Whether you own a small business on a local "main" street or merely shop at one, know this: small businesses make up a majority of local economies and are imperative to the well-being of communities. Their owners are the ones who support local initiatives, little-league teams, PTAs, Chambers of Commerce and more. Most likely they are a neighbor and a friend. Shop Local shouldn't be a slogan, it should be a lifestyle.

Why Business Retention and Expansion Plans are Important for Downtowns

By Stephanie Troller, Colorado Main Street Program, Department of Local Affairs | 
From Main Street Story of the Week  | December 11, 2015 | 






Small businesses are the driving force in today’s economy, especially in downtowns.   According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), there are 28 million small businesses in the U.S. which account for 54% of all U.S. sales.  Additionally, small businesses provide 55% of all jobs and 66% of net new jobs since the 1970s (https://www.sba.gov/content/small-business-trends-impact). Therefore, it’s critical for all communities and downtowns to have a business retention and expansion (BRE) plan in place to help local small businesses, providing them with opportunities to be successful. 

After all, small businesses help increase the number of local jobs, preserve or increase the local tax base, increase property values, enhance the community’s image, increase consumer confidence, and diversify the local economy.

It is easier and cheaper to keep an existing business than it is to replace one. A business retention and expansion plan, properly implemented, not only helps keep businesses open but possibly even helps them expand.  For local governments, think of the sales and property tax lost by having a vacant building.  For Main Street practitioners, think of the image of what an empty building conveys to consumers and how that affects the overall confidence for investment in your downtown.  There are four major components to consider when designing a local BRE plan.



1. Team Building and Partnership Development.  As with any major community or economic development endeavor, it is important to form a strong team to help carry out the plan.  When building a BRE team, consider the skills and resources that are needed in order to serve the local businesses.  Is industry knowledge represented on the team?  Is the team outcome oriented?   How can partner agencies help? Can they provide services to businesses?  When forming your team, consider training and utilizing local volunteers for business visits.  By using local volunteers, connections and relationships are made stronger and using volunteer labor can help a program’s budget as well.  Make sure all partners understand and acknowledge the purpose of the program.

2. Relationship Building. With a team in place, outreach to businesses can begin.  The first efforts should focus on building trust with business owners and managers.  Once a relationship is formed, start collecting data about the business and its needs. There are several ways to collect data: focus groups, on-site business visits, or surveys. Use local community knowledge to establish a rapport with the owners and managers. Make sure to communicate the intentions of the BRE plan and follow up on any commitments made.

3. Responding to Business Needs.  After data is collected, it will need to be analyzed and understood.  First, respond to any “red-flags.”  If there is a business in risk of failing, what can be done to help?   Assistance to individual businesses at this stage will need customized solutions.  Secondly, use the information collected to create technical assistance, marketing assistance, or operational assistance programs.  If possible, create financial assistance programs geared to help businesses expand. Lastly, this data can inform long-term development programs and help local governments create policy for retention, expansion, attraction programs and funding.

4. Management and Follow-up. You will need human capital, a sufficient budget, and technology to ensure that business visitations and the technical assistance are effectively managed.  As with any program, if there is a budget, hire a coordinator or dedicate existing staff time to oversee the BRE plan. Make sure to maintain information on workforce, technical, and financial resources available to businesses. Maintain a database about the businesses and their needs and make sure to market the program and its services to the entire business community. As with any good plan, make sure it is measurable and flexible.  Make adjustments as needed.



The local businesses in your downtown are as important to placemaking as much as, if not more than, the buildings they operate in.  They provide the experiences and interactions where visitors have a memorable meal or buy an artisan gift that can’t be found anywhere else.  Small businesses also generate the sales tax which, in part, funds local governments’ operations and infrastructure investments.  If you don’t have healthy businesses, you can’t have a healthy community.  Properly implemented BRE plans can help businesses become more competitive and remove local obstacles that interfere with the success of business. 


Stephanie Troller has over 11 years working with rural and urban communities in both Colorado and New Mexico. Her experience includes business retention and recruitment, planning and implementation, housing, project and program management.  She specializes in economic development and is passionate about helping communities achieve their short term and long term goals.

I watched my wife make holiday cookies with my four year old grandson. She was teaching him how much of each ingredient to add and, frankly, he often missed that 1/4 tsp from fully making it into the bowl. "What a mess" I thought, "those cookies were not going to taste the way they should." As it turns out, there's more to the thought of letting a child help, and make a mess as an article in SLATE points out. Oh, and the cookies tasted fine.

The Value of a Mess

You should let your kids totally botch household chores from an early age.

By Jessica Lahey / SLATE

Mom and Dad’s little helper.

Photo illustration by Juliana Jiménez. Photo by Thinkstock.

Excerpted from The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed by Jessica Lahey. Out now from HarperCollins Publishers.

A friend told me recently after she’d had a car accident that left her unscathed but chastened that in the midst of the crash, she’d realized she needed to make lists of all the small details her family would need to know if she was not there to take care of them. Her son needed to know that his soccer clothes had to go into the laundry  Sunday so he’d have what he needed for Monday’s practice.

Her daughter needed to know which fabrics can go in the dryer and which cannot and what happens when wool sweaters sneak into the dryer by mistake. The kids should know how to fix the toilet when it clogs, and reset the water pressure tank after a power outage, and change a fuse, and winterize the lawn mower, and the million other things she’d taken care of herself rather than burden her kids with.

I pointed out that if she were to die in a car accident, the location of the reset lever on the water tank would be the least of her family’s worries, but I understood her point. She’d gotten a glimpse of just how paralyzed and incompetent her kids would be in her absence. When we don’t allow our children to participate in the business of running a household, they are quite helpless without us. Worse, we don’t expect competence from them, and when they do give household duties a shot, we swoop in, and we fix.

We swoop in after our kids make their beds and smooth out the lumps and bumps. We swoop in after they fold the laundry and straighten the misfolded towels. I’ve actually taken the sponge out of my son’s hands because he was making more of a mess of the milk he was supposed to be cleaning up. I understand the impulse to want things done better, or faster, or straighter. But what’s more important—that the dishes are immaculate, or that your child develops a sense of purpose and pride because he’s finally contributing in a real and valuable way to the family?

That the bed is made without wrinkles, or that your child learns to make household tasks a part of his daily routine? All this swooping and fixing make for emotionally, intellectually, and socially handicapped children, unsure of their direction or purpose without an adult on hand to guide them.

Just because your child has never done the laundry, or loaded the dishwasher, does not mean she is not capable of doing just that. And kids want to feel capable. They are creative and resourceful, and even tasks that seem unmanageable due to limits of heights or dexterity can be accomplished with the aid of a step stool and simple directions. Those dishes that belong in the high cabinets above the counter? It took a half hour, but when my younger son was first assigned dishwasher duty at 6 or 7, he dragged a chair from the living room to reach the shelves.

