Article written by Forbes Magazine
Go Back To The Office—Your Brain Depends On It
Senior Contributor
Leadership Strategy
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More than a year of working from home has overtaxed our brains.
It’s not just about missing being social. It’s not just about emotional health, though prolonged feelings of anxiety or lethargy are strong motivators to be sure. It’s also about our nervous systems.
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Our brains need to get back to the office.
This Is Your Brain on Covid
Much has already been written about the emotional and mental tolls exacted by prolonged periods of working from home. The COVID-19 pandemic has made us lonely and depressed, but there’s a third category of harm: neurological.
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This quarantine from in-person contact with colleagues interrupts our ability to process stress and maintain a sense of inner stability. That damages our neurological health.
Generally speaking our brains run on two programs — stressed and relaxed. The stressed mode is built for survival, alerting us when a potential threat looms. The relaxed mode engages during the ordinary ups-and-downs of a normal day. In an optimal state of brain activation, we can handle the typical highs and lows of everyday life without our brains working too hard.
Dr. Daniel Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and executive director of the Mindsight Institute renowned for his research into interpersonal neurobiology, calls this optimal state of brain activation our “window of tolerance.” In our “window of tolerance,” our neurological system maintains a state of calm arousal. In other words, we’ve got enough get-up-and-go to get things done and weather the occasional hiccup without feeling overwhelmed, panicked or shut-down.
The COVID-19 pandemic bombarded our nervous systems with an unusual and unsettling array of stimuli and stressors — a life-threatening virus, economic collapse, and unprecedented uncertainty. Business leaders took on a whole new role as carers-in-chief — suddenly facing a workforce in desperate need of empathy more than strategy or operational excellence.
This extreme pressure knocked our brains out of our window of tolerance. It was beyond the capacity of our nervous systems to hold steady.
If your nervous system enters hyperarousal, you may feel anxious or irritable, and you may have had trouble falling or staying asleep. Your mind is spinning on overdrive. If your nervous system enters hypoarousal, you may feel like you’ve “hit a wall,” and you may experience exhaustion, depression, and at times, hopelessness. You might feel a desire to sleep more than usual.
Under this much stress, it is incredibly challenging to bring ourselves back into the “window of tolerance” on our own. We need in-person contact with other people to calm our brains down — to return to our brain’s center of well-being. We need to meet nervous system to nervous system.
Our brains aren’t made to go it alone. We are biologically wired to face the world together. Too long by ourselves and our nervous systems go off kilter. In the presence of others, our nervous systems stabilize. So sharing laughter in the breakroom, gathering around a conference table with friendly colleagues, even chatting about nothing much with a calm stranger in an elevator, helps us to recalibrate.
Rethinking Work from Home
As more people get vaccinated against COVID-19, a return to the workplace is certainly possible. Yet this year has shown us that working from home is also viable. Now corporate leaders must sort through the options of remote work, hybrid work or everybody back in the pool. Many workplaces will offer a choice.
Opting to work from home is tempting in certain ways. We have these turbo-charged home offices now with great lighting and high precision sound. We don’t commute. We save loads of money on dry-cleaning and salon appointments. We eat healthier now.
Brain science tells us there’s a downside.
We need to return to the office and its variety of in-person interactions to help stabilize our brain activity and steady our nervous systems.
It’s neurological.
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