What is the difference between stress management and prevention?

Grant Leboff: David, one of the differentiations you make within your material, is the difference between stress management and Prevention, which I thought was quite interesting. Explain a bit more about that for us.

David Hyner: The research we undertook with very, very, effective people – 250 top achievers, absolutely bombarded us with the fact that they don’t go about managing stress… they actively prevent it in the first place. The world renowned inventor Trevor Bayliss who invented the clockwork radio; he actually laughed out loud when I said ‘How do you manage stress?’ and he went on ‘Why on earth would you manage it if you could prevent it in the first place?’ And from there we learn lots of little simple techniques from the top achievers on how they go about preventing stress.

Grant Leboff: So that’s interesting because I think for most people, they think in terms of managing their stress levels and how to minimise it, not get rid of it completely. How does that play out when you go into work places and things like that?

David Hyner: Well again, just to define; it’s not even removing it, it’s preventing it in the first place. It’s actually much harder to manage and then remove stress than it is to prevent it. So there are dozens of little things you can do to prevent it in the first place and in the workplace, it prevents long term absenteeism, it prevents long term sickness and the cost involved to a business. People assume it’s just the man hours but the impact it has on a company’s bottom line – long term sickness – and the legal ramifications of not preventing it. It’s almost unthinkable what goes on. Unthinkable.

Grant Leboff: In your experience, people talk about stress… it’s one of those catchall terms that everybody just uses all the time. How rife do you think it is in workplaces today?

David Hyner: In my experience, I’m seeing it change massively. Before, it used to affect certain types of individuals in certain situations. I’ve actually seen that with the bombardment of technology and you being accessible so much more of the time, when its original intent was, of course, to free us up of time. The people are just into overload. They’re finding it difficult to relax, take time off. There are certain individuals who are fantastic at it, of course, but so many people now are constantly warriors to technology, information, they’re bombarded with information on television. radio, internet WiFi, and people are finding it hard to switch off and disengage and so without them realising it, stress levels – physiological stress levels, the really harmful stuff – just goes through the roof. All be it bit by little bit without people even realising it.

Grant Leboff: Is it one of those issues, do you think, the lack of opportunity to compartmentalise? Because there were times when you left the office on a Friday, shut the door and you had 48 hours when you weren’t there. But of course now, with smartphones and everything else, people are taking that work with them. Do you think that has an impact?

David Hyner: I think, not only does that have an impact of taking the work home with them but personally now, not just professionally, we are using technology as a means of absorbing information. So if we’re not doing work e-mails, we’re on social media. If we’re on social media, where we’re watching a film or a video on technology – tablets, reading information. It affects us physically – our eyes. My GP alone, he’s saying he’s seeing a massive increase in people with dry eyes and contracted eye-ducts because they’re eyes are drying up from staring at screens all the time. It’s not being talked about enough.

Grant Leboff: So to what extent does managing technology, go towards helping stress – learning to do that?

David Hyner: It’s one of many things that people can do very easily. I say very easily, it’s actually very difficult to do it especially if you are borderline addicted to it. Even people of our generation are borderline addicted to Facebook and social media. But there are so many things that people can do. And one of them is to ask yourself; really is this taking me towards where I want to be and who I want to be, or is it taking me further away?

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order make it more readable.