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Health and Stress Management in Business

Dr. John Tickell - Health Consultant

Pressure is fascinating stuff.

When times are good, we put ourselves under tremendous pressure to succeed.

Yet when times are lousy like most people consider them now, we put ourselves under pressure not to fail.

It all comes back to the human ego. It's not on to be considered a failure, even worse to be spoken about or written of as a failure.

Success - whatever it is - means you've got to count to be successful, especially in younger years.

It's the how much and how many of life.

How many runs did you make? How many goals did you kick? How many operas did you sing? How many reports did you write? Corporations have got big scoreboards with dollars all over them and they count and count. Everything is counted.

It's all relative, though, and one set of numbers means one thing to one person, and something else to another.

The other fascinating thing about success, whether you ever become one, is that it's hard to stay there. It's just as easy to slide down the other side!

A lot of it gets back to your personality or your behaviour - what you do under certain circumstances and under pressure.

You probably all now the Type A personality - often described as the ambitious person. They often get aggressive when things slow down. They tap their pen on the table and their knees go up and down because things aren't going fast enough. They hate red traffic lights.

Type A's eat lunch at their desk, with phones hanging off them, and papers everywhere. If you ever want something done, give it to a Type A personality because they'll fit it in.

Type A males always push the flush button on the toilet even before they finish peeing! Because they think it'll happen faster.

The other thing about Type A is they hate listening to people who stutter or talk real slow. And Type As are driven crazy by this sort of situation. Given a desk situation, they'll lean over the desk and at the first opportunity, they'll interrupt the person and finish off the sentence for them to get things going.

The key things about Type A is they are successful people, but they run high risks.

Types Bs on the other hand are laid back people. "She'll be right, mate. Er, can't really see the hassle myself, it'll probably fix it itself anyway."

Types Bs always sit back on their chairs in meetings, while Type As sit on the front of their chairs.

Type Bs are no good at business, but boy, they live a long time.

Type C are hard to pick. We've just stumbled across this Type. They've got a bland look on their face. But all the pressures, fears, jealousies, they internalise them and stew over them. That's a dangerous personality type.

The Type As run a high risk of vascular diseases - heart attacks and strokes.

The B Types never get anything!

C Types definitely run a high risk of the internal diseases - like the cancers.

But this is a fluid thing. You can change your behaviour if you really want to - for a minute, an hour, a day - if you're aware of how you are reacting to things.

You're given a personality to start with when you're born. Well, some people are!

As a parent, you've got about five years to mould your child's personality, but after that you've lost it.

Those first five years are pretty important, because after that, the schools get next go, and then the business houses have their way.

But there are two critical qualities necessary for Type A maniacs to survive.

• They have got to have the ability - relearned or retained - to drop back one slot and become a B Type personality. Even if it's just for a couple of minutes, or a couple of hours, or a couple of days.
• They have got to be able to listen to the little signs that the body throws at your. Not wait for the final event - the heart attack, the stroke, the diabetes, the burst ulcers. That's too late. Because the body does warn you, but the trouble is, we take no notice of the warnings.

If you choose to live in a Western country, you've get about a 10 per cent chance of dying of old age feeling good. One in 10 of us here are going to live through till we're 97, 94, 99 and go to bed one night and next morning, we'll be dead.

They won't have died of anything. Some people actually die because they've finished living. The best example of this is the spouse who dies six months after the other spouse. They don't have any disease. They've just lost the will to live.

They've lost that spark or ambition or drive to keep you excited about living.

The next 10 per cent die of bad luck and you can't help bad luck. That's 20 percent of us. That leaves 80 per cent of us who are going to kill ourselves prematurely, way before time.

That's four out of five. I know you're fine but the two people either side of you are in a bit of strife.

If you've got to kill yourself, then there's some fabulous diseases to choose from - heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, blood pressure, anxiety, neuroses, cancers and things like that.

Some people say, mate, cancer, well that's bad luck. Well I don't agree with that. My research shows me that at least three quarters of cancers are nothing to do with bad luck.

Look at the two big cancer killers in the males in this country. Lung cancer and bowel cancer.

Add those together and you get way over half the deaths from cancer in males. But let's look at it more closely.

Three per cent of males who die from lung cancer don't smoke. The other 97 per cent do smoke or did smoke, and that's called a risk? They know there's lots of risks in life, but it always fascinates me that people are prepared to take that risk.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not here telling you what to do or standing on a soapbox today. I don't give a stuff, because I'll be gone from here tomorrow.

