When I was a kid there was an advert on television which had an airline pilot coming into land at night. There were several close ups of the pilot chewing. The tag line was ‘at times like these you need Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum’. I’ve heard that when the US Navy strapped heart monitors to its pilots during the Vietnam war the most stressful bit wasn’t the being shot at but landing a jet on a postage stamp in the middle of the South China Sea. There’s something about landing that concentrates the mind.

Being under a degree of stretch is quite exhilarating. Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell, the founders of the human givens, have identified that one of the causes of stress is a lack of stretch and purpose in someone’s life.

So is stress a good thing or a bad thing, caused by lack of stretch or an emotional need? It could be that perhaps there are two meanings: stress is any form of pressure on the emotion or stress is the bit when pressure on emotions becomes bad. Is arousal the good bit and stress the bad bit? Or is stress made up of pressure and arousal? In that case could these be external and internal motivation?

I’ve just had a rummage through the stress performance graphs. It seems the most popular models are the ones with the bell curve that suggests no stress is rubbish, some stress is good, lots of stress is starting to get to hard to handle and too much stress leads to melt down. Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs-Myers, with their Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) based on Carl Jung’s ideas, suggest that in mild stress people emphasize their dominant function a bit more (people who like to do things, do even more; people who like to pontificate, pontificate even more etc) but when the stress gets too much they start to do the absolute opposite (doing people tend to start worrying about what people think of them; pontificating people start focusing on the here and now). It’s as if their personal inner chimp is in charge: if whatever it’s doing isn’t working it will do it even more first and then give up and do the exact opposite.

Stress in one sense is caused by fatigue, hunger, fear and, strangely, alcohol. A lot of external motivation seems to be about avoiding this stress (apart from, perhaps, alcohol): motivation to find food, shelter, control (not being at the bottom of the pecking order). This sort of motavition is about ‘stopping the pain’. It’s not that effective as once the pain has stopped the motivation goes away. If it appears that the pain won’t go away the simple answer is to give up.

Conversely top athletes seem to be motivate by something internal: wanting to be the best they can be. Their coaches perform a hugely important role in showing the athlete what he is capable of. By helping the athlete identify and goal and helping them to see that it’s achievable the coach triggers the athlete’s own internal motivation – arousal – and the athlete does the rest. This is so much more of a powerful motivator.

All I’m saying is that stress isn’t necessarily the most effective route to performance.