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Positive affect—language revealing that tweeters felt active, engaged, and hopeful—generally rose in the morning, plummeted in the afternoon, and climbed back up again in the early evening.
even when the researchers factored in economic news (a slowdown in China that hindered a company’s exports) or firm fundamentals (a company that reported abysmal quarterly earnings), afternoon calls “were more negative, irritable, and combative” than morning calls.
When we wake up, our body temperature slowly rises. That rising temperature gradually boosts our energy level and alertness—and
“inspiration paradox”—the idea that “innovation and creativity are greatest when we are not at our best,
After genetics, the most important factor in one’s chronotype is age. As parents know and lament, young children are generally larks. They wake up early, buzz around throughout the day, but don’t last very long beyond the early evening. Around puberty, those larks begin morphing into owls. They wake up later—at least on free days—gain energy during the late afternoon and evening, and fall asleep well after their parents. By some estimates, teenagers’ midpoint of sleep is 6 a.m. or even 7 a.m., not exactly in synch with most high school start times.
The problem is that our corporate, government, and education cultures are configured for the 75 or 80 percent of people who are larks or third birds. Owls are like left-handers in a right-handed world—forced
people are less likely to lie and cheat on tasks in the morning than they are later in the day.
drink that first cup an hour or ninety minutes after waking up, once our cortisol production has peaked and the caffeine can do its magic.
cortisol. Yes, it’s a stress hormone. But it also enhances learning.
But afternoons can be a dangerous time to be a patient.
Doctors, for example, are much more likely to prescribe antibiotics, including unnecessary ones, for acute respiratory infections in the afternoons than in the mornings.
sleep-related vehicle accidents peak twice during every twenty-four-hour period. One is between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., the middle of the night. The other is between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m., the middle of the afternoon.
When the Danish students had a twenty- to thirty-minute break “to eat, play, and chat” before a test, their scores did not decline. In fact, they increased. As the researchers note, “A break causes an improvement that is larger than the hourly deterioration.”12 That is, scores go down after noon. But scores go up by a higher amount after breaks.
it, “If there were a break after every hour, test scores would actually improve over the course of the day.”13
High performers, its research concludes, work for fifty-two minutes and then break for seventeen minutes.
five-minute naps did little to reduce fatigue, increase vigor, or sharpen thinking. But ten-minute naps had positive effects that lasted nearly three hours.
Since caffeine takes about twenty-five minutes to enter the bloodstream, they were getting a secondary boost from the drug by the time their naps were ending.
Most expert musicians and athletes begin practicing in earnest around nine o’clock in the morning, hit their peak during the late morning, break in the afternoon, and then practice for a few more hours in the evening.
“Adolescents who get less sleep than they need are at higher risk for depression, suicide, substance abuse and car crashes,”
While younger students score higher on standardized tests scheduled in the morning, teenagers do better later in the day.
the optimal time for most college classes is after 11 a.m.11
Why the resistance? A key reason is that starting later is inconvenient for adults. Administrators must reconfigure bus schedules. Parents might not be able to drop off their kids on the way to work. Teachers must stay later in the afternoon. Coaches might have less time for sports practices.
If you’re trying to encourage people to eat healthier, a campaign calling for Meatless Mondays will be far more effective than one advocating Vegan Thursdays.
The unlucky graduates who’d begun their careers in a sluggish economy earned less straight out of school than the lucky ones like me who’d graduated in robust times—and it often took them two decades to catch up.
one of the fastest routes to higher pay early in a career is to switch jobs fairly often.
A 2017 study found that economic conditions at the beginning of managers’ careers have lasting effects on their becoming a CEO.
Those who began their careers during a recession do become CEOs—but they become CEOs of smaller firms and earn less money than their counterparts who graduated during boom years. Recession graduates, the research found, also have more conservative management styles, perhaps another legacy of less certain beginnings.
“in counties containing teaching hospitals, fatal medication errors spiked by 10% in July and in no other month.
If you’re not the default choice—for example, if you’re pitching against a firm that already has the account you’re seeking—going first can help you get a fresh look from the decision-makers.3
If you’re interviewing for a job and you’re up against several strong candidates, you might gain an edge from being first.
Mialon also found that the more a couple spent on its wedding and any engagement ring, the more likely they were to divorce.)
In short, we dip in the middle because we’re lousy forecasters. In youth, our expectations are too high. In older age, they’re too low.
A team ahead at halftime—in any sport—is more likely than its opponent to win the game.
a six-point halftime lead gives a team about an 80 percent probability of winning the game. However, Berger and Pope detected an exception to the rule: Teams that were behind by just one point were more likely to win.
Don’t break the chain (the Seinfeld technique). Jerry Seinfeld makes a habit of writing every day. Not just the days when he feels inspired—every single damn day. To maintain focus, he prints a calendar with all 365 days of the year. He marks off each day he writes with a big red X. “After a few days, you’ll have a chain,”
By some estimates, about half the people in a typical marathon are first-timers.1
Alter and Hershfield found that 9-enders are overrepresented among first-time marathoners by a whopping 48 percent.
So a shorter colonoscopy in which the final moments are painful is remembered as being worse than a longer colonoscopy that happens to end less unpleasantly even if the latter procedure delivers substantially more total pain.
Several studies over several decades have found that roughly four out of five people “prefer to begin with a loss or negative outcome and ultimately end with a gain or positive outcome, rather than the reverse.”
Research by Alex Pentland at MIT “has shown that the more cohesive and communicative a team is—the more they chat and gossip—the more they get done.”
found elevated pain thresholds when people rowed together but less elevated ones when individuals rowed alone.
Operating in synch expands our openness to outsiders and makes us more likely to engage in “pro-social” behavior.
The teacher divides students into five-person “jigsaw groups.” Then the teacher divides that day’s lesson into five segments. For instance, if the class is studying the life of Abraham Lincoln, those sections might be Lincoln’s childhood, his early political career, his becoming president at the dawn of the U.S. Civil War, his signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and his assassination. Each student is responsible for researching one of these segments.
Nostalgia can even increase physiological feelings of comfort and warmth. We’re more likely to feel nostalgic on chillier days.
Strong-future languages such as English, Italian, and Korean require speakers to make sharp distinctions between the present and the future. Weak-future languages such as Mandarin, Finnish, and Estonian draw little or often no contrast at all.
Other research has found that simply thinking of the future in smaller time units—days, not years—“made people feel closer to their future self and less likely to feel that their current and future selves were not really the same person.”