One by one, he put those plates away where they belonged. When I had asked him to “unload the dishwasher,” I’d forgotten about the high shelves but he’d figured a way around that obstacle himself. The look of pride he gave me when I said, “Wait—you did all of it? Even those plates?” was utterly gratifying. Failure has been a part of that process, of course. Since that first day, he has broken dishes in the process of learning how best to carry, stack, and load them, but who cares? I’d trade 10 broken plates for his smiles of competence and pride.

Explain to your children from an early age that you expect them to contribute to the running of the household. If they are older and have never been asked to contribute before, be honest. Cop to the fact that you failed yourself and have been underestimating their abilities all along. Set clear expectations, and hold your kids accountable when they don’t meet those expectations. If your daughter’s job is to clean up her place after meals and rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, and she forgets, leave the dishes out. Explain to her that the once–easily-rinsable food dries over time, and it will be much harder to clean it off when she finally gets around to it, but the dishes will remain on the table, waiting for her to clean them up.

Even if that dish sits on the table for two days, don’t nag or hover, and absolutely no swooping or fixing, but be present and help problem-solve. Be there to help if your son is not sure about a cycle setting on the washer or if something goes horribly awry with the fabric softener, but find something absorbing to do while he goes about the work. If you go behind your child’s back and redo the chore he has just finished to his satisfaction, even if it’s after he’s left the room, he’ll notice. You will be telling him through your actions not only that he is incompetent but that you will finish the job if he’s careless.

And no bribes or rewards of cash payment—those kinds of short-term incentives can be used to kick-start motivation but don’t work as a long-term strategy. When I praised my son for putting those plates away in the high cupboards, I was not praising him for taking on the task, because he knew I expected that of him. Rather, I was praising him for the extra effort, determination, and perseverance he showed when he hit a roadblock.

Even toddlers, with their diminutive hands and limited attention spans, can begin to explore their abilities and competence in shared household responsibilities. When dealing with younger children, be sure to make your expectations clear and age-appropriate. Communicate family participation as a privilege, or even a game, and toddlers can accomplish more than you might expect. Here are some examples of the kinds of tasks toddlers are capable of learning:

• Put their dirty clothes in a basket or hamper.
• Dress themselves with clothing that’s not too complicated.
• Fold simple items of clothing or linens such as pillowcases or washcloths.
• Put their clothes away in drawers.
• Follow two- or three-step directions in order to complete tasks. (“Get your toothbrush, put toothpaste on it, brush your teeth.”)
• Throw trash and recycling away in the proper place.
• Put toys away in tubs and baskets when they are done playing with them.
• Get out and put away their dishes as long as you arrange their cups and bowls on a low shelf.
• Feed the dog or cat.

Most of us have heard that there are both complex carbohydrates and simple carbohydrates and that the complex ones are good for us while the simple ones are not. But that's not always true. A better way to look at carbohydrate consumption and which adversely affect diet, blood sugar levels, insulin resistance, caloric intake and more is to use the glycemic index. In short, if you're looking to lose weight, control blood sugar, and eat well, choose foods that are rated "50" and below while avoiding as much as possible those foods above that mark.

 

Personal Health

 

The Fats You Don’t Need to Fear, and the Carbs That You Do

 

By Jane E. Brody

October 19, 2015

Credit Paul Rogers

The nutritional pickle so many Americans are now in is largely a result of “an oversimplification of dietary recommendations that created a fat phobia,” Dr. Frank B. Hu of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health told me.

Starting in the 1970s, when accumulating evidence from animal and human studies showed that a diet high in saturated fats and cholesterol was an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease, dietary guidelines urged people to eat less fat.

Although health advice focused on saturated fats from high-fat animal foods, many people generalized the advice to mean all fats, choosing in their stead a panoply of reduced-fat and fat-free foods rich in carbohydrates, from crackers to sweetened yogurts. They especially increased their consumption of two kinds of carbohydrates, refined starches and sugars, that have helped to spawn the current epidemic of obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

Experts now realize that efforts to correct past dietary sins that made heart disease and stroke runaway killers have caused the pendulum to swing too far in the wrong direction.

“The mistake made in earlier dietary guidelines was an emphasis on low-fat without emphasizing the quality of carbohydrates, creating the impression that all fats are bad and all carbs are good,” Dr. Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology, said. “It’s really important to distinguish between healthy fats and bad fats, healthy carbs and bad carbs.”

He explained that saturated fat, found in fatty animal foods like meats and dairy products, raises blood levels of cholesterol and is not healthy, “but olive oil is important — it’s beneficial for cardiovascular health and body weight.” Olive oil, like canola, avocado and nut oils, is monounsaturated, and while it has as many calories as meat and dairy fat, it does not raise serum cholesterol or foster fat-clogging deposits in blood vessels.

“We have to get out of the fat phobia mind-set,” Dr. Hu stressed, adding that we also have to abandon the idea that all complex carbohydrates are good.

Sugars are simple carbohydrates and starches are complex carbohydrates; all are ultimately broken down into glucose, the body fuel that circulates in blood. Sugars are digested rapidly, quickly raising blood glucose, but most starches take longer to digest.

Important exceptions are refined carbohydrates, like white bread and white rice. Starchy foods with highly processed grains that have been stripped of dietary fiber act more like sugar in the body. They are rapidly digested and absorbed, raising blood levels of glucose and prompting the secretion of insulin to process it. When consumed in excess of the body’s need for immediate and stored energy, refined carbs and sugars can result in insulin resistance and contribute to fatty liver disease.

Alas, potatoes, the nation’s most popular vegetable, act like sugars and refined carbohydrates. They have what is called a high glycemic index, the ability to raise blood glucose rapidly. Potatoes, Dr. Hu explained, are made of long chains of glucose easily digested by enzymes in the mouth and stomach, and the fat in French fries slows the process only slightly.

The concept of a glycemic index, proposed in 1981 by David Jenkins and his colleagues in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, has since been validated repeatedly and is now accepted as a good way to distinguish between the kinds of carbohydrates that are health-promoting or at least neutral and those that have negative health effects.

In 2002, Dr. David S. Ludwig, a pediatrician, endocrinologist and nutrition researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital and professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, published a comprehensive review of how glycemic index influences human physiology, clearly demonstrating its importance to preventing and treating obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Had Americans and their physicians heeded it then, we might have been largely spared the fix we’re now in.

