onlys, ruminating endlessly about the worst things in my life that never happen. Practice at staying awake and in the present as long as you can whenever you do wake up leads to waking up becoming the habit instead of waking sleep, and the effects will be felt in the quality of sleep at night as well. Practice makes perfect.

“…The Challenge of Change looks at the individual’s perception of stress and really gets to the source issue….”

AgResearch is New Zealand’s largest Crown Research Institute (CRI) with acknowledged expertise in biological science, therefore having a key role to play in boosting the productivity of our bio-dependent economy. We are owned by the people of New Zealand, working for the benefit of New Zealand.  Our aim is to create wealth for New Zealand, value for our customers and health and well-being for consumers through science-based discovery, product development and commercialisation. “

I was initially attracted to the different approach to stress presented. Other courses tend to focus on coping, whereas The Challenge of Change looks at the individual’s perception of stress and really gets to the source issue.  I’ve had excellent feedback from participants, with some colleagues saying it’s one of the best courses they’ve ever attended.  I have no hesitation recommending it both inside AgResearch and to other organisations.”

Michelle Shield PhD, L&D Manager, AgResearch

The fuss was the emotion you added to something that has no emotion built into it at all. Just about all of our actions have this added emotion, along a continuum from ‘I love doing this’ to ‘I hate doing that’. The bottom of the in-tray is filled with ‘I hates’, but the work we do doesn’t come loaded with the emotion – we add it in. For example, you’re sitting at your desk and the first piece of work arrives, followed by the next and the next and the next. There is neither emotion nor stress in a growing pile of work, only an increase in pressure. Pressure is useful, and gets us going; stress is not. To turn that pressure into stress, all you need do is to start ruminating about it: what you imagine will happen if you don’t get it done, etc., which might even culminate in a scenario of you being sacked and you and your family destitute and on the streets. In other words, as Mark Twain described them, the worst things in my life that never happen.

Prioritising needs to be done in a detached way. When it isn’t, the consequence is procrastination or perfectionism. Procrastinators push things aside until the pressure is so great they end up having to do things too quickly, and usually have angry people down the line who’ve been waiting for the job to be done. Perfectionists can’t see the threshold of added value: the point where no matter how much more you do, you’re not adding anything to the outcome. Both are governed by emotion, the emotional preference of procrastinators for doing something else instead of what’s in front of them and the perfectionists’ fear of not doing the impossible perfect job.

What follows from letting go of the emotion is ‘multi-tasking’, which is actually a myth. No-one can multi-task - you can’t give your attention to more than one novel thing at a time. People who appear to be multi-tasking are certainly extremely skilled, but what they’re doing is moving their attention from one thing to another, sequentially, without getting caught by any one of them.

This is all part of prioritising. Decide what isn’t important as much as what is, do what needs to be done without getting confused by emotional preferences, and ensure that you get to the threshold of added value but not beyond it before moving on. The simple principle with all work is deciding objectively what needs to be done and doing it, without allowing your attention to get hijacked by emotion along the way.

In a quote variously attributed to Mark Twain or Benjamin Disraeli, lies are described on a continuum: there are ordinary lies, there are damn lies and, worst of all, statistics.  In fact, statistics are just numerical ways of expressing things and have no particular valence, but they can certainly be used to mislead people, and when they’re presented without clarification they are easily misunderstood. 

To download the complete article click here.  Psychometrics Article

Hard evidence for training programmes like these can only be obtained by rigorous and carefully controlled research, and unfortunately there are few studies that really meet the criteria. Satisfactory evidence comes from studies where a large group of employees can be randomly allocated to experimental and control groups.  The first group is then given the target training, while the latter either remains untrained or is given dummy training.  The groups are then compared on impact assessments administered before and afterwards, using an interval between initial and follow-up testing long enough to avoid response bias.  Any differences between the groups can then be tested for statistical significance. 

Two properly controlled case studies of the effectiveness of the Challenge of Change Resilience programme have been carried out.  The first involved a large sample of UK Police officers who were allocated to two groups, one of which received the CoC Resilience programme while the other received dummy training (conventional stress management).  Participants in the groups did not have contact with one another, and unbeknown to them, their sickness-absence levels were monitored from the period prior to the study.  The results, which were published in the International Journal of Stress Management, showed a significant reduction in sickness-absence amongst the CoC Resilience-trained group compared with controls which was sustained over the 18-month follow-up.

The second, more recent study was based on two teams from Meridian Energy in Christchurch, one of which received the Challenge of Change Resilience programme while the other did not.  They were both assessed on a range of psychometric indices that emerged from my research programme, which began at the University of York in England and continues at the University of Canterbury.

