The founder and leadership journey is rife with stress. But not all stress is bad for us. I interviewed Jo Marchant PhD, the author of the New York Times bestseller - *Cure: a journey into the science of mind over body.* You can read the interview here. In our interview, and in the book (which I’d highly recommend) Jo talks about our views of stress and how that impacts what happens in our body at a physiological level. Here is an excerpt from our conversation:

The most important common theme in terms of how this affects us through life, I would say, is around the topic of stress, and whether we see stress and stressful situations as a threat or a challenge (positive opportunity). Is the body in a defensive, protective mode, in terms of physiology? Or is it enabling growth and performance?

And it's not just a psychological thing, it's actually changing the physiology of the stress response. When you're in a challenge, the body maximises performance - so your blood vessels dilate so your heart can pump blood around the body more efficiently. If you're in a threat situation, it's an evolutionary response that the blood vessels constrict, it's the body essentially trying to minimise future blood loss. That means that the blood can't be pumped around the body as efficiently. That puts more pressure on the heart. The heart has to work harder. So it's damaging your physical and mental performance. Because you're really just minimising damage at that point.

I looked at a few different ways of how we can shift ourselves away from threat and towards challenge. So one of them is just using different tools to try and shift the way that we look at things - a process called ‘reframing’ - and part of that is seeing stress as not necessarily a bad thing. Stress and challenge can actually be really good for us in the same way that when you do physical exercise, you are stressing your body in a controlled way that's within your ability to cope. Over time, those repeated stresses make you more resilient and make you stronger. And it's exactly the same for psychological stress as well. Putting ourselves into challenging situations that stretch us, but that we have the ability to cope with, is actually really good and will make you more resilient.

We build the habits for how we respond to stress throughout our life, so it's not as easy as it sounds to just go, ‘I'm going to think differently.’ You have to actually undo that work and retrain new ways of thinking, so that's where things like mindfulness come in because you've got that regular training to find new ways of thinking and new perspectives on the world, rather than just following all the automatic responses that have been built through your life. And that's particularly important for people who perhaps had early lives where they faced adversity. So you need to undo that. And just like with physical exercise, if you're very unfit, you can't go for one run and everything's fixed. It needs to be part of your daily routine.

So stress needn’t always be a bad thing; but it’s important to balance that message with the importance of avoiding chronic stress as the major contributor to burnout.