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More ideas
If businesses and schools took sleep seriously, what would a modern office building look like? A modern school? These are not idle questions. The effects of sleep deprivation are thought to cost US businesses more than $100 billion a year.
Match schedules to chronotypes
Behavioral tests can easily discriminate larks from owls from hummingbirds. Given advances in genetic research, in the future you may need only a blood test to characterize your process C and process S graphs. That means you can determine the hours when you are likely to experience productivity peaks. Twenty percent of the workforce is already at suboptimal productivity in the current nine-to-five model. So here’s an obvious idea: Set your schedule—whether college class schedule or work schedule—to match your chronotype.
Businesses could create several work schedules, based on the chronotypes of the employees. They might gain more productivity and a greater quality of life for those unfortunate people who otherwise are doomed to carry a permanent sleep debt. A business of the future takes sleep schedules seriously.
We could do the same in education. Teachers are just as likely to be late chronotypes as their students. Why not put them together? You might increase the competencies of both the teacher and the students. Freed of the nagging consequences of their sleep debts, each might be more fully capable of mobilizing his or her God-given IQ.
Variable schedules also would take advantage of the fact that sleep needs change throughout a person’s life. For example, data suggest that students temporarily shift to more of an owl chronotype as they transit through their teenage years. This has led some school districts to start their high-school classes after 9:00 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 different schedule.
Respect the nap zone
Don’t schedule meetings or classes during the time when the process C and process S curves are flatlined. Don’t give high-demand presentations or take critical exams anywhere near the collision of these two curves. Can you actually get a nap? That’s often easier said than done. College students can perhaps get back to their dorm rooms. Stay-at-home parents might be able to sleep when baby does. Some employees sneak out to their cars.
Even better would be if schools and businesses deliberately planned downshifts during the nap zone. 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 could 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?” said Mark Rosekind, the NASA scientist who conducted that eye-opening research on naps and pilot performance.
Sleep 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? It’s worth finding out.
Brain Rule #3
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 cells and chemicals that try to keep you awake.
• The neurons of your brain show vigorous rhythmical 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.
Brain Rule #4
Stressed brains don’t learn the same way.
IT IS, BY ANY measure, a thoroughly rotten experiment. 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. 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. Learning had been shut down.
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 when punishment is unavoidable, and that includes humans. Inmates in concentration camps routinely experienced these symptoms in response to their horrid conditions. Some camps gave it the name Gammel, derived from the colloquial German word Gammeln, which literally means “rotting.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Seligman spent the rest of his career studying how humans respond to optimism.
What is so awful about severe, chronic stress that it can cause behavioral changes as devastating as learned helplessness? Why is learning so radically altered? We’ll 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.
What is stress? It depends
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.