Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (19 page)

Physical health deteriorates; absenteeism and truancy increase. The absenteeism may occur because stress is depleting the immune system, which increases the risk of infection. Though the evidence is not as conclusive, a growing body of data suggests that children living in hostile environments are at greater risk for certain psychiatric disorders, such as depression and anxiety disorders. Such disorders can wreak havoc on cognitive processes important to successful academic performance. As children grow up, the effects of childhood stress can stay with them. Indeed, performance can take a negative hit regardless of one’s age, even if you were a previously high functioning and much admired employee, like Lisa Nowak.

stress at work

You may have heard of Lisa Nowak. She is a lethal combat pilot, decorated electronics warfare specialist, pretty, smart. The government spent millions of dollars training her to be an astronaut. She was also a mother with two kids on the verge of divorcing her husband one month before her biggest professional assignment: mission control specialist for a shuttle mission. Talk about built-up stress. She put some weapons in her automobile, grabbed a disguise, even packed up a bunch of adult diapers so she didn’t have to stop to use a bathroom. She then drove virtually nonstop from Orlando to Houston, allegedly to kidnap her target, a woman she thought was a threat to a fellow astronaut to whom she had taken a fancy. Instead of serving as the lead for one of America’s most technically challenging jobs, this highly skilled engineer is awaiting trial on attempted kidnapping and burglary charges. She will probably never fly again, which makes this sad story nearly heartbreaking. It also makes the money spent on her training a colossal waste. But those few million dollars are miniscule compared with the cost of stress on the workplace as a whole.

Stress attacks the immune system, increasing employees’ chances of getting sick. Stress elevates blood pressure, increasing the risk of heart attack, stroke, and autoimmune diseases. That directly affects health-care and pension costs. Stress is behind more than half of the 550 million working days lost each year because of absenteeism. Stressed employees tend to avoid coming to work at the slightest excuse, and they often show up late. Yet executives often give stress the shortest shrift. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asserts that a full 80 percent of our medical expenditures are now stress-related. In a work force where 77 percent report being burned out, this translates into a lot of cortisol, a lot of missed meetings, and a lot of trips to the doctor. That’s not all. Prolonged stress can cause depression, which alters the ability to think—a direct assault on a corporation’s intellectual capital. This injury to business productivity is threefold.

First, depression hobbles the brain’s natural improvisatory instincts the way arthritis hobbles a dancer. Fluid intelligence, problem-solving abilities (including quantitative reasoning), and memory formation are deeply affected by depression. The result is an erosion of innovation and creativity, just as biochemically real as if we were talking about joints and muscles. In a knowledge-based economy where intellectual dexterity is often
the
key to survival, that’s bad news for competitiveness, shareholder value, and the bottom line. In fact, the cost of depression to the work force in 1990 was estimated to be $53 billion. The loss of productivity contributed the most, about $33 billion of the total.

Second, those same people who have lost their creativity incur more health-care expenses. Thus, not only does stress reduce the contributions valuable employees can make, but those same employees begin to cannibalize their company’s internal resources. And it’s not just mental-health expenditures. Depressed individuals are at increased risk for a number of other diseases.

Third, people who burn out are often fired, if they don’t leave on their own. Turnover further disrupts productivity, plus sets off a costly recruiting and training effort. The ugly truth is that any assault on human brain cells is an assault on competitiveness. The final tab? Statistical analyses from many studies form the same dismal picture. Stress causes companies to lose between $200 billion and $300 billion a year—as much as $75 billion of red ink a quarter.

Three things matter in determining whether a workplace is stressful: the type of stress, a balance between occupational stimulation and boredom, and the condition of the employee’s home life. Business professionals have spent a long time studying what types of stress make people less productive and, not surprisingly, have arrived at the same conclusion that Marty Seligman’s German shepherds did: Control is critical. The perfect storm of occupational stress appears to be a combination of two malignant facts: a) a great deal is expected of you and b) you have no control over whether you will perform well. Sounds like a formula for learned helplessness to me.

On the positive side, restoration of control can return groups to productivity. In one instance, a for-profit consented to be studied after agreeing to institute a control-based stress management program. At the end of two years, the unit had saved almost $150,000 in workers’ compensation costs alone. The cost of deploying the stress management program? About $6,000. And just 16 hours of the program reduced toxic blood pressure levels for employees diagnosed with hypertension.

Control isn’t the only factor in productivity. Employees on an assembly line, doing the same tired thing day after day, are certainly in control of their work processes. But the tedium can be a source of brain-numbing stress. What spices things up? Studies show that a certain amount of uncertainty can be good for productivity, especially for bright, motivated employees. What they need is a balance between controllability and uncontrollability. Slight feelings of uncertainty may cause them to deploy unique problem-solving strategies.

The third characteristic, if you are a manager, is none of your business. I am talking about the effects of family life on business life. There’s no such thing as a firewall between personal issues and work productivity. That’s because we can’t have two brains we can interchange depending upon whether we are in our office or in our bedroom. Stress in the workplace affects family life, causing more stress in the family. More stress in the family causes more stress at work, which in turn gets brought home again. It’s a deadly, self-feeding spiral, and researchers call it “work-family conflict.” So you may have the most wonderful feelings about autonomy at work, and you may have tremendous problem-solving opportunities with your colleagues. But if your home life is a wreck, you can still suffer the negative effects of stress, and so can your employer.

