Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (17 page)

We could do the same in education. Teachers are just as likely to be late chronotypes as their students. Why not put them together? Would you increase the competencies of the teacher? The students? Free of the nagging consequences of their sleep debts, their educational experiences might become more robust simply because each was more fully capable of mobilizing his God-given IQ.

Variable schedules also would take advantage of the fact that sleep needs change throughout a person’s life span. For example, data suggest that students temporarily shift to more of an owlish chronotype as they transit through their teenage years. This has led some school districts to start their high-school classes after 9 a.m. This may make some sense. Sleep hormones (such as the protein melatonin) are at their maximum levels in the teenage brain. The natural tendency of these kids is to sleep more, especially in the morning. As we age, we tend to get less sleep, and some evidence suggests we need less sleep, too. An employee who starts out with her greatest productivity in one schedule may, as the years go by, keep a similar high level of output simply by switching to a new schedule.

Promote naps

To embrace the midday nap zone, engineers at MetroNaps have created a nap-on-the-go device called a Sleep Pod. “It looks like a sperm that got electrocuted!” exclaimed one person upon seeing the device for the first time. Actually, the pods are portable glorified recliners that can fit in an office—complete with light-canceling visors, noise-canceling earphones, heat-canceling circulation coils, and—at more than $14,000 each—budget-canceling prices. The company, based in New York, has pods in four countries and is busy expanding its business. Others are bringing naps into the workplace, too. Hotels with stacked-bed “nap salons” have sprung up all over Japan. A Boston-based researcher named William Anthony is trying to create National Napping Day, a day set aside so that everybody can take a nap. He finds that 70 percent of Americans who admit to being workplace nappers still have to take their naps in secret. The favored clandestine venue? In the back seat of the employee’s car. At lunch.

What if businesses and schools took seriously the existence of nap zones? No meetings or classes would ever be scheduled at the time when the process C and process S curves are flat-lined. No high-demand presentations and no critical exams would be assigned anywhere near the collision of these two curves. Instead, there would be deliberately planned downshifts. Naps would be accorded the same deference that businesses reluctantly treat lunch, or even potty breaks: a necessary nod to an employee’s biological needs. Companies would create a designated space for employees to take one half-hour nap each workday. The advantage would be straightforward. People hired for their intellectual strength would be allowed to keep that strength in tip-top shape. “What other management strategy will improve people’s performance 34 percent in just 26 minutes?” says Mark Rosekind, the NASA scientist who conducted that eye-opening research on naps and pilot performance.

Try sleeping on it

Given the data about a good night’s rest, organizations might tackle their most intractable problems by having the entire “solving team” go on a mini-retreat. Once arrived, employees would be presented with the problem and asked to think about solutions. But they would not start coming to conclusions, or even begin sharing ideas with each other, before they had slept about eight hours. When they awoke, would the same increase in problem-solving rates available in the lab also be available to that team? We ought to find out.

Summary

Rule #7
Sleep well, think well.

• The brain is in a constant state of tension between cells and chemicals that try to put you to sleep and try to keep you awake.

• The neurons of your brain show vigorous activity when you’re asleep—perhaps replaying what you learned that day.

• People vary in how much sleep they need and when they prefer to get it, but the biological drive for an afternoon nap is universal.

• Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.

Get more at www.brainrules.net/sleep

Here is this beautiful German shepherd, lying in one corner of a metal box, whimpering. He is receiving painful electric shocks, stimuli that should leave him howling in pain. Oddly enough, the dog could easily get out. The other side of the box is perfectly insulated from shocks, and only a low barrier separates the two sides. Though the dog could jump over to safety when the whim strikes him, the whim doesn’t strike him. Ever. He just lies down in the corner of the electric side, whimpering with each jarring jolt. He must be physically removed by the experimenter to be relieved of the experience.

What has happened to that dog?
A few days before entering the box, the animal was strapped to a restraining harness rigged with electric wires, inescapably receiving the same painful shock day and night. And at first he didn’t just stand there taking it, he
reacted
. He howled in pain. He urinated. He strained mightily against his harness in an increasingly desperate attempt to link some behavior of his with the cessation of the pain. But it was no use. As the hours and even days ticked by, his resistance eventually subsided. Why? The dog began to receive a very clear message: The pain was not going to stop; the shocks were going to be forever.
There was no way out.
Even after the dog had been released from the harness and placed into the metal box with the escape route, he could no longer understand his options. Indeed, most learning had been shut down, and that’s probably the worst part of all.

Those of you familiar with psychology already know I am describing a famous set of experiments begun in the late 1960s by legendary psychologist Martin Seligman. He coined the term “learned helplessness” to describe both the perception of inescapability and its associated cognitive collapse. Many animals behave in a similar fashion where punishment is unavoidable, and that includes humans. Inmates in concentration camps routinely experienced these symptoms in response to the horrid conditions of the internment, and some camps even gave it the name
Gamel
, derived from the colloquial German word
Gameln
, which literally means “rotting.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Seligman has spent the balance of his career studying how humans respond to optimism.

