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.
The body alone isn’t of much help in providing a definition, either. There is no unique grouping of physiological responses capable of telling a scientist whether you are experiencing stress. That’s because many of the mechanisms that cause you to shrink in horror from a predator are the same mechanisms 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.
A measurable physiological response: There must be an aroused physiological response to the stress, and it must be measurable by an outside party. I saw this 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.
A desire to avoid the situation: The stressor must be perceived as aversive—something that, given the choice, you’d rather not experience. It was obvious where my son stood on the matter. Within seconds, he snatched 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.
A loss of control: 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 wanted to have none of it, and he thought I was going to make him have all of it. Feeling out of control over the 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.
We’re built for stress that lasts only seconds
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. This fight-or-flight response is 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 signals your adrenal glands to dump buckets of adrenaline into your bloodstream. There’s a less famous hormone at work, too—also released by the adrenals, and just as powerful as adrenalin. It’s called cortisol. It’s the second wave of our defensive reaction to stressors. 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 help us manage the threats that could keep us from procreating.
And what kinds of survival threats did we experience in our evolutionary toddlerhood? Predators would make the top 10 list. So would physical injury. 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 weather would have been a concern, the day’s offering of food another. A lot of very immediate needs rise to the surface. Most of the survival issues we faced in our first few million years did not take long 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 moments. 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 out of harm’s way.
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 stress hormones build up to large amounts, or hang around too long, they become quite harmful. That’s how an exquisitely tuned system can become deregulated enough to affect a report card or a performance review—or a dog in a metal crate.
Cardiovascular system
Stress affects both our bodies and our brains, in both good and bad ways. 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 produces scarring on the insides of your blood vessels. These scars become magnets for molecules to accumulate, creating lumps called plaques. These can grow large enough to block the blood vessels. 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.
Immune system
Stress also affects our immune response. At first, the stress response helps equip your white blood cells, sending them off to fight on your 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 more likely to suffer from the common cold, especially if the stress was 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 at UCLA. Trained actors practiced Method acting, in which if a scene calls for you to be scared, you think of something frightening, then recite your lines while plumbing those memories. On one day, the actors performed using only happy memories. On another day, they performed using only sad memories. The researchers took blood samples, continually assessing their immune systems. On the “happy days,” the actors had healthy immune systems. Their immune cells were plentiful, happy, readily available for work. On the “sad days,” the actors showed something unexpected: a marked decrease in immune responsiveness. Their immune cells were not plentiful, not as robust, not as available to protect against infection.
Memory and problem solving
Stress affects memory. 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, your brain performs better when it is stressed than when it is not stressed. You can solve problems more effectively and you are more likely to retain information. There’s an evolutionary reason for this. Our survival on the savannah depended upon remembering what was life-threatening and what was not. Ancestors 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. 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 people 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 levels of stress performed 50 percent worse than adults with low levels of stress on tests of declarative memory (things you can declare) and executive function (the type of thinking that involves problem solving and self control). Those, of course, are the skills needed to excel in school, at work, and in relationships.
I remember a story by a flight instructor I knew well. He told me about the best student he ever had, and a powerful lesson he learned about what it meant to teach her. The student excelled in ground school. She aced the simulations, aced her courses. In the skies, she showed natural skill, improvising even in rapidly changing weather conditions. One day in the air, the instructor saw her doing something naïve. He was having a bad day and he yelled at her. He pushed her hands away from the airplane’s equivalent of a steering wheel. He pointed angrily at an instrument. Dumbfounded, the student tried to correct herself, but in the stress of the moment, she made more errors, said she couldn’t think, and then buried her head in her hands and started to cry. The teacher took control of the aircraft and landed it. For a long time, the student would not get back into the same cockpit. The incident hurt not only the teacher’s professional relationship with the student but the student’s ability to learn. It also crushed the instructor. If he had been able to predict how the student would react to his threatening behavior, he never would have acted that way. Relationships matter when attempting to teach human beings—whether you’re a parent, teacher, boss, or peer. Here we are talking about the highly intellectual venture of flying an aircraft. But its success is fully dependent upon feelings.
The villain: cortisol
The biology behind this assault on our intelligences can be described as a tale of two molecules: one a villain, the other a hero. The villain is the aforementioned cortisol, part of a motley crew of stress hormones going by the name glucocorticoids. These hormones are secreted by the adrenal glands, which lie like a roof on top of your kidneys. The adrenal glands are so exquisitely responsive to neural signals, they appear to have once been a part of your brain that somehow fell off and landed in your mid-abdomen.
