George Hook

BROADCASTER You have to learn to deal with stress. There is no magic answer. Some people are better than others at dealing with it. But I consciously learnt how to get better at dealing with stress. Rule 1: The worst thing for stress is procrastinating. If you have a problem and you put it off until tomorrow, then it will be twice as big. So rule one is do something immediately. Tackle it head-on. Rule 2: Share. The thing is, you may not be able to tackle it head-on. So the second thing is, a problem shared is a problem halved. If you don’t share it, it’s very difficult to cope with it on your own. You have got to find somebody to share it with. Rule 3: Deal with stress only if you can do something about it. If the stress is caused because you’re worrying about North Korea dropping an atomic bomb, there is nothing you can do about that situation. So teach yourself: I cannot do anything about this. So there is no point in stressing about it. You can learn this. Rule 4: The killer with stress is that it means you can’t sleep. If you can’t sleep, it’s very hard to cope. You must find a way to sleep. When stress hits in the middle of the night, what can you do? If stress is keeping me awake, I have trained myself to think about something else. I push the stress to the back of my head and I fall asleep. At three in the morning, I play golf in my head. I force that into the front of my head; an imaginary game of golf. I’m hitting a drive at Milltown, walking up the fairway. I’ve yet to get to the ninth hole — I’m always asleep by that stage.