Nell Stewart-Liberty
Publisher of 'Social &Personal' magazine . It's an awful thing to say, but the bank-holiday weekends add to the stress, because they shorten the week, and nowadays everyone seems to take if not the whole Friday then, at the very least, the afternoon off.
Coping with stress:
I find physical exercise a fantastic stress-beater. I enjoy playing golf. Gardening is extremely good at helping me switch off: it is so peaceful and therapeutic. But the best stress-beater is swimming. I am in the incredibly lucky position of having a swimming pool, and a swim every morning is essential to beating my stress. It's outdoors, so when it's chilly I run an extremely hot bath, dash outside, swim up and down madly for 25 minutes, run back inside and jump into what feels like boiling water. After that, I feel ready for breakfast and ready to go, go, go.
Publishing pressures:
There is a huge amount of organisation involved in publishing a magazine, and if there is one tiny slip-up along the way, the whole process can fall apart very easily. Because there is so much to think about, and the clock is ticking away all the time, I often wake up in the middle of the night with my mind working overtime. Then I am faced with a problem: do I get up and work on whatever it is that is keeping me awake or do I try to fall asleep again so that I won't feel so tired in the morning?
In conversation with Alison Healy