The index was developed by testing the glucose response to a standard amount of carbohydrate against a reference food, either pure glucose (index number 100) or white bread (71). High-glycemic foods like baked Russet potatoes (111), white baguette (95), cornflakes (93), white rice (89), pretzels (83), instant oatmeal (83), rice cakes (82), Gatorade (78) and French fries (75) induce higher blood glucose levels than ordinary white bread and are best consumed infrequently and in small quantities.

At the other end of the glycemic spectrum, oatmeal (55), pasta (46 for spaghetti, 32 for fettuccine), apples (39), carrots (35), skim milk (32), black beans (30), lentils (29), prunes (29), barley (28), chickpeas (10), grapefruit (25), peanuts (7) and hummus (6) have a smaller effect on blood glucose, and green vegetables like broccoli have too little an effect to be measured.

Closely related to the glycemic index is the glycemic load. While the glycemic index measures how quickly a particular food raises blood sugar, the glycemic load takes portion sizes into account. Hence a food like watermelon, with a high glycemic index, has a low glycemic load, since much of the fruit is water.

High-glycemic foods are a particular problem for people trying to control their weight. The amount of insulin released to lower blood glucose can overshoot the mark and result in a rapid return of hunger. A low-glycemic food, on the other hand, has no such effect. And those that are rich in wholesome fats, like peanuts or avocado, can actually delay the return of hunger, though the calories can add up quickly if consumed to excess.

“The glycemic index and glycemic load of the average diet in the United States appear to have risen in recent years because of increases in carbohydrate consumption and changes in food-processing technology,” Dr. Ludwig wrote in 2002. The pattern persisted in the decade that followed, and can largely explain the rise in overweight and obesity among Americans of all ages.

In addition, chronic consumption of meals with a high-glycemic effect can induce insulin resistance, the hallmark of Type 2 diabetes, and an excess of free fatty acids in the blood, resulting in fatty liver disease. The prevalence of both these disorders has risen in recent years, and both can lead to chronic inflammation, a promoter of cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Hu said that when he was growing up in China, most people were physically active and thus able to handle the glycemic load of large amounts of white rice consumed. “Now, however, the Chinese have become more sedentary but still consume large amounts of white rice, and both obesity and diabetes are on the rise,” he said.

There are many reasons as to why one would want to lose weight. Health reasons including the conditions caused by obesity such as metabolic syndrome, diabetes, HBP and more should be the number one reason. But in reality, for many, the desire to look better would be the primary motivator. A new study reported in MNT indicates how much weight one needs to lose to appear more attractive.

 

How much weight do we need to gain or lose to appear more attractive?

Written by Marie Ellis / Medical News Today

Published: Monday 7 December 2015

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Previous studies have shown that so-called attractive people earn higher wages, receive more favorable outcomes in court and are more likely to win political elections. But what is this elusive index of attractiveness? A new study examines social perception of attractiveness in quantitative terms and suggests a specific amount of weight people need to gain or lose before others either notice or regard them as more attractive. 

 

How much weight loss or gain makes a person appear attractive to others?

The researchers are led by Prof. Nicholas Rule, of the University of Toronto in Canada, and they publish their findings in the journal Social Psychological & Personality Science.

He and postdoctoral fellow Daniel Re specifically investigated facial adiposity, which is the perception of weight in the face, because it accurately indicates a person's body mass index (BMI).
"It is a robust indicator of one's health," says Prof. Rule. "Increased facial adiposity is associated with a compromised immune system, poor cardiovascular function, frequent respiratory infections and mortality."

He adds that "even a small decrease can improve one's health."

As such, the researchers created a collection of photos digitally, which included male and female faces between the ages of 20-40 years old.

Each of the photos contained subjects with neutral expressions, their hair pulled back and no facial ornamentation.

Women need to lose slightly less weight than men to appear 'attractive'

After altering each image to create a range of images that included gradually increasing weights, the researchers asked participants in the study to compare randomly drawn pairs of faces and to select the one that appeared heavier to them.

From their results, the team found that a change in BMI of approximately 1.33 kg/m² (2.93 lbs/m²) is the magic number at which changes are noticeable.

Re explains that they tallied the weight change thresholds in relation to BMI, rather than kilograms or pounds, "so that people of all weights and heights can apply it to themselves according to their individual stature."

After their first investigation, the researchers then looked into the threshold at which alterations in a person's facial adiposity triggered a change in perceived attractiveness.

They found that the magic decrease in weight at which the faces appeared more attractive to the study participants was 2.38 kg/m² (5.24 lbs/m²) for women and 2.59 kg/m² (5.7 lbs/m²) for men.
 
For women and men of average height, this translates to about 6.3 and 8.2 kg (13.9 and 18.1 lbs), respectively.

Commenting on their findings, Prof. Rule says:


"Women and men of average height need to gain or lose about 3.5 and 4 kg, or about 8 and 9 lbs, respectively, for anyone to see it in their face, but they need to lose about twice as much for anyone to find them more attractive."

He says this difference between men and women indicates that the facial attractiveness of women may be more susceptible to changes in weight, meaning that "women attempting to lose weight need to shed slightly fewer pounds than men for people to find them more attractive."

The researchers conclude their study by noting that their findings "contribute to a greater basic understanding of the precision and limits of social perception and may provide information of value to medical practitioners and individuals seeking to manage changes in weight."

Should you expect your doctor or other healthcare personnel to lead by example? It seems reasonable to expect that the provider who cares for your well-being is not him/herself morbidly obese, a smoker, or chronically depressed. However, those employed in healthcare are people too and they also succumb to disease and injury. Unfortunately, the workers who are treating patients aren't themselves always afforded access to care that is focused on their well-being.

GALLUP / Business Journal

Often Ignored: Healthcare Employees' Well-Being

 

by Jade Wood and Rebecca Riffkin

 

Story Highlights

• Healthcare workers must be able to lead patients by example
• Staff well-being drives significant organizational outcomes
• Helping employees thrive in all elements of well-being is key

Many healthcare providers are giving more attention to their patients' well-being by focusing on the "whole person." A crucial component of this holistic view of patient care is positioning providers as people who lead by example and thrive in their own well-being. After all, how well can medical professionals influence positive lifestyle habits in their patients if they're not embracing healthy habits themselves?

The problem is, the very workers who are treating patients can sometimes be left out of the well-being equation. Though a great deal of attention is geared toward patients' well-being, healthcare workers often have limited means to engage in well-being practices of their own. This is particularly worrisome as healthcare employees' well-being can affect a healthcare organization's ability to provide the best and safest patient care.

Defining Well-Being

Gallup and Healthways have developed a comprehensive, research-based definition of well-being and how it relates to employees, business outcomes and living a fulfilled life. This definition encompasses five interrelated and essential elements: purpose, social, financial, community and physical. Together, these elements provide key insights into individuals' sense of purpose, social relationships, financial security, relationship to their community and physical health.



