Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded)

Atlantic Monthly:
“Teachers find
many children emotionally distracted, so upset and preoccupied by the
explosive drama of their own family lives that they are unable to
concentrate on such mundane matters as multiplication tables.”
Physical health deteriorates; truancy and absenteeism 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. As children grow up, they can bring the
effects of childhood stress into their own relationships and work lives.

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Stress at work: too expensive to ignore
Lisa Nowak was a lethal combat pilot, decorated electronics warfare
specialist, pretty, smart. The government spent millions of dollars training
her to be an astronaut. She also was a mother with three 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, and even packed a bunch of adult diapers so that she didn’t have
to stop to use a bathroom. She then drove virtually nonstop from Houston to
Orlando, 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 sat awaiting trial on attempted kidnapping and battery.
Nowak later pled guilty to lesser charges and retired with a “less than
honorable” discharge. She will 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 minuscule compared with
the cost of stress on the workplace as a whole.
The American Stress Institute estimates that American businesses lose
$300 billion every year because of work-related stress. Sources of that loss
include health-related costs, worker compensation bills, employee turnover,
and absenteeism. That last item is a big deal. About one million people stay
home from work every day because of stress (about 40% of all absences
occur because of tension felt at work!). The Bureau of Labor Statistics
found the average amount of time off due to stress was 20 days. That’s
costly. One day’s absence costs the company about two times what the
worker would make in that day. If the prolonged stress leads to depression,
organizations are dealing with a direct assault on their intellectual capital.
Depression hobbles fluid intelligence, problem-solving abilities (including
quantitative reasoning), and memory formation. In a knowledge-based
economy where intellectual dexterity is often 
the
key to survival, that’s bad
news. Yet executives often give stress the shortest shrift.
What makes a workplace stressful

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Three things matter in determining whether your workplace is stressful
or productive: the type of stress you experience, the balance between
stimulation and boredom in your job, and the condition of your home life.
The perfect storm of occupational stress appears to be a combination of
two factors: (1) a great deal is expected of you, and (2) you have no control
over whether you will perform well. This sounds like a formula for learned
helplessness. On the positive side, restoration of control can return groups
to productivity. Some companies are using a stress-reduction program
involving increasingly popular mindfulness training. Mindfulness is a form
of controlled meditation in which you learn to become aware of your
environment without judging and learn to enjoy the moment, among other
practices. A few companies tested the programs to see whether they work.
They do. About 36 percent of the employees in an insurance company who
enrolled in mindfulness training noticed a marked reduction in stress after
taking the program. About 30 percent noticed an improvement in sleep. It
has also been found to be effective against depression.
Control isn’t the only factor in productivity. Employees on an assembly
line, doing the same tired thing day after day, certainly can feel in control of
their work processes. But the brain-numbing tedium can become a source of
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 workers’ family lives. There’s no such thing as a firewall
between personal issues and work productivity. We don’t have two brains
that we can swap out depending upon whether we are in our office or in our
living room. Stress in the workplace affects family life, causing more stress
in the family. Stress in the family causes more stress at work, which in turn
gets brought home again. It’s a downward spiral, and researchers call it
“work-family conflict.” If you are a worker, 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.

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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 a 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 people they have a life-threatening
illness but not being able to cure them. And so the next step in his research
was to find a cure. Gottman devised a marriage intervention strategy based
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 show couples how to decrease both the
frequency and severity of their hostile interactions. This return to civility
has many positive side effects besides marital reconstruction, especially if
the couples have kids. And the couples often do have kids.
Gottman’s marriage research invariably put him in touch with couples
who were starting families. When the baby arrived, Gottman noticed that
the couple’s hostile interactions skyrocketed. Causes ranged 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 three times a minute). By the time the baby was 1 year old,
marital satisfaction had plummeted 70 percent. At the one-year mark, the
risk for maternal depression had risen 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.

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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? Based on his years of research, he already knew the marriage
would improve. The big question concerned the kids. What would an
emotionally stable home environment do to the baby’s developing nervous
system? Gottman 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. 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 but the child. I think Gottman’s findings can change the world.
More 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 Washington. 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

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ride back to Texas. He accomplished this feat a few months shy of his 10th
birthday. Not surprisingly, this boy comes from a troubled home. And he is
hardly alone. If something doesn’t change the course of their lives, the
private issue of raising such children soon will become a very public
problem.
How can we capture this chapter’s Brain Rule—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.