A new book claims pressure can make you stronger but, asks Kashmira Gander, can we train our brains to cope better?
© iStockStress can raise the risk serious health problems, including obesity and heart disease.
Here's an unsettling thought: stress is inescapable. Coming to a sudden halt on the side of a motorway en route to a career-changing interview, or fighting against the clock to clean Nutella off a toddler's bridesmaid dress an hour before your sister's wedding is never going to be pleasant.
But life's pressures are not always negative. While intense, prolonged, stress undeniably raises the risk of serious health problems, world-leading neuroscientist Professor Ian Robertson argues in his latest book,
The Stress Test, that
life's pressures can in fact help us to flourish, with the help of the body's complex chemical processes. Stress can help to motivate us, and even strengthen the brain. Peter Clough, professor of psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University, agrees, and says that we have become "stress-phobic" as a society, by inextricably connecting it to anxiety. In reality, most of us seek out more pressurised lives - chasing pay rises, promotions, and raising families - to reap the emotional benefits of satisfaction.
Comment: It is, indeed, the way we view and frame our day to day pressures, misfortunes and tests of mettle that determines whether we will rise to the challenge or sink into frustration and depression.
The book,
Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl, is a recount of life in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. The prisoners who lost their lives each day through psychological, emotional and physical breakdown, the author observed, were the prisoners who lost faith and could find no meaning - however subjective and personal - in their suffering.
Fortunately most, if not all, of us have never had to face the kind of situation Frankl and his fellow prisoners face, but the lessons he learned from his harrowing experience are universal and can be applied to any time of adversity.
Comment: Loneliness: The deadly truth: