A study of 171 people in the legal profession6 showed that after-work recovery was lower on days in which people experienced rudeness at work, and that this continued to the next morning. I told you: it’s a hangover. It can lead to disaster. It can even, if unchecked, lead to depression. Even just on a basic scale, concentration plummets, taking productivity with it. It’s even been shown that people learning new skills – the ukulele, say, or Esperanto – couldn’t focus on these tasks as well as they could on ‘normal’ days.
