A couple of weeks ago I met a British Airlines flight attendant while we were riding stationary bikes at the gym in the hotel where we were both staying. She had arrived from London about six o'clock the night before and told me she would be leaving on an 11-hour flight back to London later that same day. While she was telling me this, I couldn't help but think of the studies I had recently seen about the negative effects of short layovers on the brain and memory in flight attendants. Short layovers affect memory in flight attendants. Everyone copes with stress differently, so, when I asked if her job was stressful, I wasn't too surprised when she told me she wasn't fazed by the quick turnarounds at all. "My last job as a school teacher," she explained, "was way more stressful than this job." This positive attitude reminded me that a lot of the stress we experience on the job is psychological and involves negative thinking, worry and over-reacting to criticism. As the result, job stress is often best dealt with by using psychological techniques like maintaining a positive perspective. She was quick to let go of the stress in her current career by highlighting the positive differences between her current job and her former job.

I've never been a fan of multitasking from a stress management perspective and as the result of reading an interesting article in Scientific American Mind Magazine on multitasking a few weeks ago, I've decided that my feeling about multitasking have been confirmed. "Effective multitasking is a myth. So, too, is the idea that members of the 'multitasking generation,' who grew up with video games, smart phones and e-readers, can somehow concentrate on several things at once. In fact, research indicates that frequent multitaskers are often the worst at it."

I first met David Hunnicutt, the President of WELCOA at the American Journal of Health Promotion Conference in Hilton Head South Carolina. Dr. Hunnicutt was giving the keynote address and I was really impressed by it. I happened to bump into him the next day, and I introduced myself, told him a little about what I did, and I told him how much I liked his speech. A year later when I ran into him again at another conference, he surprised me by saying that he remembered meeting me the year before and that he planned on stopping by my booth the next day.

I've been following the story of the high school girls in LeRoy, NY, a town outside of Rochester, where as many as 18 students, all at the same school, have developed tics (in this case, involuntary arm movements) that are so severe some of the girls have been out of school for months. I've resisted commenting on this story until now because 1. It's already a media circus and 2. It was so obvious to me that these kids were suffering from a stress-related condition and not some mysterious underground toxin.

Do you ever wonder if stress affects you more than the average person? Are you easily annoyed or frustrated by minor inconveniences?