There are two statements to do with cigarette smoking that we've got to look at :

• It is impossible to be intelligent and smoke at the same time.
  
  There's only one exception - when it's 1.00 am in the morning and you're in a bar and you're half whacked because you've already had 100 beers. That's fine because you are already stupid at 1.00 am! But it's the next morning that's a real bother, because some people actually smoke the next day which I find quite extraordinary, especially if you're fair dinkum about the human system.
• The average smoker goes 20 cigarettes a day for 35 years. That's 20 a day for 35 years. That's 250,000 cigarettes. There's 10 puffs in a cigarette, so that's 2.5million times that crap is going through that brilliant system called the human biocomputer. If you could find a computer this good and I haven't found one yet, would you stand alongside it blowing that much smoke through it? It would stuff it up, wouldn't it.
  
  Yet people do it to themselves. Good luck to them.

Look at women's cancer profile.

Obviously, the biggest cancer killer in women is breast cancer which I find quite disturbing because I don't think any woman should die of breast cancer under the age of 60. Yet hundreds of thousands do through a total lack of awareness of prevention.

Any woman who does not have her breasts checked and a smear test every couple of years, once they hit the mid-20's, is basically playing Russian roulette.

These diseases are curable in their early stages, and it's fascinating also that among races of people who live a different type of life, with different eating patterns and different pressures, they have rarely heard of this disease.

It's a disease of Western pressure.

For lung cancer in males, the statistics show a general decline in the mid-40's. In women, there's still a slight incline for obvious reasons.

And the kids fill up the gap. Do you know how many 18 year olds smoke in this country? Forty-two per cent. It's helluva lot. Once they get to age 30, they're back to the national average. 28 per cent. Great!

But which 28 per cent are still smoking? It seems to be the ones who grow up in smoking environments.

You see, it's a big responsibility for parents in those formative years. If you mainly eat the meats and cheeses to the exclusion of other foods, your child thinks that's normal behaviour.

If you eat more of the plant- based foods like vegetables, fruits and grains, the child thinks that's normal behaviour.

Two smoking parents - that's disaster long-term for kids.

The big one overall, with everybody in the same melting pot, the biggest cancer killer overall in this country, is bowel cancer. It's number one.

But the mechanics of bowel cancer are built around a simple tube. Here's your intestines. The wide end is your mouth. The other end is - well it's the other end!

The time it takes to get all the much from the mouth to the other end is called the transit time. The emptying time of the tube - the time it takes to get rid of all the poisons and toxins through there - is in inverse proportion to your risk of getting bowel disease.

What I am saying simply is this - the slower everything goes through there, the higher your risk of getting haemorrhoids, piles, diverticulitis, bowel ulcers, cancers.

Most Australians deliberately go out of their way to slow this tube down. Why would you do that if you had half a brain? You see the best way to slow this thing down is refuse point blank to eat that meal called break fast (two separate words).

Now break fast breaks the 17 hour fast between dinner last night and lunch today.

Break fast is now squeezed up by Type A people in a hurry. They call it breakfast!

Most people who cope badly - especially people in the dangerous decade from the ages of 43 to 53 when they are under tremendous pressure, when they start to fall to bits, when things fall off and fall out and things go into spasm and they never recognise this as part of not coping - people who can't cope eat all their food in seven hours from 1.00 pm and 8.00 pm, and stuff all for the next 17 hours, except a fag and a coffee in the morning to kick-start the motor.

It's a great way of slowing us down and it works. You've got to be kidding. It means getting up four minutes earlier and sticking some roughage in the pipeline in the morning. To get things moving.

Roughage, fibre is what's needed. There's plenty of fibre in fresh fruit, not so much in stewed fruit. There is plenty of fibre in grains, breads, toasts, cereals. In vegetables, which you can't eat at breakfast.

So for breakfast, you're back to a bit of grain cereal, fresh fruit, low fat milk.

People ask why they can't have full cream milk. You know, they say the kids need full cream milk.

Way back, I was a real doctor. I delivered more than 500 babies, but now I've hung up my gloves. Most of the women involved in those births breast fed their babies. Boy, do babies grow brilliantly on breast milk. They survive on nothing else for six months or more.

Yet human breast milk is a helluva lot less fatty than full cream cow's milk. Why do little kids need full cream milk. I don't know. It's interesting the way these myths are perpetuated.

