How to Be Healthier, Happier and More Productive: It’s All in the Timing

from wsj.com 

You’ve probably made a few New Year’s resolutions, solemn promises to yourself to behave better in 2018. You might have pondered how you’re going to accomplish those goals, who could help you and why you need to change.

But if you’re like most people—and social science suggests that you and I are like most people—you’ve neglected a question that could help you actually stick to those resolutions: “When?”
We all know that timing matters. But most of our decisions on this front are intuitive and haphazard. Timing, we believe, is an art.

In fact, timing is really a science. For several decades, researchers in dozens of fields—from economics to anesthesiology to social psychology—have been unearthing the hidden science of timing. In randomized controlled experiments, field studies and the analysis of massive data sets, they are exploring questions that span the human experience. How do beginnings, midpoints and endings alter our actions and memories? How do groups synchronize in time? How do even the verb tenses we use affect our behavior? Time, they have discovered, shapes our productivity, health and well-being in powerful but often invisible ways.

Much of what we consider “natural” units of time—seconds, hours, weeks—are really fences that our ancestors constructed to corral time. But one unit remains beyond our control: We inhabit a planet that turns on its axis at a steady speed in a regular pattern, exposing us to consistent periods of light and dark. The day is perhaps the most important way that we divide, configure and evaluate our time. By understanding the science of the day—and by giving more attention to the question of “when”—we can improve the effectiveness and success of our resolutions.

So how can we harness time to be healthier, happier and more productive?
Resolution: Get a promotion, get a raise or otherwise do well at work. Each year, many of us vow to get more done at work and perhaps even make a few creative breakthroughs. Yet many of us don’t realize how much the time of day matters to our performance.

Scientists began measuring the effect of the time of day on human brain power more than a century ago, when the pioneering German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted experiments showing that people learned and remembered strings of nonsense syllables more effectively in the morning than at night. Since then, researchers have continued that investigation for a range of mental pursuits. They’ve drawn three big conclusions.

First, our cognitive abilities don’t remain static over the course of a day. During the 16 or so hours we’re awake, they change—often in a regular, foreseeable manner. We are smarter, faster and more creative in some parts of the day than others.

Second, these daily fluctuations can be extreme. “The performance change between the daily high point and the daily low point can be equivalent to the effect on performance of drinking the legal limit of alcohol,” write Russell Foster, a neuroscientist and chronobiologist at the University of Oxford, and Leon Kreitzman in their book “Rhythms of Life.” Other research has shown that time-of-day effects can explain 20% of the variance in human performance on cognitive undertakings.

Third, how we do depends on what we’re doing. We’re more effective at some tasks early in the day and at other tasks later in the day.

From big-data analyses of 500 million tweets to studies led by Nobel Prize-winning scientists, research has shown that we generally experience the day in three acts: a peak, a trough and a rebound. Most of us experience the pattern in that order. But the roughly one in five of us who have evening “chronotypes”—people who are night owls—tend to proceed in reverse order. (To determine whether you’re an owl, consider a day when you don’t have to awaken to an alarm clock. What is the midpoint between the time you go to sleep and the time you wake up? If it’s 5:30 a.m. or later, you’re probably an owl.)

During the peak, our ability to focus is at its best. When we wake up, our body temperature slowly rises. That rising temperature gradually boosts our energy level and alertness—and that, in turn, enhances our executive functioning, our ability to concentrate and our powers of deduction. For most of us, these sharp-minded analytic capacities crest in the late morning or around noon. This is when we are most vigilant, when we can keep distractions from penetrating our cerebral gates. That makes the peak the best time to tackle work that requires heads-down attention and analysis, such as writing a legal brief or auditing financial statements.

Vigilance, though, has its limits. Alertness and energy levels tend to plummet during the afternoons. And with that drop comes a corresponding fall in our ability to remain focused and constrain our inhibitions. This is the second stage: The trough, which usually occurs in the early to midafternoon.

The effects of the trough can be significant. In a 2016 study, Harvard University’s Francesca Gino and two Danish researchers examined four years of standardized test results for two million students in Denmark and matched scores to the time of day the students took the test. They found that students randomly assigned to take the tests in the afternoon scored considerably lower than those who took the test in the morning—an effect equivalent to missing two weeks of school.

The trough is an especially dangerous time for health-care professionals and their patients. In a study published in 2006 in Quality and Safety in Health Care, researchers at Duke Medical Center reviewed about 90,000 surgeries at the hospital and found that harmful anesthesia errors were three times more likely in procedures that began at 3 p.m. than at 8 a.m.

The afternoon trough is the Bermuda Triangle of our days—the place where effectiveness and good intentions disappear. This is the time to do your mindless administrative work, such as answering email, filing papers and filling out expense reports.

The third stage is the rebound, which for most of us occurs in the late afternoon and early evening. During this stage, we tend to excel at a different type of work. In 2011, two American psychologists, Mareike Weith and Rose Zacks, posed what are called “insight problems”—which require creative, rather than algorithmic, thinking and have nonobvious, surprising solutions—to 428 people, about half of whom were vigilant morning thinkers. These participants fared better on these problems not during their supposedly more optimal mornings but much later in the day—a phenomenon the researchers dubbed “the inspiration paradox.”

In the late afternoons and early evenings, most people are somewhat less vigilant than during the peak, but more alert and in a better mood than during the trough. That combination has advantages. A boosted mood leads to greater openness. A slight reduction in vigilance lets in a few distractions—but those distractions can help us spot connections that we might have missed when our filters were tighter. So we should move brainstorming sessions and other creative pursuits to the rebound stage. (Again, because night owls move through the day in the reverse order, their rebound period is the morning.)

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