Stress in the City: ‘At first, I thought my depression was a heart attack’

Geoff McDonald knows a thing or two about the January blues. For many, the start of the new working year is a gloomy period, with the third Monday (this year, 16th January) purporting to be the most depressing day on the whole calendar, what with broken resolutions, bleak weather and the post-Christmas/pre-pay day strain on the purse strings.  And this year in particular, says the co-founder of the Minds@Work movement – which operates alongside Heads Together, one of the Telegraph’s Christmas appeal charities, in campaigning to raise awareness of mental health issues – some could be in for a Blue Monday with knobs on.   “Coming back to work at the start of a very uncertain 2017, being expected to do more with less – and this 24/7 mentality at work, of being always ‘on’,” enumerates the engaging…

You Can Improve Your Default Response to Stress

One morning while anchoring The Early Show in New York, one of my coanchors got mixed up and tossed the show to me five minutes before I was slated to appear for my next segment, which was covering breaking news on political corruption in Washington. The teleprompter was cued to a different story, which, if I remember correctly, was about cats at a local shelter. I found myself live on national television in front of millions of viewers — with the wrong setup, and with a video of shelter cats instead of fat cats in Washington.

It is moments like these that test a person. And it’s not the problem itself, but our response to it, that matters in our careers and in…