Half fat milk is plenty. More calcium, just as much protein and less fat.

It's interesting when you look at it. Two per cent milk is half fat milk, and that's what most nutritionists in the US recommend. Four per cent is full cream milk, and that's not very fatty. But look at it this way, there are 4 grams of fat in every 100 mls of milk. A standard glass of milk for a child is 250mls, so that's 10 grams of fat in every glass. It's too much fat. The child doesn't need it.

People say you're sounding like a bit of a fanatic. No, fanatics are people who overdo things at the risk of their own social acceptance. It's like marathon runners. They're people who run more than one marathon.

Most people over the age of 35 who are fanatical exercisers tend to break down tissues in the tendons, muscles, joints faster than they can regenerate them.

Fanatics don't smile much. They don't get too many invites out to dinner. They have a habit of running out of friends. Most bodies over the age of 35 struggle to cope with fanaticism.

I think a fairer method of looking at life is this. I've been involved in this management skills business for 15 years and I have a databank of 27,000 executives.

The great motto - moderation in all things except these four :

• Laughter
• Sex
• Vegetables
• Fish

The motto now is moderation in all things except heaps of laugher, sex, vegetables and fish in no particular order and not together because it makes a helluva mess!

The reasons you can overuse these things are that :

• Laughter and sex are the two greatest stress-cycle breakers known to the human system. We don't know whether they're one and tow, or two and one. But you know you're getting old if they come together.
• Vegetables form the basis of the food groups eaten by the races we know which live the longest and feel the best. If we go overseas tomorrow in a jumbo jet, I'll show you races of people who are 80, 90, or more and they look like us when we're 40 or 50. One of the enormous differences is the quantity of plant food they eat.
• The fish story is also impressive. Races of people who eat a least two meals a week of fish have got an incidence of heart attacks and stroke less than half the normal Western population. It's a medical fact. Because fish oil protects arteries.

I've got a good friend in Sydney who's very strong in the women's publishing business. She and I have discussed this issue at length. So Ita and I now agree that if you want, you can replace sex with rice. Not very comfortable, but it is very good for you.

Let's look at those little warning signs before you get the heart attack. What are the little signs we should be heeding?

There are heaps of them, but today, we've only the chance to discuss a couple of them.

The first thing that happens to your body when it can't cope is that it goes into muscle spasm. Now muscle spasm takes different forms in different areas of the body. Muscle spasm can be a headache, a migraine, a pain in the neck.

"I think my neck might have gone!. No, it's still there, but your body is pleading with you to act as a B Type person. Even just for three minutes.

The whole thing will unwind, but the person doesn't know what to do.

Muscle spasm can be felt as chest pain. Palpitations. Gut pain. Lower back pain is the commonest symptom in middle-aged men who cope badly.

A lot of them say they've got a crook back. Most of them haven't got a crook back. It's just that the muscles are as tight as tight.

Adult diarrhoea is another example. The great majority of adult diarrhoea has got nothing to do with infection - it's caused by bowel spasm. You go to the doctor. The doctor says you've got some fancy disease. What's it called ? Colitis or irritable bowel syndrome.

What's the treatment - a bunch of pills. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it's three days out into B Land, and the whole thing will unwind.

These are things we've got to start considering. The warnings!

The second thing to monitor is how much chemical stimulant do you need a day to survive. How much caffeine, alcohol, tobacco? How much of refined and processed sugar do you need?

I am not saying you aren't allowed to use these things - what I am saying is that I have monitored thousands and thousands of people as they move on through life and you can watch their coping skills and their relative intake of these stimulants. And you can see when people start to go bad because their intake goes way up.

People say you shouldn't drink coffee, mate, it's no good for you. My opinion is a little different. I reckon it's all right. The body likes a kick now and again. It's how much or how many.

Maximum three a day. No more than three shots of caffeine a day. That's all the body needs. Why would you want more than 3 cups of coffee ? There's a green alternative. It's called a glass of iced water!

What happens is that every time you get a hassle and you go straight to the coffee machine, the blood sugar climbs and you feel fantastic for about 15 minutes and then the blood sugar starts to come off the top, back down to normal, but it drops to a bit below normal. So you get a bit down and irritable again. Then you have another cream bun, a biscuit, a coffee, a fag, and then whoosh, the blood sugar climbs again.

You can get away with this in your 20's and into the 30's but after then, the body starts to object to this stimulant rollercoaster. Long-term, it just doesn't work. Think about it.

