Read Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders Online
Authors: Srinivasan S. Pillay
The application
: Managers, leaders, and coaches can all understand that their brains (and the brains of the people they work with) “pick up” on anxiety that may be completely outside of their awareness. Due to the nature of business challenges for the executive leader, the default state of the brain will be to look out for danger. This can be distracting and can profoundly affect the thinking of the leader. A decent dose of positive psychology can therefore help their brains move out of this default mode. We will examine the techniques for this at a later point, but for now it is important to know that even brilliant leaders may not be able to solve their problems if the amygdala is completely bombarded by threats, fear, and anxiety.
Before we examine what this psychology would entail and how it impacts the brain, let’s take a look at what happens in the brain when we focus on negative things.
The Impact of Negative Thinking on the Brain
The concept:
When coaches work with leaders or managers, or even when coaches, managers, and leaders work with themselves, one of the major challenges is to help leaders move out of worry mode into problem-solving mode. As I described earlier, we need to know how to detach from our problems. Leaders often mistake staring at the problem as solving the problem, and to an extent, they are correct in that staring can create insights. However, when worry becomes fixed and obsessively ruminative, this can significantly affect the productivity of a leader’s life. To better work with one’s self or others under these situations, it is helpful to understand the basic brain biology of focusing on the negative. The following experiments describe what is going on in the brain when we are doing this.
Concept 1
A number of experiments have shown that when we attend to pain, the subjective experience of that pain is greater than when we do not attend to that pain. One study examined subjects who received a fixed amount of pain under two conditions: In the first condition, subjects rated the pain (attending) while in the other condition, subjects performed a distracting arithmetic task. This experiment showed that not focusing on the pain resulted in lower pain ratings but higher ACC activation, thus demonstrating that an internal conflict between focusing on the pain versus focusing on the arithmetic task activated the ACC.
16
Another study had a similar finding. It also showed that this increased ACC activation during distraction correlated with decreased activation in the pain centers in the brain.
17
These findings have been supported by other studies as well.
18
Conclusion:
These experiments point to the fact that if we focus on pain, the ACC is not in a state of conflict, but we experience the pain more acutely. When we are distracted from this pain, the ACC is in a state of conflict detection (or distraction) and the pain experienced is lessened. We can use this information to justify decreasing “brain pain” by focusing attention elsewhere if leaders or managers are distressed. This pain relief can also free up the brain’s thinking and decision-making resources to be available for important business-related decisions. Thus, focusing on neutral or positive things rather than on the negative decreases discomfort and likely improves thinking. The important idea here is not to focus
on
the pain, but
away
from the pain. Thus, “increased ACC activation,” per se, is not always bad: When it reflects a diminution of attention in general, it may be deleterious, but when it indicates distraction from pain, it is positive.
Ann C. runs a “fund of funds” company that essentially invested people’s money in a group of hedge funds. When the market was down, she would crash with it, often taking time off and not going to work. Facing this downturn was too difficult for her. However, leaving work
cemented this attitude, and when she was alone, all she could do was focus on the diminishing returns. When she talked to me about the difficulties of her mood shifts, I pointed out that her mood fluctuations were related in part to the inflexibility of her attention. She had fixed her attention on all the things that were not going well, thus paralyzing her ACC. When she eventually learned the habit of shifting this attention and her ACC away from the difficulties in the company, she was actually able to focus her attention on growing the company—getting more clients and paying more attention to the performance of the hedge fund managers. Decreasing her brain pain allowed her planning brain to become more engaged.
Concept 2
The direction of activity of the ACC is not in itself indicative of a better outcome. In fact, we are still trying to work out the precise meaning of increased and decreased activation of the brain regions. Instead, when experiments tie a specific direction of activity with an emotional state, we have a brain basis for understanding why we feel a particular way. For example, although distraction increases ACC activity and decreases “brain pain,” social exclusion may increase ACC activation
19
,
20
as well as amygdala activation.
21
However, increased emotional support under situations of social exclusion (see
Chapter 3
, “The Neuroscience of Social Intelligence: Guiding Leaders and Managers to Effective Relationships,” for more detail) decreases ventral ACC activation and distress. In addition, left lateral PFC activation is also increased by emotional support.
19
Although we clearly need to examine such mixed findings in more depth before we know what they mean, the basic concept remains true. That is, with physical pain, distraction relieves distress by increasing ACC activation, whereas with social pain, emotional support relieves distress by decreasing ACC activation. In both cases, the ACC subserves the function of defocusing on the pain: With physical pain, the increased activation is due to a conflict in demands on the brain between focusing on the pain versus on the task at hand, whereas with social pain, the emotional support calms the ACC and amygdala down. In both cases, what we see is that the brain systems for pain reduction are engaged when not focusing on pain.
Conclusion:
Focusing on support rather than social pain is helpful to the brain and frees up thinking resources by calming down the disruptive effects of the amygdala. When Ann C. felt more supported, she was able to let go of her attachment to the negative. It is peculiar but completely understandable that nervous people feel more comforted when they attach to negative things because they feel as though they are safer if they keep their eye on what threatens them. Ann C., for example, had many other situations in her life that made her anxious. She had a troubled relationship with her sister and her mother, but because she could not deal with the impact of this, she chose to have the same emotions without as much of a sense of lack of control by attaching to what worried her at work.