Stress hormones can do some truly nasty things to your brain if boatloads of the stuff are given free access to your central nervous system. And that’s what is going on when you experience chronic stress. Stress hormones seem to have a particular liking for cells in the hippocampus, which is a problem because the hippocampus is deeply involved in many aspects of human learning. Stress hormones can make cells in the hippocampus more vulnerable to other stresses. Stress hormones can disconnect neural networks, the webbing of brain cells that store your most precious memories. For example, a bodyguard was in the car with Princess Diana on the night of her death. To this day, he cannot remember the events several hours before or after the car crash. Amnesia is a typical response to catastrophic stress. Its lighter cousin, forgetfulness, is quite common when the stress is less severe but more pervasive.
Stress hormones also can stop the hippocampus from giving birth to brand-new baby neurons. Under extreme conditions, stress hormones can even kill hippocampal cells. Quite literally, severe stress can cause brain damage in the very tissues most likely to help you succeed in life.
One of the most insidious effects of prolonged stress is that it pushes people into depression. I don’t mean the “blues” people can experience as a normal part of daily living. Nor do I mean the grief resulting from tragic circumstance, such as the death of a relative. I am talking about the kind of depression that causes as many as 800,000 people a year to attempt suicide. It is a disease every bit as organic as diabetes, and often deadlier. Chronic exposure to stress can lead you to depression’s doorstep, then push you through. Depression is a deregulation of thought processes, including memory, language, quantitative reasoning, fluid intelligence, and spatial perception. The list is long and familiar. But one of its hallmarks may not be as familiar, unless you are in depression. Many people who feel depressed also feel there is no way out of their depression. They feel that life’s shocks are permanent and things will never get better. Even though there is a way out—treatment is often very successful—they have no perception of it. The situation feels so helpless that they don’t seek treatment. Yet they can no more argue their way out of a depression than they could argue their way out of a heart attack. Clearly, stress hurts learning. Most important, however, stress hurts people.
The brain seems to be aware of all this and has supplied our story not only with a villain but also with a hero. We met this champion in the Exercise chapter. It’s brain-derived neurotrophic factor. BDNF is the premier member of a powerful group of proteins called neurotrophins. BDNF in the hippocampus acts like a peacekeeping force, keeping neurons alive and growing in the presence of hostile action. As long as there is enough BDNF around, stress hormones cannot do their damage.
How, then, does the system break down? The problem begins when too many stress hormones hang around in the brain too long, a situation you find in chronic stress, especially learned helplessness. As wonderful as the BDNF forces are, it is possible to overwhelm them if they are assaulted with a sufficiently strong (and sufficiently lengthy) glucocorticoid siege. Like a fortress overrun by invaders, enough stress hormones will eventually overwhelm the brain’s natural defenses and wreak their havoc. In sufficient quantities, stress hormones are fully capable of turning off the gene that makes BDNF in hippocampal cells, causing long-lasting damage. You read that right: Not only can they overwhelm our natural defenses, but they can actually turn them off.
A genetic buffer
Out-of-control stress is bad news for the brains of most people. But of course “most” doesn’t mean “all.” Like oddly placed candles in a dark room, some people illuminate corners of human behavior with unexpected clarity. They illustrate the complexity of environmental and genetic factors.
Jill was born into an inner-city home. Her father began having sex with Jill and her sister during their preschool years. Her mother was institutionalized twice because of what used to be termed “nervous breakdowns.” When Jill was 7 years old, her agitated dad called a family meeting in the living room. In front of the whole clan, he put a handgun to his head, said, “You drove me to this,” and then blew his brains out. The mother’s mental condition continued to deteriorate, and she revolved in and out of mental hospitals for years. When Mom was home, she would beat Jill. Beginning in her early teens, Jill was forced to work outside the home to help make ends meet. As Jill got older, we would have expected to see deep psychiatric scars, severe emotional damage, drugs, maybe even a pregnancy or two. Instead, Jill developed into a charming and quite popular young woman at school. She became a talented singer, an honor student, and president of her high-school class. By every measure, she was emotionally well-adjusted and seemingly unscathed by the awful circumstances of her childhood.