Whether we look at school performance or job performance, we keep running into the profound influence of the emotional stability of the home. Is there anything we can do about something so fundamentally personal, given that its influence can be so terribly public? The answer, surprisingly, may be yes.

marriage intervention

Famed marriage researcher John Gottman can predict the future of a relationship within three minutes of interacting with the couple. His ability to accurately forecast marital success or failure is close to 90 percent. His track record is confirmed by peer-reviewed publications. He may very well hold the future of the American education and business sectors in his hands.

How is he so successful? After years of careful observation, Gottman isolated specific marital behaviors—both positive and negative—that hold most of the predictive power. But this research was ultimately unsatisfying to a man like Gottman, akin to telling someone they have a life-threatening illness but not being able to cure them. And so the next step in his research was to try to harness some of that predictive knowledge to give a couple a better future. Gottman devised a marriage intervention strategy based on his decades of research. It focuses on improving the behaviors proven to predict marital success and eliminating the ones proven to predict failure. Even in its most modest forms, his intervention drops divorce rates by nearly 50 percent.

What do his interventions actually do? They drop both the frequency and severity of hostile interactions between husband and wife. This return to civility has many positive side effects besides marital reconstruction, especially if the couple has kids. The link is direct. These days, Gottman says, he can predict the quality of a relationship not only by examining the stress responses of the parents but also by taking a urine sample of their children.

That last statement deserves some unpacking. Gottman’s marriage research invariably put him in touch with couples who were starting families. When these marriages started their transition to parenthood, Gottman noticed that the couple’s hostile interactions skyrocketed. There were many causes, ranging from chronic sleep deprivation to the increased demands of a helpless new family member (little ones typically require that an adult satisfy some demand of theirs about 3 times a minute). By the time the baby was 1 year old, marital satisfaction had plummeted 70 percent. At that same point, the risk for maternal depression went from 25 percent to a whopping 62 percent. The couples’ risk for divorce increased, which meant American babies often were born into a turbulent emotional world.

That single observation gave Gottman and fellow researcher Alyson Shapiro an idea. What if he deployed his proven marital intervention strategies to married couples while the wife was pregnant? Before the hostility floodgates opened up? Before the depression rates went through the roof? Statistically, he already knew the marriage would significantly improve. The big question concerned the kids. What would an emotionally stabilized environment do to the baby’s developing nervous system? He decided to find out.

The research investigation, deployed over several years, was called Bringing Baby Home. It consisted of exposing expectant couples to the marital interventions whether their marriages were in trouble or not, and then assessing the development of the child. Gottman and Shapiro uncovered a gold mine of information. They found that babies raised in the intervention households didn’t look anything like the babies raised in the controls. Their nervous systems didn’t develop the same way. Their behaviors weren’t in the same emotional universe. Children in the intervention groups didn’t cry as much. They had stronger attention-shifting behaviors and they responded to external stressors in remarkably stable ways. Physiologically, the intervention babies showed all the cardinal signs of healthy emotional regulation, while the controls showed all the signs of unhealthy, disorganized nervous systems. The differences were remarkable and revealed something hopeful and filled with common sense. By stabilizing the parents, Gottman and Shapiro were able to change not only the marriage; they also were able to change the child.

I think Gottman’s findings can change the world, starting with report cards and performance evaluations.

ideas

What people do in their private life is their own business, of course. Unfortunately, what people do in their private life often affects the public. Consider the criminal history of a fellow who had recently moved from Texas to a city in the Pacific Northwest. He absolutely
hated
his new home and decided to leave. Stealing the car of a neighbor (for the second time that month), he drove several miles to the airport and ditched the car. He then found a way to fool both the security officials and the gate managers and hopped a free ride back to Texas. He accomplished this feat a few months shy of his 10
^th
birthday. Not surprisingly, this boy comes from a troubled home. This is a fairly recent event, but if something isn’t done soon, the private issue of raising this child soon will become a very public problem. And he is hardly alone. How can we capture our Brain Rule, that stressed brains learn differently from non-stressed brains, and change the way we educate, parent, and do business? I have thought a lot about that.

Teach parents first

The current education system starts in first grade, typically around age 6. The curriculum is a little writing, a little reading, a little math. The teacher is often a complete stranger. And there is something important missing. The stability of the home is completely ignored, even though it is one of the greatest predictors of future success at school. But what if we took its influence seriously?

My idea envisions an educational system where the first students are not the children. The first students are the parents. The curriculum? How to create a stable home life, using Gottman’s powerful, baby-nervous-system changing protocols. The intervention could even start in a maternity ward, offered by a hospital (like a Lamaze class, which takes just about as much time). There would be a unique partnership between the health system and the education system.
And it makes education, from the beginning of a child’s life, a family affair.

First grade would begin a week after birth. The amazing cognitive abilities of infants, from language acquisition to the powerful need for luxurious amounts of active playtime, are fully unleashed in a curriculum designed just for them. (This is
not
a call to implement products in the strange industry that seeks to turn babies into Einsteins in the first year of life. Most of those products have not been tested, and some have been shown to be harmful to learning. My idea envisions a mature, rigorously tested pedagogy that does not yet exist—one more reason for educators and brain scientists to work together.) Along with this, parents would take an occasional series of marital refresher courses, just to ensure the stability of the home. Can you imagine what a child might look like academically after years of thriving in an emotionally stable environment? The child flourishes in this fantasy.