Respondents can be classified as thriving, struggling or suffering in each element according to how they rate that particular facet of well-being in their lives:

• Thriving: well-being that is strong and consistent in a particular element
• Struggling: well-being that is moderate or inconsistent in a particular element
• Suffering: well-being that is low and inconsistent in a particular element

Gallup and Healthways research shows that more than half of all healthcare workers are thriving in none or only one element of well-being, rather than thriving in multiple elements. But this also means that there is a significant opportunity for their well-being to improve. A more positive finding is that one in three healthcare workers (34%) is thriving in three or more well-being elements.



Taking a "Care for the Healthcare Worker" Approach

The field of medicine can be quite stressful, as it's both emotionally demanding and logistically rigorous, which can be a recipe for burnout. The 24/7 nature of the job -- constantly being "on," with always more to do -- and regulatory and compliance tasks can create a heavy and sometimes burdensome workload for many healthcare professionals.

Healthcare workers are notorious for neglecting their own care and not taking time for their own well-being. That's why a "care for the healthcare worker" approach is essential within healthcare organizations to give workers the energy, focus and adaptability they need to come to work ready to be their best every day. In fact, healthcare workers with high well-being are more likely to be resilient and recover quickly from stress, important qualities to possess when overseeing the lives and welfare of others.

Whether a healthcare organization approaches well-being to improve its employee engagement, retain talent or meet its mission to create a healthier community, well-being drives significant business outcomes. Healthcare workers who are thriving in three or more elements are more likely to be at work every day, because they have fewer unhealthy days that prevent them from doing their usual activities than do those with lower well-being.

Furthermore, high well-being supports mental health and resiliency. Healthcare workers who are thriving in three or more well-being elements are more likely to report bouncing back quickly from illness, injury or hardship than those who are not.



Medical professionals who are thriving in three or more elements are also two times less likely to look for a new job than their counterparts with lower well-being. Both of these findings are significant, because attendance and retention are crucial components of proper patient care, patient satisfaction, correct staffing coverage and reduced expenses.



Thriving Healthcare Workers Can Help Patients and Communities Boost Their Well-Being

Improving healthcare workers' well-being requires more than simply improving physical health. Healthcare workers who don't feel connected to their community or who are struggling with debt may find it difficult to focus on their patients or model healthy behaviors to them while they are at work. When healthcare workers thrive in all elements of well-being, not just physical, healthcare
organizations can gain a competitive advantage from employees' maximized performance, reduced turnover and enhanced engagement. Establishing a culture that promotes well-being by focusing on all five elements will help healthcare workers thrive -- and this, in turn, will benefit patients and the community.

Sangeeta Agrawal contributed to the research in this story.

Survey Methods

Results are based on a Gallup Panel Web study completed by 24,320 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Oct. 8-Nov. 13, 2014. A subsample of 1,300 healthcare working adults was selected for this analysis. The Gallup Panel is a probability-based longitudinal panel of U.S. adults who are selected using random-digit-dial (RDD) phone interviews that cover landline and cellphones. Address-based sampling methods are also used to recruit panel members. The Gallup Panel is not an opt-in panel, and members are not given incentives for participating. The sample for this study was weighted to be demographically representative of the U.S. adult population using 2013 Current Population Survey figures. For results based on this sample, one can say that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±3 percentage points, at the 95% confidence level. Margins of error are higher for subsamples. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error and bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

Jade Wood is Well-Being Practice Manager at Gallup.

Rebecca Riffkin is a Writer and Analyst at Gallup.

Now that it's the end of the year, have you taken time off from your job yet? Doing so is good for your health, good for your workplace (not taking your allotted time off is like you're paying your employer for you to work) and according to this Fox News article, good for the economy. No sense in being a job martyr.

Budget Travel

Why you should take all the time off you deserve

By Eileen Oginz / Fox News

Vacation Commitment Summit (Diamond Resorts International.)

Are you a job martyr?

Not the perky one who volunteers to do all the vacation chores -- the cooking, the cleaning up while everyone else goes to the beach. I'm talking about the one who doesn't make it to the beach at all, the one who either considers themselves too valuable to take time off or too scared they'll return to find their boss realized they were expendable after all. And then there's the group simply overwhelmed by the thought of all the work that would pile up in their absence.

Make it a point to make it to the beach this year. (Project: Time Off)

Whatever the reasons, Americans failed to use 429 million days of paid time off last year, the U.S. Travel Association reports. Those who get vacation time are taking less, while a quarter of Americans don't get any paid vacation at all in part because they have cobbled together several part-time jobs, explains Dr. Kenneth Matos of the Families and Work Institute, which researches work and family life issues.

Last year, a new study commissioned by MasterCard found that only half of Americans have been on, or are planning, a vacation. You've probably seen those pull-at-the-heartstrings MasterCard commercials with kids pleading with their parents to take just "One More Day" off. The campaign obviously has struck a nerve, generating over 100 million clicks, mentions, shares, likes and video completions from those of us who have heard those sentiments too many times from our own kids.

Katie Denis, a Washington, D.C., mom of a young daughter, freely admits she was a work martyr -- until she changed jobs. Now she is helping direct Project: Time Off, the new U.S. Travel Association initiative with the lofty goal of shifting our culture so that using personal time is no longer considered frivolous. "There is always going to be a reason to put vacation off, but you need to prioritize that time, not only because your family needs you to, but also because it will make you a better employee," she said. "Our research proves that HR managers agree that employees who take more vacation time are more productive, creative, and better performers."

Ready to get onboard?

The U.S. Travel Association, by the way, realized only 19 percent of its own staff was taking all of their vacation. After they offered $500 bonuses to those who did, the vast majority did "and we had the most successful year," said the association's Executive Vice President Gary Oster, speaking recently at a Vacation Commitment Summit in New York City presented by another initiative, TakeBackYourTime.org and Diamond Resorts whose CEO, David Palmer, has become a champion of this growing movement.

"In the hospitality business, we have the privilege of impacting someone's life every day, with memorable experiences and moments," he explained. "I had missed that we weren't creating that same opportunity for our team members ... it is too costly not to do this."

Palmer said his Las Vegas-based company with more than 7,000 employees now is developing programs to encourage managers to not only lead by example to take their vacations, but to encourage their team members to take theirs as well. They are even giving away all-expense paid trips every month to employees who explain why they couldn't get away otherwise every month.

At the summit, speaker after speaker detailed research findings that show people return from vacations rejuvenated, less stressed and more productive -- no real surprise. "People can't innovate if they don't have time to stop and think. Vacation gives them that opportunity," said Dr. Matos, adding that employers can benefit as much from their employees' time off as the employees themselves.

