Analyzing Past Failures May Boost Future Performance by Reducing Stress

Summary: Researchers report writing about past failures can lower the stress response and enhance performance when faced with a new stressful task.

Source: Frontiers.

Insights from past failures can help boost performance on a new task — and a new study is the first to explain why. US researchers report that writing critically about past setbacks leads to lower levels of the “stress” hormone, cortisol, and more careful choices when faced with a new stressful task, resulting in improved performance. The study, published today in open access journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, is the first demonstration that writing and thinking deeply about a past failure improves the body’s response to stress and enhances performance on a new task. This technique may be useful in improving performance in many areas, including therapeutic settings, education and sports.

People are often advised to “stay positive” when faced with a challenging task. However, a vast body of research suggests that paying close attention to negative events or feelings — by either meditating or writing about them — can actually lead to positive outcomes.

But why does this counter-intuitive approach lead to benefits? To investigate this question, Brynne DiMenichi, a doctoral candidate from Rutgers University-Newark, together with other researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University, examined the effect of writing about past failures on future task performance in two groups of volunteers.

A test group wrote about their past failures while a control group wrote about a topic not related to themselves. The researchers used salivary cortisol levels to provide a physiological readout of the stress experienced by the people in both groups. These levels were comparable across the test and control groups at the start of the study.

DiMenichi and colleagues then measured the performance of the volunteers on a new stressful task and continued to monitor their cortisol levels. They found that the test group had lower cortisol levels compared to the control group when performing the new challenge.

“We didn’t find that writing itself had a direct relationship on the body’s stress responses,” says DiMenichi. “Instead, our results suggest that, in a future stressful situation, having previously written about a past failure causes the body’s stress response to look more similar to someone who isn’t exposed to stress at all.”

The researchers also found that volunteers who wrote about a past failure made more careful choices on a new task, and overall performed better than the control group.

cortisol
The researchers used salivary cortisol levels to provide a physiological readout of the stress experienced by the people in both groups. NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.

“Together, these findings indicate that writing and thinking critically about a past failure can prepare an individual both physiologically and cognitively for new challenges,” observes DiMenichi.

While everyone experiences setbacks and stress at some point in their lives, this study may provide insight about how one can use these experiences to better perform in future challenges.

“It provides anyone who wants to utilize this technique in an educational, sports, or even therapeutic setting with clear-cut evidence of expressive writing’s effectiveness,” says DiMenichi. “However, it is difficult to compare laboratory measures of cognitive performance to performance on say, the Olympic track. Future research can examine the effect of writing manipulation on actual athletic performance.”

About this neuroscience research article

Funding: The work was funded by National Science Foundation.

Source: Emma Duncan – Frontiers
Publisher: Organized by NeuroscienceNews.com.
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Open access research for”Writing About Past Failures Attenuates Cortisol Responses and Sustained Attention Deficits Following Psychosocial Stress” by Brynne C. DiMenichi, Karolina M. Lempert, Christina Bejjani, and Elizabeth Tricomi in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. Published online March 23 3018.
doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00045

Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article

[cbtabs][cbtab title=”MLA”]Frontiers “Analyzing Past Failures May Boost Future Performance by Reducing Stress.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 23 March 2018.
<https://neurosciencenews.com/failure-stress-performance-8679/>.[/cbtab][cbtab title=”APA”]Frontiers (2018, March 23). Analyzing Past Failures May Boost Future Performance by Reducing Stress. NeuroscienceNews. Retrieved March 23, 2018 from https://neurosciencenews.com/failure-stress-performance-8679/[/cbtab][cbtab title=”Chicago”]Frontiers “Analyzing Past Failures May Boost Future Performance by Reducing Stress.” https://neurosciencenews.com/failure-stress-performance-8679/ (accessed March 23, 2018).[/cbtab][/cbtabs]


Abstract

Writing About Past Failures Attenuates Cortisol Responses and Sustained Attention Deficits Following Psychosocial Stress

Acute stress can harm performance. Paradoxically, writing about stressful events—such as past failures—has been shown to improve cognitive functioning and performance, especially in tasks that require sustained attention. Yet, there is little physiological evidence for whether writing about past failures or other negative events improves performance by reducing stress. In this experiment, we studied the effects of an acute psychosocial stressor, the Trier Social Stress Test, on attentional performance and salivary cortisol release in humans. Additionally, we investigated whether an expressive writing task could reduce the detrimental effects of stress, both on performance and physiological response. We found that when individuals were asked to write about a past failure before experiencing a stressor, they exhibited attenuated stress responses. Moreover, those who wrote about a past failure before being exposed to stress also exhibited better behavioral performance. Our results suggest that writing about a previous failure may allow an individual to experience a new stressor as less stressful, reducing its physiological and behavioral effects.

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