The aim of the research was to identify the personality factors that either protected people from stress or made them more vulnerable, and the assessment of the Meridian teams was based on the key dimensions of rumination and detached coping.  High scores on rumination indicate less resilience and poorer efficiency and performance, hence low scores are preferable.  High scores on detached coping indicate an ability to keep issues in perspective; detached copers have greater resilience and adaptability to change, and are significantly better decision-makers.  The teams were also assessed on the CoC Climate Survey developed as part of the Challenge of Change training suite, which is based on four key dimensions labelled management style, empowerment, workload and communication.  Higher scores on all four indicate a more positive corporate climate.

The trained team was assessed on the resilience and climate survey dimensions before the training and then again 12 months later, while the untrained team completed the assessments twice separated by the same 12-moth interval.  The results showed that the scores for the two teams were not different on the first administration of the tests.  By the second testing, the average scores for the untrained controls had not changed, but the averages for the experimental team that had received the CoC Resilience programme had increased significantly for detached coping and three of the climate survey dimensions - Management Style, Empowerment and Communication – and had decreased significantly for rumination.  The findings provide further controlled evidence for the effectiveness of the Challenge of Change training.

What exactly is the message here? Other research has indicated that the expression of emotion does indeed contribute to well-being – women, for example, live on average 5 years longer than men for a variety of reasons, including hormonal differences, but a significant contributory factor is that women express emotion much more readily than men. We can be fairly confident that inhibiting emotion is not useful, but we need to be much more cautious about leaping to the conclusion that showing anger is healthy. The emotions that women express seldom have much to do with anger, and the point about expressing emotion is that it averts the potentially very dangerous expression of anger.

However, let’s take this a step further. Vaillant draws a simplistic distinction between expressing anger on the one hand, and what he dismissively refers to as ‘positive thinking’ on the other. Offering a choice between either anger or ‘positive thinking’ suggests that these are the only alternatives. Endorsing the expression of anger legitimises anger itself, and avoids the much more important question: why are you angry in the first place? What’s your problem?

It may sound like an urban myth, but there was a time when some companies did actually have a room in the building with a big cushion in it, and frustrated staff were encouraged to go in and beat the cushion about – presumably imagining it was their line manager or whatever they believed was causing their frustration. Afterwards the person feels better, and that’s precisely the problem: the effect is to reinforce anger as a way of dealing with frustration. In other words, encouraging the kind of behaviour we spend the first decade of a child’s life trying to convince them is wrong.

Again, there is the question: why are you so frustrated that you have to revert to beating up a cushion? Most likely because something didn’t go your way. What do we try to teach children? Not everything goes your way; getting frustrated and angry about it is childish. And so we create an immature environment in which aggressive people are rewarded. Consider your experience at work, and the number of managers from hell you’ve encountered: they got there by behaving like children.

If you doubt any of this, notice the language used in the business world. CEOs tasked with helping struggling companies are not appointed, they are ‘parachuted in’. Risky investments are ‘kamikaze deals’. You don’t challenge other people in meetings, you ‘throw in a grenade’. The notion that expressing anger is not just useful but good for you serves to reinforce the mentality that you’re in a war, and that everyone except ‘us’ is an enemy. That’s a useful way to live your life?

The idea that anger is an inevitable consequence for everyone and needs to be expressed is based on the pressure-cooker model: that we need to ‘let off steam’. How many people have you heard proudly announcing that they fly into rages but that once that’s done they’re wonderful again? What about the consequences? The fear it provokes in others? Again, the issue is not about thinking you’re a pressure-cooker, but why you’re so angry in the first place.

Another favourite is that ‘a bit of stress is good for you’. Ask anyone how they feel when they’re stressed, and the answer will be miserable and upset. How can that be in any way good for you? The misunderstandings about stress have been discussed at length in these blogs, and the evidence is incontrovertible: all that stress offers is a short, miserable life, but the misconception that it is good for licenses those same managers from hell to think that if you’re stressed you’ll do the job better. Just a moment’s mature reflection will show that the opposite is true.

Frequency-modulated (FM) radio cuts off the peaks and troughs of the signal.  Much of the interference is in the peaks and troughs, so reception improves.  Economosts have devoted a great deal of effort in recent decades applying the same principle to economies, with the aim of avoiding the extremes of ‘boom and bust’ at the top and bottom of the economic cycle.  The strategy has so far been fairly successful, but FM economics has not removed the ups and downs altogether.  Indeed, it couldn’t: the economy is cyclic, and what goes around comes around again.

To download the complete article click here.  FM Economics Article