Alcohol. The negative people say it's a dangerous drug. You must not touch alcohol. But the other opinion if this - if you line up all the drugs in the world, nicotine comes up the worst end, whereas alcohol, if used cleverly, actually sneaks in to the better end of the drug scale.

It's got some positive points. The first three drinks relax you. Not the next 10, but the first three. Then the blood. Alcohol also pumps up the production of a chemical, high density lipoprotein which drags cholesterol out of your arteries. Fantastic! The teetotallers have got a higher risk of heart attack than people who drink a little.

The best thing about alcohol is that if you have enough of the stuff, it can make ugly people look really beautiful!

But how much can you have? Males can have about 25 drinks a week. Women a little less - 18 or 20. The difference between men and women in the alcohol stakes is that the liver in women does not metabolise alcohol very well. More slowly. The flipside is that women's hearts last seven years longer than men's hearts. They're smaller, more effective, protected by female hormones.

So what's a drink? A 7oz of beer, 4 oz of wine, 1 oz of scotch - all these are one drink.

AFDs are also important. These are Alcohol Free Days. It is socially acceptable not to have a drink every day. A glass of soda with a bit of lemon or ice. The body will love you if you can find two AFD's a week, that's good. And if you can find tow days together, so much the better because you'll hear your liver applaud.

It's a discipline. People say they don't like discipline. But you do. People are under pressure in business. They get tough and sharpen pencils and make some real hard decisions.

Self-management - people are awful at self-management. Then they got crook, and they get good at it.

These are the sort of things you should consider throwing into your life.

Tobacco, it's a disaster. The stuff that comes out the back of a cigarette is the same stuff that comes out the back end of a car. Two deadly poisons. Carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide.

But there's one good thing to smoking cigarettes. There's always a silver lining to every story. Stick the cigarette and light up and then you take a deep breath. Deep breathing is the start of most relaxing techniques. Put two deep breathers together and your pulse comes down, your blood pressure starts to drop and all the spasm goes out of the body.

So cigarette smokers have really got it going for them for about the first 15 seconds. Then the nicotine gets into the system, and the blood pressure flies up, not to normal but way above normal.

It takes an hour or more to come back. Even a smoke an hour. Pulse and blood pressure are up. You get tired a lot quicker - it's a medical fact.

Sugar gives you energy. Be aware that there's a couple of type of sugars. There is the simple sugars like cakes, lollies, pastries, soft drinks, rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream. It's there as energy. What if you don't burn up the energy? You only get a few hours to burn up the sugar and calories.

What's the body doing with all that available energy, while you're sitting on your butt at the desk or in the car or on the plane all day?

The body stores that energy mostly as fat. If you've got two or three day's energy stored, that's okay. Bit if it's six or seven years, that's not so good.

You know all this stuff was started by the tennis players like Billie Jean and Martina. They started to swap across to what we call complex carbohydrates. Like the pastas, the rice, the grains, the vegetables, because these are more slowly absorbed.

Then the athletes caught on. And the footballers. And then the ordinary people. So instead of the wild swings in sugar, you get a constant supply - need for sporting events or just walking around.

I'm not saying you can't have a coke or a mars bar. The problem is we follow America so closely in this regard. Every man, women and child in America, and there are 280 million of them, averages 2.5 tins of soft drink there every day. That's three quarters of a billion cans of soft drink every day, and they wonder why their kids get fat.

We've got to get the balance working a little bit.

Let's look quickly at the three skills needed to keep up to the mark. They are management skills.

Let's talk self-management. You may say 'I'm not a manager'. Well you are. You all manage things - groups, people, families, companies.

You need three basic skills :

• First, activity skills
• secondly, eating skills
• coping

Activity is easy. You get three shots at it. You can do nothing, and that makes you a slob. You can become a fanatic which I question. If your body can cope with being a fanatic when you're over 35, then good luck to you. A lot of bodies can't.

Or you can do something in the middle and that's called moderation.

What do I actually mean? One per cent of your time alive - you should move your body. Here's 168 hours in a week. One per cent is about 90 or 100 minutes a week. And that's when people change their tune. Achievers may say they're achievers, successful, and they don't have time. But you have got time - it's a management decision.

You don't have to do it all at once. You're allowed to bust it up. You're allowed to do a 35 minute walk three times a week. You're allowed to ride a bike or walk up stairs.