What is so awful about severe, chronic stress that it can wreak such extraordinary changes in behavior? Why is learning so radically altered? Let’s begin with a definition of stress, talk about biological responses, and then move to the relationship between stress and learning. Along the way, we will talk about marriage and parenting, about the workplace, and about the first and only time I ever heard my mother, a fourth-grade teacher, swear. It was her first real encounter with learned helplessness.

terror and titillation

We begin with an attempt at definitions, and, as is true of all things cognitive, we suddenly run into turbulence. First, not all stress is the same. Certain types of stress really hurt learning, but some types of stress
boost
learning. Second, it’s difficult to detect when someone is experiencing stress. Some people love skydiving for recreation; it’s others’ worst nightmare. Is jumping out of an airplane inherently stressful? The answer is no, and that highlights the subjective nature of stress.

The body isn’t of much help in providing a definition, either. There is no unique grouping of physiological responses capable of telling a scientist whether or not you are experiencing stress. The reason? Many of the same mechanisms that cause you to shrink in horror from a predator are also used when you are having sex—or even while you are consuming your Thanksgiving dinner. To your body, saber-toothed tigers and orgasms and turkey gravy look remarkably similar. An aroused physiological state is characteristic of both stress and pleasure.

So what’s a scientist to do? A few years ago, gifted researchers Jeansok Kim and David Diamond came up with a three-part definition that covers many of the bases. In their view, if all three are happening simultaneously, a person is stressed.

Part one:
There must be an aroused physiological response to the stress, and it must be measurable by an outside party. I saw this in obvious fashion the first time my then 18-month-old son encountered a carrot on his plate at dinner. He promptly went ballistic: He screamed and cried and peed in his diaper. His aroused physiological state was immediately measurable by his dad, and probably by anyone else within a half mile of our kitchen table.

Part two:
The stressor must be perceived as aversive. This can be assessed by a simple question: “If you had the ability to turn down the severity of this experience, or avoid it altogether, would you?” It was obvious where my son stood on the matter. Within seconds, he took the carrot off his plate and threw it on the floor. Then he deftly got down off his chair and tried to stomp on the predatory vegetable. The avoidance question was answered in full.

Part three:
The person must not feel in control of the stressor. Like a volume knob on some emotional radio, the more the loss of control, the more severe the stress is perceived to be. This element of control and its closely related twin, predictability, lie at the heart of learned helplessness. My son reacted as strongly as he did in part because he knew I wanted him to eat the carrot, and he was used to doing what I told him to do. Control was the issue. Despite my picking up the carrot, washing it, then rubbing my tummy while enthusiastically saying “yum, yum,” he was having none of it. Or, more important, he was wanting to have none of it, and he thought I was going to make him have all of it. Out-of-control carrot equaled out-of-control behavior.

When you find this trinity of components working together, you have the type of stress easily measurable in a laboratory setting. When I talk about stress, I am usually referring to situations like these.

flooding the system

You can feel your body responding to stress: Your pulse races, your blood pressure rises, and you feel a massive release of energy. That’s the famous hormone adrenaline at work. It’s spurred into action by your brain’s hypothalamus, that pea-size organ sitting almost in the middle of your head. When your sensory systems detect stress, the hypothalamus reacts by sending a signal to your adrenal glands, lying far away on the roof of your kidneys. The glands immediately dump bucketloads of adrenaline into your bloodstream. The overall effect is called the fight or flight response.

But there’s a less famous hormone at work, too— also released by the adrenals, and just as powerful as adrenalin. It’s called cortisol. You can think of it as the “elite strike force” of the human stress response. It’s the second wave of our defensive reaction to stressors, and, in small doses, it wipes out most unpleasant aspects of stress, returning us to normalcy.

Why do our bodies need to go through all this trouble? The answer is very simple. Without a flexible, immediately available, highly regulated stress response, we would die. Remember, the brain is the world’s most sophisticated survival organ. All of its many complexities are built toward a mildly erotic, singularly selfish goal: to live long enough to thrust our genes on to the next generation. Our reactions to stress serve the live-long-enough part of that goal. Stress helps us manage the threats that could keep us from procreating.

And what kinds of sex-inhibiting threats did we experience in our evolutionary toddlerhood? It’s a safe bet they didn’t involve worrying about retirement. Imagine you were a cave person roaming around the east African savannah. What kinds of concerns would occupy your waking hours? Predators would make it into your top 10 list. So would physical injury, which might very well come from those predators. In modern times, a broken leg means a trip to the doctor. In our distant past, a broken leg often meant a death sentence. The day’s climate might also be a concern, the day’s offering of food another. A lot of very
immediate
needs rise to the surface, needs that have nothing to do with old age.

