Shifting the perception

Ross Edgley But he never thought of giving up, he says. He took to heart the advice of Alexei Janssen, a performance coach to the royal marines, to focus on the process – then the outcome would become inevitable “There were times when I wasn’t thinking about surviving, when I could coast – that’s when you can go into this moving meditation and mull over everything In his cabin he was reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations on stoic philosophy (“It’s been brilliant, this psychology in the face of adversity”) He was inspired by the Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye’s work on general adaptation in 1936. By gradually increasing lab rats’ tolerance to poison, Selye was able to prove that stress and stimuli were the key to adaptation, says Edgler