Her story, published in a leading psychiatric journal, illustrates the unevenness of the human response to stress. Psychiatrists long have observed that some people are more tolerant of stress than others. Molecular geneticists are beginning to shed light on the reasons. Some people’s genetic complement naturally buffers them against the effects of stress, even the chronic type. Scientists have isolated some of these genes. In the future, we may be able to tell stress-tolerant from stress-sensitive individuals with a simple blood test, looking for the presence of these genes.
We each have our own tipping point
How can we explain the various ways humans respond to stress—both the typical cases and the exceptions? The answer is that stress is neutral. Aversive stimuli are neither beneficial nor bad. Whether stress becomes damaging depends on the severity of the stress, how long you are exposed to the stress, and on your body’s ability to handle stress. There’s a tipping point where stress becomes toxic. Scientist Bruce McEwen calls it the allostatic load. Allo is from a Greek word meaning variable; stasis means a condition of balance. McEwen’s idea is that we have systems that keep us stable by constantly changing themselves. The stress system, with all of its intricacies, is one of those. The brain coordinates body-wide changes—from hormonal to behavioral changes—in response to the approach and retreat of potential threats.
Stress at home shows up at school
I know the allostatic load as the first time, and only time, I ever heard my mother swear. As you may recall, my mother was a fourth-grade teacher. I was upstairs in my room, unbeknownst to my mother, who was upstairs in her room grading papers. She was grading one of her favorite students, a sweet, brown-haired wisp of a girl I will call Kelly. Kelly was every teacher’s dream kid: smart, socially poised, blessed with a wealth of friends. Kelly had done very well in the first half of the school year. The second half of the school year was another story, however. My mother sensed something was very wrong the moment Kelly walked into class after Christmas break. Her eyes were mostly downcast, and within a week she had gotten into her first fight. In another week, she got her first C on an exam, which would prove to be the high point, as her grades for the rest of the year fluttered between Ds and Fs. She was sent to the principal’s office numerous times, and my mother, exasperated, decided to find out what caused this meltdown. She learned that Kelly’s parents had decided to get a divorce over Christmas and that the family conflicts, from which the parents valiantly had insulated Kelly, had begun spilling out into the open. As things unraveled at home, things also unraveled at school. And on that snowy day, when my mother gave Kelly her third straight D in spelling, my mother also swore: “Damn it!” she said, nearly under her breath. I froze as she shouted, “THE ABILITY OF KELLY TO DO WELL IN MY CLASS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MY CLASS!”
She was describing the relationship between home life and school life, a link that has frustrated teachers for a long time. One of the greatest predictors of performance in school turns out to be the emotional stability of the home.
I have firsthand experience with the effects of stress on grades. I was a senior in high school when my mother was diagnosed with the disease that would eventually kill her. She had come home late from a doctor’s visit and was attempting to fix the family dinner. But when I found her, she was just staring at the kitchen wall. She haltingly related the terminal nature of her medical condition and then, as if that weren’t enough, unloaded another bombshell. My dad, who knew of Mom’s condition, was not handling the news very well and had decided to file for divorce. I felt as if I had just been punched in the stomach. For a few seconds I could not move. School the next day, and for the next 13 weeks, was a disaster. I don’t remember much of the lectures. I only remember staring at my textbooks, thinking that this amazing woman had taught me to read and love such books, that we used to have a happy family, and that all of this was coming to an end. What she must have been feeling, much worse than I could ever fathom, she never related. Not knowing how to react, my friends soon withdrew from me even as I withdrew from them. I lost the ability to concentrate, my mind continually wandering back to childhood. My academic effort became a train wreck. I got the only D I would ever get in my school career, and I couldn’t have cared less.
Even after all these years, it is still tough to write about that time in my life. But it effectively illustrates Brain Rule #4: Stressed brains do not learn the same way as non-stressed brains.
My grief at least had an end point. In an emotionally unstable home, the stress seems never-ending. Consider the all-too-common case of children witnessing their parents fighting. The simple fact is that kids find unresolved marital conflict deeply disturbing. They cover their ears, stand motionless with clenched fists, cry, scowl, ask to leave, beg parents to stop. Study after study has shown that children—some as young as 6 months—react to adult arguments physiologically, such as with a faster heart rate and higher blood pressure. Kids of all ages who watch parents constantly fight have more stress hormones in their urine. They have more difficulty regulating their emotions, soothing themselves, and focusing their attention on others. They are powerless to stop the conflict, and the loss of control is emotionally crippling. As you know, perception of control is a powerful influence on the perception of stress. They are experiencing allostatic load.
