Why You Really Shouldn't Curse at Work (Much)

The media brouhaha over Carol Bartz's coarse language in the wake of her firing was telling. Rather than responsibly assessing her merits as the chief executive of Yahoo!, the conversation instantly devolved into what kind of woman swears on the job. That, to me, is so twentieth century. When we've reached a point in our anything-goes culture that the anchors of the most important newscasts (Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert) curse nightly, and public figures like prime-time teenage role model Lea Michele, the actress who plays a goody-goody(ish) character on Glee, talks (as we used to say) like a stevedore in interviews, it strikes me that managers and executives need to seriously rethink the words they choose to communicate displeasure.

In fact, we're now so inured to vulgarity that it takes something really over-the-top — say, the baby doll being sold this holiday season that apparently curses — to make us stop and take notice. Taboo words, with a couple of true taboo exceptions, have always been used sparingly to communicate powerful emotions, but when swearing becomes simply reflexive and ubiquitous — as it is today — those words cease to have much power or meaning. And when crude words do shock, the language deflects our focus from the serious issues at hand.

Take, for instance, the internal Goldman Sachs e-mail that Senator Carl Levin read aloud last year during a Congressional hearing: "Boy, that Timberwolf was one shitty deal.'" Hard to tell without more context whether the guy who wrote that e-mail (now a Bank of America division president) was proud of the group for pulling the wool over the public's eyes, or just candidly stating the facts. But one thing became clear pretty quickly — to the American public, the language made what looked like double-dealing cynicism more memorably rotten. And the immediate consequence? Rather than suggest to their employees that they not sell bad deals to their clients, Goldman Sachs chose to focus on the language and its potential for embarrassment, instructing their employees to stop using profanity in e-mails. The emotionally laden words that communicate our more powerful feelings are particularly slippery at work, where we spend the majority of our waking hours and where our livelihoods hang in the balance.

How we choose to interpret hyper-charged no-longer-taboo words changes from moment to moment and office to hallway, according to permutations of status, gender, ethnicity, education, age and the particular setting — one person's obscenity is another's spicy punctuation. "In-house" language is often at odds with public norms. I was talking with a female partner in a New York corporate communications company that advises companies on critical communications challenges. "I think of swearing," she told me, "the way I think of Yiddish. It's very expressive." But she also asked to be quoted anonymously, perhaps anxious that her cheerful acceptance of workplace swearing might be seen as an endorsement — and might offend clients, current or prospective. And yet many of the people I spoke with about this subject, men as well as women, suggested that swearing was a strategic part of the lexicon they developed to be taken seriously as potential alphas of their organizations. I can relate. My first jobs were in banking and then media sales — businesses at the time completely dominated by men and fueled by a backslapping, crude-joke-telling camaraderie. Swearing definitely helped me come across as one of the guys, and thereby granted me access to the kind of casual gossiping and information-trading upon which deals are sometimes built. "Swearing," as one senior female attorney told me, "gives others, men and women, reciprocal permission to let their hair down and feel comfortable sharing revelations." This approach — swearing as an effective social tool that can enhance work relationships and allow women in particular to present an equal-to-men or even crypto-masculine identity — has been documented by psychology and linguistics researchers.

But not all swearing is equal. Take swearing in anger. Swearing is positively correlated with extraversion and Type A hostility and many scholarly studies (Jennifer Coates, 1993, Vivian de Klerk, 1991, 1997) identify swearing as intrinsically aggressive. Take Dick Cheney's unapologetic snarling at Senator Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor, or Serena Williams's outburst to a ref about a foot-fault call. Their curses were meant to take charge, to intimidate. And swearing men and swearing women are perceived differently. De Klerk discovered that women risk being viewed more negatively than men when using obscenities. Elizabeth Gordon, who studies speech and gender stereotypes at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, has found in her research that women who were "non-standard" speakers — that is, foul-mouthed — were judged to be of lower social and moral strata. We've seen this play out in public. Cheney refused to apologize for his f-bomb and reported that he felt "better" after his exchange with Senator Leahy, whereas at Serena Williams's next press conference, she was subdued and entirely contrite. These days, it's practically meaningless and way too easy to say something "sucks," or (much) worse. And the rough waters in which we all now work makes it increasingly important to be clear and precise about what is going on emotionally inside and around us — not to be milquetoasty, but to be calibrated. As a person who allowed (and, I confess, still occasionally allows) herself to resort to default swearing, it seems to me that in this laissez faire age, and as we start a new year with new intentions, that it's a good idea — indeed, a damn fine notion — for business leaders to get more truly creative about their language and use the various linguistic bombs only sparingly.

A Female-Dominated Workplace Won't Fix Everything

From the Harvard Business Review.

Men on the job must feel besieged. Two seismic shifts are underway that are irrevocably changing the ways in which we've believed work works.

