James' World 2

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In my 20s, I had a friend who was brilliant, charming, Ivy-educated, and rich, heir to a family fortune. I’ll call him Gallagher. He could do anything he wanted. He experimented, dabbling in neuroscience, law, philosophy, and other fields. But he was so critical, so picky, that he never settled on a career. Nothing was good enough for him. He never found love for the same reason. He also disparaged his friends’ choices, so much so that he alienated us. He ended up bitter and alone. At least that’s my guess. I haven’t spoken to Gallagher in decades.

There is such a thing as being too picky, especially when it comes to things like work, love, and nourishment (even the pickiest eater has to eat something). That’s the lesson I gleaned from Gallagher. But when it comes to answers to big mysteries, most of us aren’t picky enough. We settle on answers for bad reasons, for example, because our parents, priests, or professors believe it. We think we need to believe something, but actually, we don’t. We can, and should, decide that no answers are good enough. We should be agnostics.

Some people confuse agnosticism (not knowing) with apathy (not caring). Take Francis Collins, a geneticist who directs the National Institutes of Health. He is a devout Christian, who believes that Jesus performed miracles, died for our sins, and rose from the dead. In his 2006 bestseller The Language of God, Collins calls agnosticism a “cop-out.” When I interviewed him, I told him I am an agnostic and objected to “cop-out.”

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Scientists have a firm grasp on the purpose of certain automatic physical functions, like blinking, breathing, or digestion. When it comes to sleep, however, researchers still aren’t clear on why exactly your body needs to shut off every night. Details aside, one thing’s for sure: When you don’t sleep, your body revolts.

The effects of acute sleep deprivation—which is more akin to pulling an all-nighter than to getting just a few hours of sleep every night for weeks at a time (that’s chronic sleep deprivation)—generally kick in after 16 to 18 hours of being awake and get progressively worse with each proceeding hour. Your mind, heart, endocrine system, and immune system are all affected, malfunctioning in ways both subtle and severe.

The consequences of chronic sleep deprivation are far worse than one sleepless night. But the decision to pull an all-nighter just once can leave some serious damage in its wake.

Mind

When it comes to the effects of acute sleep deprivation, “It’s really all about the brain,” says Steven Feinsilver, director of sleep medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital and a leading sleep researcher. The first signal that your body is overtired will be a sluggish mind. Your reaction time will begin lagging around hour 18; after a full night without sleep, it will nearly triple—which, for context, is about the same as being legally drunk. Your ability to form memories will start deteriorating, and after a while, your capacity to create any new memories at all will shut off entirely.

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Photo: Bill Butcher

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When U.S. Marine Corp Officer Jake D.’s vehicle drove over an explosive device in Afghanistan, he looked down to see his legs almost completely severed below the knee. At that moment, he remembered a breathing exercise he had learned in a book for young officers. Thanks to that exercise, he was able to stay calm enough to check on his men, give orders to call for help, tourniquet his own legs, and remember to prop them up before falling unconscious. Later, he was told that had he not done so, he would have bled to death.

If a simple breathing exercise could help Jake under such extreme duress, similar techniques can certainly help the rest of us with our more common workplace stresses. The combination of the Covid-19 pandemic and battles for social justice have only exacerbated the anxiety that many of us feel every day, and studies show that this stress is interfering with our ability to do our best work. But with the right breathing exercises, you can learn to handle your stress and manage negative emotions.

In two recently published studies, we explored several different techniques and found that a breathing exercise was most effective for both immediate and long-term stress reduction.

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Illustration by Giulia Neri

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