Given that stress can powerfully affect learning, one might predict that children living in high-anxiety households would not perform as well academically as kids living in more nurturing households. That is exactly what studies show. Marital stress at home can negatively affect academic performance in almost every way measurable, and at nearly any age. Initial studies focused on grade-point averages over time, revealing striking disparities in achievement between kids whose parents are going through a divorce and control groups. Even when a couple stays together, children living in emotionally unstable homes get lower grades and do worse on standardized tests of math and reading. Careful subsequent investigations showed that it was the presence of overt conflict, not divorce, that predicted grade failure.
The stronger the degree of conflict, the greater the effect on performance. When teachers are asked to rate children’s intelligence and aptitude, children from homes with conflict score lower. Such children are three times more likely to be expelled from school or to become pregnant as teenagers, and five times more likely to live in poverty. As social activist Barbara Whitehead put it, writing for the 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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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 something important is missing. The stability of the home is completely ignored, even though it is one of the greatest predictors of future success at school. What if we took the home influence seriously?
My idea envisions an educational system where the first students are not the children but 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). This 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.
A week after birth, parents and tots would engage in a curriculum designed around the amazing cognitive abilities of infants, from language acquisition to the powerful need for luxurious amounts of active playtime. Parents would learn things like how to talk with their babies and what types of objects help children learn about the physical world. (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.
At the very least, couples (struggling or not) can seek out Gottman’s research-based marriage intervention. They are readily available to individuals.
Free family counseling and child care
Historically, people have done their best work—sometimes world-changing work—in their first few years after joining the workforce. In the field of economics, most Nobel Prize–winning research is done in the first 10 years of the recipient’s career. Albert Einstein published most of his creative ideas at the ripe old age of 26. It’s no wonder that companies want to recruit young intellectual talent.
The problem in today’s economy is that people typically are starting a family at the very time they are also supposed to be doing their best work. They are trying to be productive at some of the most stressful times of their lives. What if companies took this unhappy collision of life events seriously? They could offer Gottman’s intervention as a benefit for every newly married, or newly pregnant, employee. It might reverse the negative flow of family stress that normally enters the workplace at this time in a person’s life, enhance productivity, and perhaps even generate grateful, loyal employees.
Businesses also risk losing their best and brightest at this time, a decision especially hard on women. What if talented people didn’t have to choose between career and family? Businesses could offer on-site child care and flexible work schedules simply to retain employees at the very time they are most likely to be valuable. As this affects women the most, businesses immediately would achieve more gender balance. My guess is that such an offering would so affect productivity that the costs of providing child care are offset by the gains. Not only might businesses create more stable employees in the current generation, they might be raising far healthier children for work in the next.
Power to the people
Plenty of books discuss how to manage stress, and the good ones all say the key is to get control back into your life. For individuals, that may mean leaving a stressful job or an abusive relationship.
Companies could detect work-related problems by developing a questionnaire based on Jeansok Kim and David Diamond’s three-pronged definition of stress, to assess whether an employee feels powerless. The next step would be to change the situation.
It’s no coincidence that stress researchers, education scientists, and business professionals come to similar conclusions about the effects of toxic stress on people. We have known most of the salient points since Marty Seligman stopped shocking those dogs in the mid-1970s. It is time we made productive use of that horrible line of research.
Exercise
Even if you’re not experiencing the kind of out-of-control stress we’ve been discussing, you can minimize the stress in your daily life. Aerobic exercise, several times a week for 30 minutes each, is an excellent way to shore up your BDNF peacekeeping forces.
Brain Rule #4
Stressed brains don’t learn the same way.
• Your body’s defense system—the release of adrenaline and cortisol—is built for an immediate response to a serious but passing danger, such as a saber-toothed tiger. Chronic stress, such as hostility at home, dangerously deregulates a system built only to deal with short-term responses.
• Under chronic stress, adrenaline creates scars in your blood vessels that can cause a heart attack or stroke, and cortisol damages the cells of the hippocampus, crippling your ability to learn and remember.
• individually, the worst kind of stress is the feeling that you have no control over the problem—you are helpless.
• Emotional stress has huge impacts across society, on children’s ability to learn in school and on employees’ productivity at work.