For one thing, they take less sick days. "A vacation isn't a luxury. It's a medical necessity," said Dr. Leigh Vinocur, a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians, who said she sees patients daily whose conditions are caused or exacerbated by stress. "The number one thing a vacation can do is release stress," she said. They also can improve your sex life, she added, and your kids' school performance.

If you are afraid to take your vacation, here's another factoid to consider: Those who don't use all their vacation aren't any more likely to get a raise or a promotion. "Martyrdom," said Katie Denis, "is bad for business," as well as for your family life. Still, she said, in many corporate cultures, "people get weird when you want to talk about whether to take vacation."

If you still feel too guilty to get away, consider that, according to the U.S. Travel Association, those unused days cost the U.S. economy $160 billion in spending that could support 1.2 million jobs.

If your boss grumbles about the "extra work" your absence will cause, remind her how many innovative ideas you'll come back with. Denis noted that some of the greatest recent success stories have been products of vacation thinking, including Dropbox and Instagram.

Point to what MasterCard is doing. After all, said Executive Vice President Susan Kunreuther, they couldn't launch an advertising campaign to encourage Americans to take vacations while their own people weren't taking the time they were owed -- often leaving more than four days on the table.

Now MasterCard employees get reminder emails of what vacation time they have left (sent to bosses, as well) and there are incentive contests with vacation experiences as prizes. Managers, Kunreuther said, are being encouraged "to leave folks alone" during vacation and weekends.

The strategy is working. During the four months following the campaign (September to December 2014) employees, in total, took almost 1,500 more days than they had the previous year but Kunreuther added, "We have a long way to go."

So where are you going on vacation?

Metabolic Syndrome (High blood sugar/Diabetes with high blood pressure and large girth) is an epidemic in the U.S. A new study indicates brief exercise can help lower BP. Over time, exercise and diet will help lower weight/girth and reduce sugar levels. In fact, exercise and diet is an effective prohibitor of metabolic syndrome and its components and it costs little more than some of your time.

Brief bursts of activity lower blood pressure in type 2 diabetics

Published: Tuesday 10 November 2015 at 12am PST 
Written by Tim Newman  / Medical News Today 

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New research shows that just short bursts of simple, gentle exercise can significantly lower blood pressure in patients with type 2 diabetes.

 

Short flurries of exercise help lower blood pressure in type 2 diabetes patients.

 

Patients with type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure have a significantly increased risk of heart attacks and strokes. As such, research into methods that minimize these risks are vital.

An estimated 29.1 million people in the US have diabetes, of which 90-95% are type 2.
From 2009-2012, 71% of diabetic adults (aged 18 or older), had a blood pressure of at least 140/90 mm Hg or used prescription medications to lower high blood pressure.

Individuals with a systolic blood pressure of 140 or more are considered to have high blood pressure.
In 2010, hospitalization rates for stroke were 1.5 times higher among adults with diabetes aged 20 years or older, compared with the general population. Research into effective methods of controlling blood pressure are increasingly valuable as the obesity trend continues.

These new findings were presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2015. The team of investigators, from Melbourne, Australia, found that just a few minutes of light movement every 30 minutes could lower blood pressure.

Blood pressure reductions with very light walking

The trial was conducted on 24 obese or overweight people (average age 62) with type 2 diabetes as they sat for an 8-hour period.

Every 30 minutes, the participants either walked on a treadmill for 3 minutes at an average pace of 2 mph or carried out 3 minutes of light resistance exercises.

The resistance exercises consisted of half-squats, calf raises, knee raises or gluteal muscle squeezes. The study was carried out across 3 separate days, 8 hours per day, and the participants' blood pressure and norepinephrine levels were checked at regular intervals.

The participants who embarked on the light walking were found to have an average 10-point decrease in their systolic pressure and those engaging in resistance exercise showed a 12-point decrease.
 
Co-author Bronwyn Kingwell, PhD, says:

"It appears you don't have to do very much. We saw some marked blood pressure reductions over trial days when people did the equivalent of walking to the water cooler or some simple body-weight movements on the spot."

Long periods of inactivity have already been shown to have negative impacts on health and metabolism including obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease.
This is the first study on short, intermittent bursts of light activity on type 2 diabetes patients in a controlled lab setting.

Kingwell notes that exercise benefits people with type 2 diabetes because as the muscles work, they take up more blood sugar. Because the patients either cannot make enough insulin or are unable to use it efficiently, this reuptake by the muscles is helpful toward maintaining a healthy internal balance.

The role of norepinephrine

The mechanisms through which blood pressure dropped during the trial are unclear. However, the team's norepinephrine measurements might give an insight. They observed an associated drop in norepinephrine as blood pressure lowered.

Norepinephrine is a hormone and neurotransmitter, and a potential candidate for causing the blood pressure drop.

Generally, norepinephrine is released in times of stress or danger. It elicits arousal and alertness, increases vigilance and improves memory recall. During sleep, norepinephrine is at its lowest concentrations in the brain.

Importantly, in regards to this study, norepinephrine also increases blood pressure and heart rate. This measured drop may well have influenced the simultaneous decrease in blood pressure. However, further investigation will be needed before we can confidently attribute these positive changes to this particular chemical.

Kingwell adds:

"Light activity breaks are not meant to replace regular, purposeful exercise. But they may be a practical solution to cut down sitting time, especially if you're at your desk all day."

So, in this case, less might not be more, but it certainly seems to be worthwhile. Medical News Today recently reported on how depression and diabetes are linked to a sedentary pregnancy.

The idea of happiness at work - equating to job satisfaction - is an oft sought component of a corporate culture. You either have it and fit in, or you may find yourself sitting alone in the cafeteria. But in an article published in the Harvard Business Review, its authors site research indicating that happiness at work may not be all that it is purported to be and may, in fact, be counter-productive. Makes you wonder if wanting to be left alone to do your job is such a bad thing.

The Research We’ve Ignored About Happiness at Work

 

by Andre Spicer & Carl Cedarstrom

July 21, 2015

 

Recently, we found ourselves in motivational seminars at our respective places of employment. Both events preached the gospel of happiness. In one, a speaker explained that happiness could make you healthier, kinder, more productive, and even more likely to get promoted.

The other seminar involved mandatory dancing of the wilder kind. It was supposed to fill our bodies with joy. It also prompted one of us to sneak out and take refuge in the nearest bathroom.

Ever since a group of scientists switched the lights on and off at the Hawthorne factory in the mid-1920s, scholars and executives alike have been obsessed with increasing their employees’ productivity. In particular, happiness as a way to boost productivity seems to have gained increased traction in corporate circles as of late. Firms spend money on happiness coaches, team-building exercises, gameplays, funsultants, and Chief Happiness Officers (yes, you’ll find one of those at Google). These activities and titles may appear jovial, or even bizarre, but companies are taking them extremely seriously. Should they?