It's a decision. If you won't do it, you're a bad manager and you need a coach. The best coach is the person in the next office or around the corner. Because if two people go walking or bike riding at 5.30 pm, there's more change you'll do it. And if one doesn't turn up, then that's $20 in the jar. And while you're bad managers, you will have one helluva Christmas party!

The operative phrase is lightly puffing. If you are staring in shop windows, it's a nice time out, but it's useless really. Unless you are lightly puffing, you are not flushing arteries, lubricating joints, you're not getting oxygen in the skull. That's the brilliant thing about moving.

You increase the concentration of oxygen in the brain and you think smarter. You're looking at problems from a different perspective. People find solutions to their problems when they walk. Because you're in B Land and there's more oxygen going around.

Walking is the best exercise in the world. You need support in the heels - buy a pair of exercise shoes, and if the padding's right, they'll tip you forward and it makes it easier to start.

The great thing about being a slob is that all you need to do is get out of the chair and you already feel lightly puffed.

As you get fitter, you've got to walk faster or carry some weights or walk further. Or ride a bike. Or swim, provided you don't get too good at it.

Look at the academics of exercise quickly. Maximum pulse rate is 220 minus your age. 0 is dead. If you're an effective person, resting pulse rate should be about 55 to 75. If you're a slob, into the coffee, the fags, then maybe it's a big higher - up to 90.

So what's an extra few heartbeats a minute? Well, 30 beats a minute adds up to 15 million extra heartbeats a years. Your heart is overworked. You run out of energy. You get tired quickly.

Remember lightly puffing is only 70 percent of maximum. As you get fitter, do more!

Food

There's another significant area to be considered. It's called food. In my view, there are only two food groups in the world - basic foods and bonus foods.

Nutritionists tell me there are five food groups. I reckon there's two. It's a simple system that is easy to remember. Basic foods are plant foods - vegetables, fruits, grains, pasta, rice, boring stuff, all the stuff your parents made you eat before the main event.

Bonus foods are flesh and refined foods, processed foods. Red meat, ice cream, cheese. My program is great because you can eat what you like.

Red meat - yes, it's good for you. It's got protein, iron in it. I reckon you should have one, two maybe three lumps of it a week. But no more than three. Because if is full of saturated animal fat which sticks to your arteries.

People say 'my grandfather had red meat 14 times a week and he lived till he was 95'. Well, that generation of people lived on the land and worked 14 hours a day physically. We don't do anything like that today. Man in his natural state was a hunter. He only ate red meat when he could find it.

Then came America which decided to eat red meat twice a day. And that's not the way we're designed. We're designed as a herbivorous being.

We can eat anything we like.

I don't care what you eat. It's where the balance is. It's the two thirds, one thirds rule. If your are prepared to eat two thirds as plant food - fruit, vegetables, grains, pastas - and only one third as flesh in the rest of the stuff, then you need no other rules.

So what about cholesterol? There is no cholesterol in any plant food.

Relate that to any meal you like. Breakfast. What are the basic foods - cereal, toast, fruit, tea. What's the bonus - bacon, eggs. Eggs have terrific value. As an adult, they're a bonus food.

Egg whites are the best source of protein. The yellow blob in the middle has a bit of a public relations problem because it is full of cholesterol which the body needs very little of.

And I know they are producing eggs with lower cholesterol, but if you love eggs, throw the shell away, prepare the egg with all the white and one quarter of all the yolk. Just scrape a little of the yellow on your toast.

Looks pale, tastes the same. You're only feeding your taste buds. Give the three quarters of the egg to your dog and let him have the heart attack. But people won't do that because they love their dog.

People say "but I'm on a diet". Whoever invented the word 'diet' should be shot. Because people on a diet want action. They want fast weight loss. And when people lose weight fast, what do they lose? Fat, fluid, muscle. The faster the weight comes off, the more muscle you lose. And then the weight goes back on, because 90 percent of dieters go back to their original weight within 18 to 20 weeks. What goes back on? The fluid, the fat, but not as much muscle. When you get back to square one, in percentage terms, you are fatter than when you started.

So what do you do? Slam the pendulum on this side of the page for two or three weeks. Swing it over in favour of the plant foods. You don't have to starve to lose weight. You can eat as much as you like.

There's another trick to losing weight. We eat our big meal at the end of the day. That's when we eat all the calories. Then we take all those calories with us while we stagger over and watch television, and then we take them to bed with us. Then those calories get stored as fat because we didn't burn them up overnight.

