Professor Peter Kinderman from the University of Liverpool
describes what he has learned from the BBC Stress Experiment.
His results reveal a positive message about how we may be able
to improve our mental health. Many different factors can affect
your mental health Back in June 2011, with assistance from All
in the Mind and BBC Lab UK, we asked the BBC audience to help us
carry out a groundbreaking experiment into the causes of stress.
Over thirty thousand of you took part, which makes this one of
the largest studies of mental health ever. First of all, we
confirmed that nearly all the variables that we predicted would
influence mental health and wellbeing did indeed play a role.
Secondly, the biggest predictor of mental health problems was
‘rumination’, which means the tendency to dwell on negative
events for too long. Before we began, we knew that many things
can affect our mental health. These include: The BBC Stress Test
was designed to explore how important these different factors
are compared with each