When you look closely at the research — which we did after the dancing incident — it’s actually not clear that encouraging happiness at work is always a good idea. Sure, there is evidence to suggest that happy employees are less likely to leave, more likely to satisfy customers, are safer, and more likely to engage in citizenship behavior. However, we also discovered alternate findings, which indicates that some of the taken-for-granted wisdoms about what happiness can achieve in the workplace are mere myths.

To start, we don’t really know what happiness is, or how to measure it.

Measuring happiness is about as easy as taking the temperature of the soul or determining the exact color of love. As Darrin M. McMahon shows in his illuminating study Happiness: A History, ever since the 6th Century B.C., when Croseus is said to have quipped “No one who lives is happy,” we have seen this slippery concept being a proxy for all sorts of other concepts, from pleasure and joy to plenitude and contentment. Being happy in the moment, Samuel Johnson said, could be achieved only when drunk. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, happiness was to lie in a boat, drifting aimlessly, feeling like a God (not exactly the picture of productivity). There are other definitions of happiness, too, but they are neither less nor more plausible but those of Rousseau or Johnson.

And just because we have more advanced technology today doesn’t mean we’re any closer to pinning down a definition, as Will Davies reminds us in his new book The Happiness Industry. He concludes that even as we have developed more advanced techniques for measuring emotions and predicting behaviors, we have also adopted increasingly simplified notions of what it means to be human, let alone what it means to pursue happiness. A brain scan that lights up may seem like it’s telling us something concrete about an elusive emotion, for example, when it actually isn’t.

Happiness doesn’t necessarily lead to increased productivity. 

 A stream of research shows some contradictory results about the relationship between happiness — which is often defined as “job satisfaction” — and productivity. One study on British supermarkets even suggests there might be a negative correlation between job satisfaction and corporate productivity: The more miserable the employees were, the better the profits. Sure, other studies have pointed in the opposite direction, saying that there is a link between feeling content with work and being productive. But even these studies, when considered as a whole, demonstrates a relatively weak correlation.

Happiness can be exhausting.

The pursuit of happiness may not be wholly effective, but it doesn’t really hurt, right? Wrong. Ever since the 18^th century, people have been pointing out that the demand to be happy brings with it a heavy burden, a responsibility that can never be perfectly fulfilled. Focusing on happiness can actually make us feel less happy.

A psychological experiment recently demonstrated this. The researchers asked their subjects to watch a film that would usually make them happy — a figure skater winning a medal. But before watching the film, half of the group was asked to read out a statement about the importance of happiness in life. The other half did not. The researchers were surprised to find that those who had read the statement about the importance of happiness actually were less happy after watching the film. Essentially, when happiness becomes a duty, it can make people feel worse if they fail to accomplish it.

This is particularly problematic at the present era, where happiness is preached as a moral obligation. As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner put it: “Unhappiness is not only unhappiness; it is, worse yet, a failure to be happy.”

It won’t necessarily get you through the work day. 

 If you have worked in a front-line customer service job, like a call center or fast food restaurant, you know that being upbeat is not an option. It’s compulsory. And as tiring as this may be, it makes some sense when you’re in front of customers.

But today, many non-customer facing employees are also asked to be upbeat. This could have some unforeseen consequences. One study found that people who were in a good mood were worse at picking out acts of deception than those who were in a bad mood. Another piece of research found that people who were angry during a negotiation achieve better outcomes than people who are happy. This suggests that being happy all the time may not be good for all aspects of our work, or jobs that rely heavily on certain abilities. In fact, for some things, happiness can actually make us perform worse.

Happiness could damage your relationship with your boss. 

 If we believe that work is where we will find happiness, we might, in some cases, start to mistake our boss for a surrogate spouse or parent. In her study of a media company, Susanne Ekmann found that those who expected work to make them happy would often become emotionally needy. They wanted their managers to provide them with a steady stream of recognition and emotional reassurance. And when not receiving the expected emotional response (which was often), these employees felt neglected and started overreacting. Even minor setbacks were interpreted as clear evidence of rejection by their bosses. So in many ways, expecting a boss to bring happiness makes us emotionally vulnerable.

It could also hurt your relationship with friends and family.

In her book Cold Intimacies Eva Illouz noticed a strange side effect of people trying to live more emotionally at work: They started to treat their private lives like work tasks. The people she spoke with saw their personal lives as things needed to be carefully administered using a range of tools and techniques they had learned from corporate life. As a result, their home lives became increasingly cold and calculating. It was no wonder, then, that many of the people she spoke with preferred to spend time at work rather than at home.

It could make losing your job that much more devastating. 

 If we expect the workplace to provide happiness and meaning in our life, we become dangerously dependent on it. When studying professionals, Richard Sennett noticed that people who saw their employer as an important source of personal meaning were those who became most devastated if they were fired. When these people lost their jobs, they were not just loosing an income – they were loosing the promise of happiness. This suggests that, when we see our work as a great source of happiness, we make ourselves emotionally vulnerable during periods of change. In an era of constant corporate restructuring, this can be dangerous.

Happiness could make you selfish.

Being happy makes you a better person, right? Not so, according to an interesting piece of research. Participants were given lottery tickets, and then given a choice about how many tickets they wanted to give to others and how many they wished to keep for themselves. Those who were in a good mood ended up keeping more tickets for themselves. This suggests that, at least in some settings, being happy does not necessarily mean we will be generous. In fact, the opposite could be true.

It could also make you lonely.

In one experiment, psychologists asked a number of people to keep a detailed diary for two weeks. What they found at the end of the study was that those who greatly valued happiness also felt lonelier. It seems that focusing too much on the pursuit of happiness can make us feel more disconnected from other people.

So why, contrary to all of this evidence, do we continue to hold on to the belief that happiness can improve a workplace?

The answer, according to one study, comes down to aesthetics and ideology. Happiness is a convenient idea that looks good on paper (the aesthetic part). But it’s also an idea that helps us shy away from more serious issues at work, such as conflicts and workplace politics (the ideological part).

When we assume that happy workers are better workers, we can sweep more uncomfortable questions under the carpet, especially since happiness is often seen as a choice. It becomes a convenient way of dealing with negative attitudes, party poopers, miserable bastards, and other unwanted characters in corporate life. Invoking happiness, in all its ambiguity, is an excellent way of getting away with controversial decisions, such as letting people go. As Barbara Ehrenreich points out in her book Bright-Sided, positive messages about happiness have proved particularly popular in times of crisis and mass layoffs.