On the one hand, new technologies have enabled neuroscience to discover that men and women tend to be wired differently in ways that incline men — can it be? — to behave more emotionally and irrationally in certain work situations, exploding the myth that women are the only emotional creatures in the workplace. Recent research, like that led by Cambridge University neuroscientist John Coates, suggests that surges in male financial traders' testosterone produce states of euphoria that cause them to understate risk, thus contributing to the overleveraged global financial crash. Since men naturally produce ten times as much testosterone as women, it's being suggested that a more gender-balanced financial workforce could be stabilizing for firms and for the system as a whole.

On the other hand, the metrics of 21st century female professional and economic empowerment have become a tide. As of the last two years, more American workers are female than male, and the postindustrial occupations in which women predominate — health and education, among others — are the growth sectors. Women today account for 57% of college undergraduates, 62% of graduate students, and majorities of those graduating from medical and law schools. Despite the continuing rarity of women at the very tops of large corporations (which will inexorably shift as the cohort of overwhelmingly male CEOs retires during the next decade) and in finance, a 2004 study by the women's group Catalyst, The Bottom Line: Connecting Corporate Performance and Gender Diversity, concluded that companies with the highest percentages of women in their executive ranks achieved 35% higher returns on average. What's more, according to the Center for Women's Business Research, women today own 40% of the private businesses in the United States and a study released last year found that (the relatively few) high-tech start-ups led by women fail less frequently than those led by men. After 40 years of feminist-era dues paying, women's moment has come. Hear us roar.

As a woman who came of age in the late 1970s and who has worked in sometimes unproductively male-dominated workplaces, I'm with the program so far. Two-income families are the new normal. Economic parity for women is a good thing. But I don't think we should rush into simplistically thinking that a female-dominated workplace will change everything and overnight make the world perfect. The bigger opportunity, and indeed an essential rethink if we are to reboot our economy, is finally to move beyond circa-1970s gender-centric ideology into a larger, more constructive conversation about how to reinvent workplace norms.

We humans, women and men alike, are hobbled by a gigantic evolutionary time lag. We have no clue how to handle 21st century cognitive threats, real life in the modern workplace. We evolved, survived, through our ability to respond to physical threat — is that a snake on the trail or a stick? Our bodies' stress hormones, adrenaline, cortisol and testosterone, among others, which raise blood pressure and send more blood to our muscles, historically made us more alert in preparation to fight or flee imminent physical threats. Whether I'm fleeing a charging lion or cowering before a screaming boss, the amygdala responds, on a basic level, in a very similar way. Deep inside we are all irredeemably super-old-school. But the reality is that emotion is far more complicated in a modern work setting than it was for our prehistoric ancestors on the savanna. Is the person in the next cubicle gunning for my job? How will I get my work done when the babysitter calls in sick? And this disconnect — this evolutionary delay in the development of more emotionally nuanced or sophisticated responses to psychological challenges — is a huge contributor to what makes navigating modern work/life so incredibly hard.

In a 2008 paper on gender differences, five psychologists — Kateri McRae and James Gross of Stanford, Kevin Ochsner of Columbia, Iris Mauss of the University of Denver, and John Gabrieli of MIT — reported that while men and women don't really differ in their basic "reactivity" to emotional provocation, they are quite different in the ways in which they respond. Based on both subsequent questioning and neural responses to aversive photos as measured by fMRI brain scans, the authors discovered no significant differences between the genders in the speed of their reactions to stimuli. But there are gender-based distinctions in how men and women were able to regulate and manage their emotional response to these stimuli. The amygdala was less activated in men's brains than in women's, and portions of the women's prefrontal cortex, the cognitive control center, were more active than those of the men. The relatively new science of emotion is beginning to pinpoint precisely the neurochemical differences between the ways women and men tend to approach and deal with emotion, and it is important neither to let PC feminist ideology or neo-Victorian "Ooh, ick" squeamishness blind us to the findings. A too-reductive men-are-from-mars-women-are-from-venus perspective serves no one.

Rather than stigmatize the characteristic emotional biologies of one gender or the other, it should be the goal of any person or organization to allow all emotion at work, in all of its gendered nuances, its full due. Understanding the truths that neuroscience is revealing will allow us greater awareness and thus control of the emotions that shape our decisions and behavior at work. Learning and paying attention to the emotions that motivate and/or hobble us and in what measure — anger, anxiety, fear, joy — can help us learn to manage and use those emotions more effectively. I'd like to think that today, with U.S. women irrevocably at work and the economy in such dire straits, that we can safely raise all kinds of questions without endangering progress. When it comes to emotions and work, we should start being more unflinchingly analytical and empirical than ever before. As science discovers, confirms, and refines new understandings of gender-based aspects of emotion, let's try not to react to them too emotionally.

