NL Summit 2010 Insight - The Neural Challenges of the Senior Leader - Sleep, Stress & Performance
Jessica Payne is the Director of the Sleep, Stress & Memory Lab at the University of Notre Dame. Jessica co-presented a breakout session on Day 2 of the NeuroLeadership Summit 2010 with Christina Lafferty, Professor Behavioral Science & Director of Research & Writing at the National Defense University, USA. The session, ‘The neural challenges of the senior leader – sleep, stress & performance’ looked into what neuroscience research is revealing about the optimal brain state for learning, performance, leadership and behavior change.
The session explored three factors the brain needs to order to function at its optimum:
1. Moderate stress
2. Good nourishing sleep
3. Positive affect
As all these areas intersect and are neurobiologically linked, targeting any one of these areas for improvement has the benefit of affecting the others.
Stress
Research reveals that the brain operates at it’s optimum under moderate stress. Too low you lose alertness and too high you fall into anxiety and disorganization. High levels of stress can impair the brain, and have tangible effects on the physical body and brain and on mental and emotional health. This impairment is selective and unfortunately targets the areas that we need most in order to process information efficiently, learn and perform cognitively at our optimum.
There is evidence to suggest that by practicing activities such as relaxation, mindfulness meditation, exercise and deep breathing we can reduce cortisol levels (stress hormones) in the brain and improve regulatory control over the stress response system in general.
Sleep
Sleep is critical for optimal neural performance. The sleeping brain is smart and very active. During sleep the brain extracts what is essential and important and makes calculations of what to retain and what to let go of, what to remember and what to forget and helps us regulate our emotions.
Sleep allows us to harness a huge amount of unconscious or implicit knowledge that can’t be accessed when the brain is ‘online’. Effectively, during sleep, the brain is allowed to ‘run-a-muck’, searching for connections that don’t make sense and defying the rules of time and space. Sorting through, mapping out, reconnecting and recombining information that we know, yet don’t have conscious access to when we are ‘online’. Jessica hypothesizes that the purpose of this process is to allow you to find connections that you wouldn’t be able to find otherwise.
Emerging evidence suggests that sleep not only consolidates your memories and helps you to learn and remember things but also helps you reorganize that information in a way that gives rise to creative cognition and insights and allows you to make inferential jumps that you can’t make during wakefulness.
Positive Affect
Postive affect is extremely powerful to the brain, lab results indicate that minor affect manipulations, eg a smile, can have a huge impact. The impact on cognition include: facilitating memory for neutral and positive information (instead of negative), increasing verbal fluency, positively impact the strategies we use in decision making and improving creativity and problem solving.
In conclusion Jessica suggests that anything we can do to lead with a scientifically informed understanding of the brain, taking into account the brains limits and harnessing its strengths, is sure to improve performance, dramatically enhance leadership and make for a more productive workplace and happier employees.
Click here to access the webinar recording for a full debrief of the 2010 Summit sessions
For more on Jessica's work visit http://psychology.nd.edu/people/JessicaPayne.shtml
To order the 2010 Summit recordings and accompanying slides click here
Labels: Jessica Payne, Neural challenges of the senior leader, neuroleadership summit, summit
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