Why immediate? Most of the survival issues we faced in our first few million years did not take hours, or even minutes, to settle. The saber-toothed tiger either ate us or we ran away from it—or a lucky few might stab it, but the whole thing was usually over in less than half a minute. Consequently, our stress responses were shaped to solve problems that lasted not for years, but for seconds. They were primarily designed to get our muscles moving us as quickly as possible, usually out of harm’s way. You can see the importance of this immediate reaction by observing people who cannot mount a thorough and sudden stress response. If you had Addison’s disease, for example, you would be unable to raise your blood pressure in response to severe stress, such as being attacked by a mountain lion. Your blood pressure would drop catastrophically, probably putting you into a state of debilitating shock. You would become limp. Then you would become lunch.

These days, our stresses are measured not in moments with mountain lions, but in hours, days, and sometimes months with hectic workplaces, screaming toddlers, and money problems. Our system isn’t built for that. And when moderate amounts of hormone build up to large amounts, or when moderate amounts of hormone hang around too long, they become quite harmful. That’s how an exquisitely tuned system can become deregulated enough to affect a dog in a metal crate—or a report card, or a performance review.

from sniffles to forgetfulness

Stress can hurt more than our brains. In the short term, acute stress can boost cardiovascular performance—the probable source of those urban legends about grandmothers lifting one end of a car to rescue their grandchildren stuck under the wheels. Over the long term, however, too much adrenaline stops regulating surges in your blood pressure. These unregulated surges create sandpaper-like rough spots on the insides of your blood vessels. The spots turn into scars, which allow sticky substances in the blood to build up there, clogging your arteries. If it happens in the blood vessels of your heart, you get a heart attack; in your brain, you get a stroke. Not surprisingly, people who experience chronic stress have an elevated risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Stress also affects our immune response. At first, the stress response helps equip your white blood cells, sending them off to fight on the body’s most vulnerable fronts, such as the skin. Acute stress can even make you respond better to a flu shot. But chronic stress reverses these effects, decreasing your number of heroic white-blood-cell soldiers, stripping them of their weapons, even killing them outright. Over the long term, stress ravages parts of the immune system involved in producing antibodies. Together, these can cripple your ability to fight infection. Chronic stress also can coax your immune system to fire indiscriminately, even at targets that aren’t shooting back—like your own body.

Not surprisingly, people who experience chronic stress are sick more often. A
lot
more often. One study showed that stressed individuals were three times as likely to suffer from the common cold. People were especially vulnerable to the cold-producing virus if the stressors were social in nature and lasted more than a month. They also are more likely to suffer from autoimmune disorders, such as asthma and diabetes.

To show how sensitive the immune system can be to stress, you need look no further than an experiment done with the drama department at UCLA. If you can imagine having to think all day of the most depressing things that have ever happened in your life, then acting out these feelings in front of scientists
while they are taking your blood
, you will have a pretty good idea of this Transylvanian research exercise. During the experiment, the actors practiced method acting (which asks you, if the scene calls for you to be scared, to think of something frightening, then recite your lines while plumbing those memories). One group performed using only happy memories, the other only sad. The researchers monitored their blood samples, continually looking for immune “competence.” Those people who had been working with uplifting scripts all day long had healthy immune systems. Their immune cells were plentiful, happy, readily available for work. Those people who had been working with depressing scripts all day long showed something unexpected: a marked decrease in immune responsiveness. Their immune cells were not plentiful, not as robust, not as available for work. These actors were much more vulnerable to infection.

The brain is just as influenced by stress as the immune system is. The hippocampus, that fortress of human memory, is studded with cortisol receptors like cloves in a ham. This makes it
very
responsive to stress signals. If the stress is not too severe, the brain performs better. Its owner can solve problems more effectively and is more likely to retain information. There’s an evolutionary reason for this. Life-threatening events are some of the most important experiences we can remember. They happened with lightning speed in the savannah, and those who could commit those experiences to memory the fastest (and recall them accurately with equal speed) were more apt to survive than those who couldn’t. Indeed, research shows that memories of stressful experiences are formed almost instantaneously in the human brain, and they can be recalled very quickly during times of crises.

If the stress is too severe or too prolonged, however, stress begins to harm learning. The influence can be devastating. You can see the effects of stress on learning in everyday life. Stressed people don’t do math very well. They don’t process language very efficiently. They have poorer memories, both short and long forms. Stressed individuals do not generalize or adapt old pieces of information to new scenarios as well as non-stressed individuals. They can’t concentrate. In almost every way it can be tested, chronic stress hurts our ability to learn. One study showed that adults with high stress levels performed 50 percent worse on certain cognitive tests than adults with low stress. Specifically, stress hurts declarative memory (things you can declare) and executive function (the type of thinking that involves problem-solving). Those, of course, are the skills needed to excel in school and business.