Given all these potential problems, we think there is a strong case for rethinking our expectation that work should always make us happy. It can be exhausting, make us overreact, drain our personal life of meaning, increase our vulnerability, make us more gullible, selfish and lonely. Most striking is that consciously pursuing happiness can actually drain the sense of joy we usually get from the really good things we experience.

In reality, work — like all other aspects of life — is likely to make us feel a wide range of emotions. If your job feels depressing and meaningless, it might be because it is depressing and meaningless. Pretending otherwise can just make it worse.

Happiness, of course, is a great thing to experience, but nothing that can be willed into existence. And maybe the less we seek to actively pursue happiness through our jobs, the more likely we will be to actually experience a sense of joy in them — a joy which is spontaneous and pleasurable, and not constructed and oppressive. But most importantly, we will be better equipped to cope with work in a sober manner. To see it for what it is. And not as we — whether executives, employees, or dancing motivational seminar leaders — pretend that it is.

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André Spicer is a professor of Organizational Behavior at Cass Business School in London and the co-author of The Wellness Syndrome.

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Carl Cederström is an Associate Professor of Organization Theory at Stockholm University and the co-author of The Wellness Syndrome.

With so much news focused lately on age-related dementia and Alzheimer's Disease, people's awareness of the conditions is certainly becoming heightened. At the same time, such awareness also forces people to ask what they might do to prevent the conditions occurring to themselves. Now a new study indicates that there is something that will help prevent age-related brain changes - aerobic exercise.

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Your source for the latest research news

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Long-term aerobic exercise prevents age-related brain change

 

Date:October 29, 2015

Source:

PLOS

Summary:

A study of the brains of mice shows that structural deterioration associated with old age can be prevented by long-term aerobic exercise starting in mid-life, according to new research. Structural changes that make the blood-brain barrier leaky and result in inflammation of brain tissues in old mice can be mitigated by allowing the animals to run regularly, providing a potential explanation for the beneficial effects of exercise on dementia in humans.

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A study of the brains of mice shows that structural deterioration associated with old age can be prevented by long-term aerobic exercise starting in mid-life, according to the authors of a research article publishing in the Open Access journal PLOS Biology on October 29th. Gareth Howell, Ileana Soto and their colleagues at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine (USA) found that structural changes that make the blood-brain barrier leaky and result in inflammation of brain tissues in old mice can be mitigated by allowing the animals to run regularly, so providing a potential explanation for the beneficial effects of exercise on dementia in humans.

Old age is the major risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, like many other diseases. Age-related cognitive deficits are due partly to changes in neuronal function, but also correlate with deficiencies in the blood supply to the brain and with low-level inflammation. In this study, the authors set out to investigate the changes in the brains of normal young and aged laboratory mice by comparing by their gene expression profiles using a technique called RNA sequencing, and by comparing their structures at high-resolution by using fluorescence microscopy and electron microscopy.

The gene expression analysis indicated age-related changes in the expression of genes relevant to vascular function (including focal adhesion, vascular smooth muscle and ECM-receptor interactions), and inflammation (especially related to the complement system, which clears foreign particles) in the brain cortex. These changes were accompanied by a decline in the function of astrocytes (key support cells in brain) and loss of pericytes (the contractile cells that surround small capillaries and venules and maintain the blood-brain barrier) and of major components of the basement membrane, which forms an integral part of the blood-brain barrier, as well as an increase in the density and functional activation of the immune cells known as microglia/monocytes, which scavenge the brain for infectious agents and damaged cells.

Dr. Soto, lead author on the study, says: "Collectively, our data suggests that normal aging causes significant dysfunction to the cortical neurovascular unit, including basement membrane reduction and pericyte loss. These changes correlate strongly with an increase in microglia/monocytes in the aged cortex,"

Physical activity is already known to ameliorate the cognitive decline and sensorimotor deficits seen in old age in humans as well as in mice. To investigate the impact of long-term physical exercise on the brain changes seen in the aging mice, the researchers provided the animals with a running wheel from 12 months old (equivalent to middle aged in humans) and assessed their brains at 18 months (equivalent to ~60yrs old in humans, when the risk of Alzheimer's disease is greatly increased).

Young and old mice alike ran about two miles per night, and this physical activity improved the ability and motivation of the old mice to engage in the typical spontaneous behaviors that seem to be affected by aging. This exercise significantly reduced age-related pericyte loss in the brain cortex and improved other indicators of dysfunction of the vascular system and blood-brain barrier. Exercise also decreased the numbers of microglia/monocytes expressing a crucial initiating component of the complement pathway that others have shown previously to play are role in age-related cognitive decline.

Interestingly, these beneficial effects of exercise were not seen in mice deficient in a gene called Apoe, variants of which are a major genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. The authors also report that Apoe expression in the brain cortex declines in aged mice and this decline can also be prevented by exercise.

Numerous studies have correlated the development of Alzheimer's disease with vascular dysfunction during aging. This study suggests that this dysfunction might be driven by astrocyte dysfunction and/or pericyte loss leading to a breakdown of the blood-brain barrier. But further work will be required to establish the mechanism(s): what is the role of the complement-producing microglia/macrophages, how does Apoe decline contribute to age-related neurovascular decline, does the leaky blood-brain barrier allow the passage of damaging factors from the circulation into the brain?

Previous studies showing that exercise is beneficial for the human brain suggest the effects on mice are relevant for human health. The authors conclude that, "Our data, supported by data from human studies, point towards focusing efforts on understanding the impact of aging and lifestyle choices on neurovascular unit decline and neuroinflammation, particularly astrocyte and pericyte dysfunction.

Dr. Howell believes as a society we need to work hard to ensure we maintain an active lifestyle wherever possible. "In this day and age, with so many distractions and conveniences, it is easy to fall into a lifestyle that does not include enough exercise. With an aging population, I hope our study helps in encouraging a healthy lifestyle that includes exercise."

He goes on to say that: "For those that are unfortunately unable to exercise, our study provides insight into a possible mechanism by which exercise may benefit the aging brain and may one day lead to improved treatments for age-related cognitive decline, Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders."

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Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by PLOS. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Ileana Soto, Leah C. Graham, Hannah J. Richter, Stephen N. Simeone, Jake E. Radell, Weronika Grabowska, W. Keith Funkhouser, Megan C. Howell, Gareth R. Howell. APOE Stabilization by Exercise Prevents Aging Neurovascular Dysfunction and Complement Induction. PLOS Biology, 2015; 13 (10): e1002279 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002279

All my life I've had a private office with its messy desk, radio playing, and the occasional solitaire game on the computer. It's allowed me to be creative, to have "ah-ha" moments I would never have had in an open office concept, or even in an accessible cubicle. Businesses have benefited more from the innovation that arose from my solitude than from my being in an open space at which "Big Brother" could keep an eye on my productivity. At the end of 2014, Forbes wrote that the open office concept should die. And even earlier, as evidenced by the following article, "group think" was being questioned.