Aging: A Different Kind of Utopia

Do you ever find yourself up late at night worrying about what's going to happen to you when you get old? Anxious about whether you've managed finances well enough to take care of your needs for the long haul? And for those of you with kids, concerned that they might not want to deal with your problems, particularly if they no longer live anywhere nearby? Well, I do. But I've also started thinking about different kinds of ways I might proactively allay some of those concerns. About 20 of us have been members of the same New York City book club for almost a decade. The average age is around 60; I think I'm the youngest. Almost three years ago we started a sort of parlor game imagining different ways we might live as we got older. And given that women will survive their husbands by an average of seven years - and all the women in our club are straight and married - the speculative elder-world of our all-female book club was, not surprisingly, female.

We thought we could pool all of our resources and buy a huge house in Manhattan. Each of us would have our own bedroom and we'd share the communal spaces. The savings we'd gain by not having individual homes we could use to hire a cook, a driver, a nurse (if needed) and probably an exercise instructor.

If we were fortunate in our planning we might even have enough capital to buy a second home maybe at the beach. All of us like each other and the idea of creating our own micro-community, a group with whom we could go out to dinner, and attend lectures and films and concerts and plays and remain culturally and socially active is appealing. And fiscally smart - why replicate many times over what we could consolidate?

A different fantasy, which includes my husband, is to buy a bit of land in some mild-winter locale with several friends. It would be a second home for some of us over the next decade or so, and a principal home for some of us in the years beyond that.

Each of us would build our own compact house - bedroom(s), living room, office(s) or studio - and again share communal spaces like the kitchen and dining areas. In this scheme we would also have a gardener/handyman, a pool and (when I'm driving the fantasy) a tennis court. The notion being that if we merged our resources we might be able to create something pretty grand, physically and socially.

As my husband and I have shared this notion with others they get excited. Since our kids still live at home, we haven't yet gone so far as to talk with a lawyer about the legal particulars of how this might work. Clearly there are lots of gritty problems like taxes and maintenance and inheritances and governance to figure out, but I've discovered that we aren't alone in thinking about innovative ways to create a new kind of community.

What we are talking and fantasizing about is called an Intentional Community - as the Intentional Community Web site defines it: "Intentional Community is an inclusive term for ecovillages, cohousing, residential land trusts, communes, student co-ops, urban housing cooperatives, and other projects where people strive together with a common vision." I scrolled through the site and discovered thousands of people forming all sorts of living groups.  The site is a great resource for any of you thinking about this.

I also decided to search "aging in place" and came up with 21 million hits, many of them excellent starting reference points. The term usually refers to retrofitting your current house so that you can stay living there no matter how old you get.

The trick with aging in place is to make the environment brighter and easier to navigate with shelving and appliances all made effortlessly accessible. It is also important to "outsource" other kinds of needs you might have - like the ones I imagine with my book club: driving, meal preparation, household maintenance, cleaning, and health care.

I find the sociological implications of these trends really interesting. As our families have splintered across the country, lots of us are clearly interested in creating new models for comfortable, collective living. And most of us are loath to burden family living far away when we age, yet the majority of us will need help in managing day-to-day life if we're lucky enough to beat the odds and make it past 80.

I think the industries serving this segment will only expand as more of us boomers tackle how we live in the future.

Taking Your Feelings To Work

WHEN I graduated from college in 1977, the world was still neatly divided into two spheres: work and everything else. Work was supposed to be a hyperrational realm of logic, filled with timetables, organizational charts and returns on investment. It was only outside of work that emotions — so dangerously ill-defined and unpredictable — were supposed to emerge.

Anne Kreamer says that “home life, with all its messy, complicated emotional currents, has become inextricably and undeniably woven into the workplace.”

But from the first day of my first real job, as an administrative assistant at the Park Avenue headquarters of a commercial bank that is now defunct, I realized that emotions were simmering everywhere in the workplace.

My desk, on the hushed, deep-pile-carpeted executive floor, was a few feet opposite the restroom doors. (Clearly, I was lowest in the pecking order.) Every few days, one of the three executive women on my half of the floor would rush into the restroom and, after a little too long, re-emerge with the remnants of a good cry still visible on her splotchy face. I also watched men dash into the men’s room and leave a few minutes later, tight-lipped and ashen.

Even as a 21-year-old workplace neophyte, I realized that emotion is a force that underlies all of our behavior. For my book, “It’s Always Personal: Emotion in the New Workplace,” I spent two years exploring Americans’ attitudes toward emotion at work today, and my findings suggest this amended version of Descartes’s famous line: I think and feel, therefore I am.

In the old days — pre-Internet, pre-cellphones — it was a lot easier to believe “work equals rational” and “home equals emotional.” But now that work and home life constantly bleed into each other, that distinction has become anachronistic and probably self-defeating. People text and e-mail their friends and family members throughout the workday, and they receive messages from colleagues and clients on nights and weekends and during vacations.