The application:
With these experiments, we now know the following: (1) Focusing on the negative or painful situations increases brain pain, even when the pain remains the same! With the exact same situation, taking your attention away from the pain can decrease the feeling of discomfort by changing the way your brain registers the pain. This will free up thinking resources for better decision making. (2) It may make sense to have a retreat away from the environment that makes people focus on pain. With their brains registering pain by association, it will be difficult to free up thinking resources in an environment associated with pain. By the distracting effect of a retreat, leaders may be better able to not focus on the automatic pain associated with the context of their work environments. (3) Social support helps focus thinking by calming down the amygdala; when you notice a decrement in performance, consider social support as a way to improve thinking.
Concept 3
The concept:
A recent review described multiple studies that showed that negative mood states can increase the sensation of pain.
22
Negative mood states interact with the pain system at multiple levels in the brain. For example, in a series of experiments on patients with chronic lower back pain, Crombez et al. (1999) showed that pain-related fear is a better predictor of pain-related disability than pain intensity. That is, fear adds to the disability of pain. Whatever the pain state of the leader, fear adds to this. Similarly, many studies have shown that positive mood reduces pain perception
23
–
25
and negative mood increases pain perception.
26
,
27
However, under certain situations of stress, induced fear sensitivity to pain may be reduced.
28
By and large, though, negative emotion increases sensitivity to pain. In the brain, this sensitivity to fear registers in the amygdala, ACC, periaqueductal gray (PAG), and insula.
The application:
It is relevant to remember that negative emotion registers in the brain in a manner that taps into brain pathways that enhance pain perception. When Ann C. was focusing on all things negative, it made it feel as though things were much worse than they actually were. It was like putting a magnifying glass on the downturns. Thus, we now know that focusing on pain increases pain perception, but staying in a negative emotional state also does this. This is a motivation for sculpting out time for positive reflections, even at the most negative times, so that brain pain can be reduced to free up thinking pathways. When your brain is stuck on the pain, you should practice having it change its focus of attention to something else.
Concept 4
The concept:
Worry, the brain’s response to fear, is thought of as a response of the brain to block out negative emotions that are in the unconscious.
29
It has been described as “a strategy of cognitive
avoidance, in which internal verbalization acts to suppress threatening emotional imagery.”
30
This recent brain imaging study showed that the time to transfer negative (but not positive or neutral) emotional information from the left to the right hemisphere in individuals who worry is increased probably due to disruptions of the brain-bridge (corpus callosum) that connects both left and right hemispheres. Thus, in this case, we see overtly how thinking is slowed down by worry, and that worry is actually a way to avoid processing relevant negative information. Therefore, leaders may miss out on important information if they are absorbed in worry.
The application:
We can let people with whom we are working know that worry probably leads to them missing important negative information (such as risk) that may be relevant to their decisions. (This information often is unconscious.) They need to understand that worry disrupts the brain-bridge and slows transfer time across from the left to the right hemisphere. As a result, it just takes up time without bearing the fruit for solutions.
Why Should Leaders Be Optimistic?
When working with leaders who are profoundly pessimistic or unable to move forward because they are ruminating on their own or other people’s errors, we are often faced with the challenge of encouraging them to look on the bright side. It is highly likely that a leader’s productivity is being affected by his or her negative attitude or that the leader’s thinking is not clear or focused on finding a solution. Leaders or managers who are constantly worried see this worry as an attempt to find a solution, but may in fact be stuck in this worry in a counterproductive manner.
When people hear the word “optimism,” they roll their eyes. In this economy, with the difficulties of balancing home and work life and making ends meet, just the idea of optimism seems tiring to
most. Many business leaders are practical, and they believe that optimism is for the birds. They feel as though optimism is “pie in the sky”—unrealistic positivity that is based on nothing. With neuroscience, we can entertain a radically different view of optimism:
What if optimism were not the result of success but the cause of it? How could this be the case? Most leaders wonder, in the face of increasing challenges, why should optimism matter at all? Here are some examples of optimism being important in the corporate world:
• Optimism is important when dejection decreases productivity.
• Optimism is important when there is a threat of people leaving and attrition of the workforce.
• Optimism is important when pessimism blocks action.
• Optimism is important when there is no motivation to work.
• Optimism is important when there is a need for a temporary solution to the high anxiety that blocks working.
The concept:
Hope and optimism are not “soft skills.” They are necessary brain adjustments to allow your brain to navigate the path toward success. The experiments that follow highlight some of the important findings with regard to hope and optimism in the corporate world.
The Concepts and Their Applications to Coaches, Managers, and Leaders
The following concepts explain why optimism may impact business challenges positively.
Concept 1
In medical experiments, the effects of certain drugs on the brain are usually compared with inactive drugs or sugar pills, and
researchers usually correlate this with how effective the drug is. The idea is that if sugar pills affect the brain significantly, why are they working and in whom are they working?