The World Health Organisation refers to stress as the ‘Health Epidemic of the 21st Century’ and predicts that by 2020 five of the top diseases world-wide will be stress related. This translates to us all having a one-in-four chance of developing a stress related illness in our lifetime. But whether we love it or hate it, we all need stress in our lives. The key is in keeping it manageable. There is a direct relationship between the amount of...

Alleviating stress can be a complicated process but one of the most straightforward approaches is down to you – you just teach yourself to breathe properly. As we get stressed and tense we tend to curl in on ourselves, our shoulders slump forward and we tend to take short, quick breaths that do not expand our lungs. For our lungs to expand we need to sit up straight with our shoulders pinned back and we need to breathe in to expand our lungs to...

I call stress the ‘double-edged sword’ because while we need stress and pressure for optimum performance we can very easily tip over into stress that affects our performance and makes us ill. Some people now refer to this as ‘toxic stress’, as in ‘good’ stress versus ‘toxic’ or damaging stress. The reality is that all stress can be both good and bad. We are all familiar with the deadline approaching and the adrenaline rush that helps us focus...