It's hard to forget the first time you experience jaw-clenching pressure. I thought I had experienced the true meaning of pressure during my undergraduate finals. But I realised I was wrong when I first encountered real pressure near the end of my Ph.D. I had just six weeks to finish all my lab work. That's when I learned that there was another dimension of pressure that I still had to probe. When I met the real McCoy it left me physically short of breath. It was the kind of pressure that leaves you shaking inside, even though you try all the relaxation tricks you know.

So what plunges someone into this kind of cul-de-sac of stress? And, once you have driven down it, how do you manage to reverse out of ‘stress alley’? It is not a nice place to be. In recent years the ‘stress screw’ has been turned more tightly in all professions. Everyone now has targets and deadlines, and we all have our own personal league table to try to clamber up. Coupled with this, job security, by and large, doesn't exist anymore. OK, that's enough bleakness. You didn't buy this book to top up on depressive stories. You want advice to encourage and uplift you, so let me perform a little analysis of what I went through.