SundayReview | Opinion: New York Times

The Rise of the New Groupthink

 

SUSAN CAIN / JAN. 13, 2012

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. 

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

One explanation for these findings is that introverts are comfortable working alone — and solitude is a catalyst to innovation. As the influential psychologist Hans Eysenck observed, introversion fosters creativity by “concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand, and preventing the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work.” In other words, a person sitting quietly under a tree in the backyard, while everyone else is clinking glasses on the patio, is more likely to have an apple land on his head. (Newton was one of the world’s great introverts: William Wordsworth described him as “A mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.”)

Credit Andy Rementer

Solitude has long been associated with creativity and transcendence. “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible,” Picasso said. A central narrative of many religions is the seeker — Moses, Jesus, Buddha — who goes off by himself and brings profound insights back to the community.

Culturally, we’re often so dazzled by charisma that we overlook the quiet part of the creative process. Consider Apple. In the wake of Steve Jobs’s death, we’ve seen a profusion of myths about the company’s success. Most focus on Mr. Jobs’s supernatural magnetism and tend to ignore the other crucial figure in Apple’s creation: a kindly, introverted engineering wizard, Steve Wozniak, who toiled alone on a beloved invention, the personal computer.

Rewind to March 1975: Mr. Wozniak believes the world would be a better place if everyone had a user-friendly computer. This seems a distant dream — most computers are still the size of minivans, and many times as pricey. But Mr. Wozniak meets a simpatico band of engineers that call themselves the Homebrew Computer Club. The Homebrewers are excited about a primitive new machine called the Altair 8800. Mr. Wozniak is inspired, and immediately begins work on his own magical version of a computer. Three months later, he unveils his amazing creation for his friend, Steve Jobs. Mr. Wozniak wants to give his invention away free, but Mr. Jobs persuades him to co-found Apple Computer.

The story of Apple’s origin speaks to the power of collaboration. Mr. Wozniak wouldn’t have been catalyzed by the Altair but for the kindred spirits of Homebrew. And he’d never have started Apple without Mr. Jobs.

But it’s also a story of solo spirit. If you look at how Mr. Wozniak got the work done — the sheer hard work of creating something from nothing — he did it alone. Late at night, all by himself.

Intentionally so. In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors:

“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me ... they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone .... I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

Credit Andy Rementer

And yet. The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I’m talking about. 

Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.

Our schools have also been transformed by the New Groupthink. Today, elementary school classrooms are commonly arranged in pods of desks, the better to foster group learning. Even subjects like math and creative writing are often taught as committee projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited in New York City, students engaged in group work were forbidden to ask a question unless every member of the group had the very same question.

The New Groupthink also shapes some of our most influential religious institutions. Many mega-churches feature extracurricular groups organized around every conceivable activity, from parenting to skateboarding to real estate, and expect worshipers to join in. They also emphasize a theatrical style of worship — loving Jesus out loud, for all the congregation to see. “Often the role of a pastor seems closer to that of church cruise director than to the traditional roles of spiritual friend and counselor,” said Adam McHugh, an evangelical pastor and author of “Introverts in the Church.”

Some teamwork is fine and offers a fun, stimulating, useful way to exchange ideas, manage information and build trust.

But it’s one thing to associate with a group in which each member works autonomously on his piece of the puzzle; it’s another to be corralled into endless meetings or conference calls conducted in offices that afford no respite from the noise and gaze of co-workers. Studies show that open-plan offices make workers hostile, insecure and distracted. They’re also more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, stress, the flu and exhaustion. And people whose work is interrupted make 50 percent more mistakes and take twice as long to finish it.

Many introverts seem to know this instinctively, and resist being herded together. Backbone Entertainment, a video game development company in Emeryville, Calif., initially used an open-plan office, but found that its game developers, many of whom were introverts, were unhappy. “It was one big warehouse space, with just tables, no walls, and everyone could see each other,” recalled Mike Mika, the former creative director. “We switched over to cubicles and were worried about it — you’d think in a creative environment that people would hate that. But it turns out they prefer having nooks and crannies they can hide away in and just be away from everybody.”

Privacy also makes us productive. In a fascinating study known as the Coding War Games, consultants Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister compared the work of more than 600 computer programmers at 92 companies. They found that people from the same companies performed at roughly the same level — but that there was an enormous performance gap between organizations. What distinguished programmers at the top-performing companies wasn’t greater experience or better pay. It was how much privacy, personal workspace and freedom from interruption they enjoyed. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said their workspace was sufficiently private compared with only 19 percent of the worst performers. Seventy-six percent of the worst programmers but only 38 percent of the best said that they were often interrupted needlessly.

Credit Andy Rementer

Solitude can even help us learn. According to research on expert performance by the psychologist Anders Ericsson, the best way to master a field is to work on the task that’s most demanding for you personally. And often the best way to do this is alone. Only then, Mr. Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class — you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.”

Conversely, brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity. The brainchild of a charismatic advertising executive named Alex Osborn who believed that groups produced better ideas than individuals, workplace brainstorming sessions came into vogue in the 1950s. “The quantitative results of group brainstorming are beyond question,” Mr. Osborn wrote. “One group produced 45 suggestions for a home-appliance promotion, 56 ideas for a money-raising campaign, 124 ideas on how to sell more blankets.”

But decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” wrote the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

The reasons brainstorming fails are instructive for other forms of group work, too. People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.”

The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. 

Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.

My point is not that man is an island. Life is meaningless without love, trust and friendship.

And I’m not suggesting that we abolish teamwork. Indeed, recent studies suggest that influential academic work is increasingly conducted by teams rather than by individuals. (Although teams whose members collaborate remotely, from separate universities, appear to be the most influential of all.) The problems we face in science, economics and many other fields are more complex than ever before, and we’ll need to stand on one another’s shoulders if we can possibly hope to solve them.

But even if the problems are different, human nature remains the same. And most humans have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.

To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.

Before Mr. Wozniak started Apple, he designed calculators at Hewlett-Packard, a job he loved partly because HP made it easy to chat with his colleagues. Every day at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., management wheeled in doughnuts and coffee, and people could socialize and swap ideas. What distinguished these interactions was how low-key they were. For Mr. Wozniak, collaboration meant the ability to share a doughnut and a brainwave with his laid-back, poorly dressed colleagues — who minded not a whit when he disappeared into his cubicle to get the real work done.

Susan Cain is the author of the forthcoming book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.”