Stress (huh)…What is it good for…?

There are so many articles on stress and poor mental health in the press, that you can be forgiven for being overwhelmed.

The Damaging Cost of Stress

According to the centre for Mental Health, stress and mental health problems cost UK business costs an estimated £34.9 billion a year through staff absence, turnover and reduced productivity. On an individual level, according to the American Psychological Association, as well as the short term effects, stress can contribute to longer-term health issues including Chronic Pain; Respiratory diseases; Cardiovascular disease; Diabetes; Gastrointestinal problems; reproduction problems and even cancer. So it is absolutely critical that we do something about it.

Most articles try to do this by raising the awareness of the public to mental health. Advice encourages us to adopt coping mechanisms to reduce the effects of stress and urges us to make changes to our lives to reduce the amounts of stress we are subjected to.

A Better Way: Harnessing Mental Toughness

This awareness and advice is important, but the main issue with most of the current debate is that it actually increases how stressed people feel. By raising the awareness of stress it can actually make people focus on it more and increase how stressed they feel. Whilst asking people to make fundamental changes in their lives might feel impossible and thus debilitating.

What most articles fail to talk about, because it is not widely understood, is resilience, more robustly described as mental toughness.

According to the work of Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, the relationship between the performance and pressure of an individual can be represented in the diagram below.

Up to a certain point, pressure is an enabler. It gives us a reason to get out of bed and has a positive effect on performance. However, at a certain point this reaches a peak and if pressure continues to build, it starts to have a negative effect on our performance.

Most of the advice stems from the assumption that this curve is static, that to reduce the negative effects of pressure on me, I need to reduce the amount of stress in my environment, or care less about things so that I don’t put pressure on myself. Whilst, in the short term, this is a helpful form of ‘first aid’, it provides no positive path to develop an ability to perform under pressure.

Using Mental Toughness to Build Resilience

Recent understanding and research has shown that mental toughness can erode and can be developed, meaning that over time the size of an individual’s curve can shrink or grow. What this means is that we can develop the ability to perform well under, and enjoy, a level of pressure we currently find too stressful, we just need to build our resilience.

This provides a much more positive and enabling path to self-development for those who are currently suffering with stress and the effects of poor mental health. As a result, they can build their resilience and enjoy the pressure they are currently struggling with, without having to make fundamental changes to their lives or their values.

In the next article, we will spend more time understanding mental toughness and explain how individuals can develop their own levels of resilience.

Developing Mental Toughness to Improve Mental Health

The brain at work - mental health and mental toughness

Mental Toughness – Does it Make a Difference to Mental Health?

There’s a lot of focus on mental health at the present time. Rightly so, given the devastating impact poor mental health can have on people. But how do you, as a business, show leadership in this area? How do you stop reacting to problems and get ahead of the issue, so that your people remain healthy and mentally resilient? And if you do take steps to actively improve the mental health of your workforce, is there a bottom-line benefit?

In our view, one strategy could be to start developing mental toughness across the organisation. This will help people – from the boardroom to the shop floor – develop their resilience, their ability to face challenges head-on and to thrive under pressure. Mentally tough people – not tough or macho so please don’t get mental toughness confused with the common perceptions of being tough because it’s not that at all – just function better! In general they:

feel more in control of their lives.
are accountable and responsible for their actions rather than seeking to blame others or life itself.
believe that what they do makes a difference and as such don’t feel helpless or out of control.

Studies also show an explicit link between higher levels of mental toughness and higher levels of performance, so there’s a definite business benefit to be had here as well. And for leaders, high levels of mental toughness can really set you apart and improve your effectiveness. This is particularly true as it’s often lonely at the top…

Going back to mental health itself, there are lots of statistics that support the business case for investing in an organisation’s employees. The Mental Health Foundation’s website provides a good snapshot:

https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/statistics/mental-health-statistics-mental-health-work

Get in touch to find out more about how our mental toughness and other workshops can help your organisation thrive:

hello@yeast.ltd / 0330 133 133 8

Mental Toughness, Leadership and the Long Distance Runner

In the first of a series of articles relating to Mental Toughness, Jason Skelton of Yeast gives an overview of the principles of Mental Toughness and how they help to distinguish between those who achieve success and those who fall short, those who out-perform their perceived potential and those who fail to fulfil it. Future articles will go into more detail on the individual components of Mental Toughness and how they contribute to superior performance.

Mental Toughness is often referenced when describing successful sportspeople but it is also often confused with resilience or vaguer terms such as determination, willpower or character. At least there is recognition that the mental side of things is a major differentiator in elite level sport and increasingly, it is acknowledged that mentally strong people tend to be over-represented at the top levels of business.

One of the key differences with Mental Toughness compared with willpower or character is that it is measurable and can be increased, to drive increased performance. There are 4 key components to overall Mental Toughness, known as the 4 Cs of Mental Toughness:

Challenge

Commitment

Control (incorporating emotional control and life control)

Confidence (incorporating confidence in abilities and interpersonal confidence)

So how do these relate to endurance running and in turn, leadership? Well, let’s start by describing these terms to illustrate the similarities, and then I’ll give a personal example of how Mental Toughness helped me in my toughest challenge to date…

Long distance running: hour after hour of potentially unrelenting pain, an often solitary experience, with opportunities to give up every step of the way

Leadership: day after day of unrelenting responsibility, often in very challenging circumstances and often accompanied by a sense of loneliness or isolation, particularly at the very top.

To succeed at both, it’s clear that you will need resilience, which we can think of as an ability to cope with all the bumps in the road, the setbacks that you will invariably face, the pain or stress of the journey. But this is a rather passive and reactive state – things happen to you, rather than you making them happen – and it is rare to find either a runner or a leader that hasn’t gone looking for their particular challenge. So, we can start to infer that mentally tough people actively seek out challenges to test themselves in difficult situations.

Furthermore, they are happy to take on such challenges – in fact, they get a real buzz out of them – as they have an unshakeable belief in their ability to overcome whatever obstacles are
put in their way – they have confidence in their ability to perform and to succeed. Having this confidence also allows them to have the necessary commitment to see things through – they commit to making it to the finish (of the race, the project etc) without getting discouraged and giving up, almost irrespective of the pain or sacrifices required.

When the going gets tough, mentally tough people remind themselves that they set the agenda, that they have actively put themselves in this situation and that they’re not passive “victims of circumstance.” They exhibit high levels of life control and take responsibility for their situation and their actions.

All of the above can be applied equally to business leaders and to endurance athletes and we work with CEOs, MDs and board level directors to improve their effectiveness and the performance of their people and businesses, through the application of the Mental Toughness techniques.

What about Mental Toughness and how it helped me recently? Well, I’ve just finished my first ultra-marathon, running 100km non-stop at the iconic Race to the Stones, completing it in a respectable 14 hours and 15 minutes. Given that the furthest race I’d previously entered was a half marathon (21.1km), and I only entered with 8 days notice, it was only my high levels of mental toughness – particularly challenge, commitment, confidence in my abilities and life control – that enabled me to deliver a good performance. My darkest time came around 80km when my legs had basically gone and I had to dig deep to summon the energy and strength to keep going and actually accelerate towards the finish. I am convinced that my understanding of Mental Toughness and my work in developing it over recent years made the difference between me and better, stronger runners who underperformed or pulled out.

Mental Toughness does really make a difference to performance and if you’d like to find out how it can help you and your business, please get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.

Yeast: Peter Wortley / Jason Skelton

0330 133 133 8