I'd like to suggest you have your big meal in the middle of the day. Start with a good breakfast - grains, fruits, tea, toast, an egg now and again if you like. Lunch is a big meal - fish, vegetables, meat, salad, pasta, whatever.

And don't forget meat. You go to the hotel tonight and say "Dr John says I can have a bonus tonight". "Give me a steak". Here's the steak and here's the plate, and the steak is falling off the sides. No, you'll stuff up the rule of basic foods two-thirds of the plate and bonus foods making up the other third.

Look at the Eastern culture. Plenty of rice and vegetables, along with small bits of fish and meat mixed in. There are no fat people in Japanese and Chinese villages, but plenty of fat people in Japanese and Chinese cities. What's the difference? It's the westernisation of the food that's gone on. Interesting.

So that's the diet picture. A big meal in the middle of the day. Nothing much after 2 pm Derryn Hinch says he's invented this , but it's been around for three million years. Nothing passes your lips after 2pm except when you're hungry, a bowl of vegetable soup. Make your own in a big pot. Throw anything you like in. Hungry? Have a bowl of soup. Still hungry? Have another one.

But people ask "isn't that boring?" No, it really depends on whether food is the main event in your life. See, for overweight people, food is the main event. For normal weighted people, food is something you eat when you are hungry. It's delightful. Vegetable soup, bread roll, a glass of wine. The weight will fall off you.

Coping

Let's look at the third of the management skills. The first just involves moving your backside for 1 per cent of your time, to be lightly puffed. It's a commitment, but it's so easy. The second thing is food. But there are so many rules. I pick up the women's magazines and there are nine different diets. You never learn anything. It's three raisins, and four of something else, five grapes. Just swing the pendulum in favour of the plant foods.

The coping bit is the third part. The guy who invented the word, stress, was a Canadian professor. I met him and he was telling me that people come up to him and say "I am under stress". You can't be under stress. Because stress is an internal phenomena. The stress is caused by pressure, and if you put the same pressure in front of six different people, why do you get six different stress responses.

Because it's your choice, that's why. Number one in the line-up feels the pressure and treats it more as a challenge, as an exciting thing and something to win by for them, their group, their family, their company, and more often than not, that attitude give you a positive response.

And the body loves positive stress responses. So why does person Number two under exactly the same pressure Number one is thriving on affect them so badly. It's attitude and feeling. But what are people doing? The misery bags. You get a rainy day and what are the misery bags doing? They've got two options. They can race home to bed and call in sick. How long if your runny nose going to last? Six or seven days. Why? Because it's the major event in their life. They've got a runny nose.

The other option? You are working at your desk. There's paper everywhere. You're excited about something and your nose starts dripping. It's just a nuisance, isn't it? But you're excited about something else so the runny nose is going to go away in a couple of days or one or two days maximum. It's just a nuisance.

You see it's the brain that's so important and what you fill it with. Destroy your resistance. Destroy your immune system. People say "what do you mean, your immune system?" Your resistance is the thing inside which decides you're going to get a cold or the flu next week. It plays an enormous part, your immune system, in determining whether you are going to get cancer in five or eight years. You say it's genetics. Sure, resistance is so important. Do you want a cold next week or not? It's your choice. That's rubbish. It's not.

If you walk down the street with 100 people, and somebody with the worst cold in the world sneezes over 100 people, 100 people don't get the flue. Twenty or 22 get the flu. Which ones? The ones with the lousy resistance. You know that disease called AIDS where the immune system has come to a halt. Just for your kids' sake, I am going to give you the quick five rules about AIDS. You see, AIDS is not curable at this stage and one doubts whether it ever will be because we can't even cure the flu virus, because it mutates every year. Find something and it changes itself. See the AIDS virus is a piece of genetic material and when it fights the white cells, it doesn't just have a war with the white cells, it actually gets inside the white cell and changes the genetics of the cell and reproduces itself 100 or 1,000 times. You can't beat that. But the only thing we know so far is not to get it into your system. Sperm to blood contact. Blood to blood contact.

The five rules are :

• The first is the BP rule. Bottoms are for pooping out of. The lining of the back passage is about as thin as two bits of tissue paper. I don't care what you shove up it, it's going to bleed. It's just not worth the risk.
• The second rule is the TP rule. Never share your toothbrush with a prostitute. Anything that breaks the mucus membrane of an AIDS carrier - a toothbrush, a shaver. You see the AIDS virus cannot stay alive in air or water for more than one or two minutes. Dead! But in blood, it can stay alive for as long as the blood remains liquid. So sharing toothbrushes and shavers, that sort of thing, it's deadly.
• The third rule is NN. No needles. Acupuncture, tattooing, splinters out of thumbs, no needles. Unless you see that needle come out of a sterile pack or a deadly sterile solution, do not let anyone stick that needle into you. The intravenous drug users share these things, and just one drop of liquid blood, you're dead!
• The research.
• If you're serious about jumping into bed with someone, do a bit of research. You've got to do the odds - get your bookmaker to help you. You cannot get AIDS from someone who doesn't already have it. AIDS is not caused by friction. If you want to know definitively, you take them down to the pathology laboratory before you go to bed. Get a blood test done and don't forget the blood test takes three to six months before it registers positive. So you watch them for three to six months. And then you take them down for the second one, and if it registers negative, go for it! It might be worth the risk, but you've got to check all the odds.

Let's look at people who can't cope. Negative versus positive. What do you do? Do you go back to the pressure cooker? But you say "I don't like the pressure". Well, there's your first mistake, because to achieve, you've got to have pressure. You need the stimulation. So people say "right, I'll put myself in the pressure cooker". The problem is they stay there eight days a week and 52 weeks a year. They never get out.

The person who invented this pressure cooker put two valves on it - there's a physical valve and a psychological valve. Physically, relax, stretch every now and then. People never take two minutes off to stretch. Chinese corporations have been stretching before their morning cuppa for hundreds of years. Take a good breath. You know, these cigarettes take a bit of breath.

Take two diaphragm breaths, not just from the mouth. Get the pulse and blood pressure down. One per cent of your time, you are moving. Forget the health and fitness. Think of it as a valve opener. When you're walking or riding a bike, or whatever, you're lightly puffing, get more oxygen, and you get a different perspective on your problems.

Psychologically, we can spend the whole day talking about how to jump out of the pressure cooker. Just a quick precis : laughter. Brilliant. More comedies on television. Lighten up a little. Go and look in the mirror. Mental bonuses. Relaxation techniques. No time for that?

See non-copers never go to movies. Non-copers never lie on the beach. Non-copers never buy a crappy book on a newstand or at the airport and read a couple of chapters. "Oh no, I couldn't do that." Non -copers never go to the botanical gardens for a half an hour on a Sunday morning and smell the roses. "I haven't got time for that - I'm an achiever, a success.

But you have got time. That's your B time. To survive as an A type, we've got to drop back. The best mental bonus ever invented is the three-day, three times a year, switch-off. What we call the selfish break. It's nine days in every 365. You might take a spouse. You might take one of your children - if you can remember their names. But it's your time. You've got to do it. There are three types of break - the selfish break, the spouse break and the kid's break.

People tell me times are tough. Good! Remember the last boom and tell me the genuine winners who came out of the last boom. Where are they now? You see, genuine winners don't come out of booms. Great winners come out of lousy times. You see, your options are right there now. Latch onto them now.

But there are so many rules - corporate rules, community rules. The world's tied up in them. No wonder we're in trouble and our kids grow up like us. Maybe we should get a group of people to sit together once a month and think up crazy ideas. There's a lot of them. But they could be formulate into something real.

Two more things. "Never mind all that stuff about exercising. I love food. I'm going to lose weight be exercising. Can I do it?" There are 3,500 calories in a pound of fat. If you walk like hell, you burn 300 calories in an hour. You need to walk 12 hours to burn a pound. You come back after your 12-hour walk and have a piece of pie and a beer, and you've blown the lot! It's hard to burn by exercise. So why not swing the pendulum. Cycling? That's 500 calories and hour, and you've got to cycle for seven hours to burn a pound. Running. You've got to run three hours to burn a pound. A least with regular exercise, your whole metabolism starts to work better.

Long-term, exercise certainly helps. If you sit on your backside watching television, that burns 100 calories an hour. And if you walk an hour, there's an extra 200 calories burned. Even if you walk half an hour, you burn an extra 100 calories. Every day for a week for five weeks, that's a pound. For 52 weeks, that's 10 pounds. With a brisk walk every day, you'll lose 10 pounds a year. That's good, isn't it?

People say "is sex any good for an hour?" Sex is 400 calories an hour. For two minutes, it's the same as one-sixth of a beer!

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