The membranes between private life and work, especially office work, have always been porous, but today employers and employees expect accessibility and accountability pretty much round-the-clock. And whereas old-school office memos and business letters generally weren’t expected to be friendly or candid — that is, human — business e-mails most definitely are.

Conversely, what used to be considered private behavior can instantly reverberate at work through social networking. People fire off e-mails late at night, only to regret their tone and intent in the cold light of day. Facebook friends from work can stumble upon wild and crazy pictures from a bachelorette party. Tweets and anonymous mobile video uploads can instantly broadcast unflattering emotional displays by surly customer service employees or misbehaving C.E.O.’s.

The conventional wisdom used to be that we brought home the emotions we couldn’t express at work — snapping (or worse) at blameless partners and children. That is still true, but what’s new is that home life, with all its messy, complicated emotional currents, has become inextricably and undeniably woven into the workplace.

The rulebook for modern office etiquette has yet to be codified. How do we avoid hurting one another’s feelings if everything is supposed to be rational, yet also transparent and accessible? How can others understand the emotion behind what we’re trying to say in an e-mail if no one takes the time to read beyond the subject line and the first sentence?

And the more we relegate communication to the electronic realm, the greater our longing for face-to-face contact. Our new “flat” organizational structures at work might seem to promote a more hang-loose level of emotional expression. But, if anything, flatter organizations tend to require even higher levels of emotional competency and effort in order to navigate amorphous command structures.

NO one is sure where the lines are anymore. Should we high-five an underling? Is it cool to make jokes with the boss? What if we overhear the man in the next cubicle crying?

Clear rules for this new working world simply don’t exist. But one thing is certain. The Millennials, a generation raised with the 24/7 naked emotional transparency of texting and social networking, is now entering the work force by the millions each year. As they replace old-schoolers born in the 1940s and ’50s, there is no turning back to a compartmentalized world.

I like to imagine that if men and women were to express more emotion routinely and easily at work — jokes, warmth, sadness, anger, tears, joy, all of it — then as a people we might not feel so chronically anxious and overwhelmed. By denying the range of emotional expressiveness intrinsic and appropriate to the workplace, we find ourselves at a loss for how to handle this brave new boundary-less world.

Overtly acknowledging how and in what measure anger, anxiety, fear and pleasure color and shape our working lives can help us manage those emotions and use them to our benefit, both at work and at home.

E-mail: preoccupations@nytimes.com.

What Do Glenn Beck, Jim Cramer, Rush Limbaugh and most bosses have in common?

They don’t understand their anger. “In a culture where it’s easy to fire of a snippy e-mail or text,” reported Elizabeth Bernstein in her Wall Street Journal column ‘Friendly Fight:  A Smarter Say to Say I’m Angry,’  “most of have a hard time honestly expressing anger face to face.  If someone upsets us, often we shout, stomp off, roll our eyes, refuse to speak to the person or complain to everyone else.  Or we kid ourselves that we aren’t upset and subconsciously fume – until one day we explode over the seemingly littlest thing.”  And no one likes to be on the receiving end of explosive anger.

Sound familiar?  I bet it does.  In the research I conducted for my book, 60% of all Americans reported seeing their boss get angry with someone on the job during the past year.  And yet, none of us are ever taught how to deal with managing our anger or how to deal with others.

Anger is a biologically driven response to threat.  When threatened, we release the hormone epinephrine, followed by norepinephrine (noradrenaline), prepping the body to react – increasing our heart rate and blood pressure, and narrowing our focus as we prepare to flight or flee.  And this is what is at the crux of the issue for modern homo sapiens in the workplace:  pretty much as they did 200,000 years ago, our bodies continue to automatically process psychological threats as physical threats.  Deep inside we are all irredeemably very old school.  But the reality is that reacting to a psychological threat with a physical response is wildly inappropriate.  And this disconnect – this evolutionary lag in the development of more emotionally calibrated or sophisticated responses to psychological challenges – is a huge contributor to what makes navigating modern life so incredibly hard.  As the economist Terry Burnham, the author of Mean Markets and Lizard Brains:  How to Profit From the New Science of Irrationality, put it, “The caricature view would be, the caveman wins the battle, has more babies, crushes his enemies, then puts on a suit 10,000 years later and goes into a boardroom and still wants to crush his enemies.”

To be effective at work we need to learn how to handle this evolutionary gap in responding to non-physical threat.  I have created many tools to aid us in developing this challenging skill and one of the best is something I call DING.  Which relates to the concept of self-reflection or meta-cognition, which I’ll address in another post.

Aging and How to Have it Both Ways

Not long ago the front page of the Styles section in the New York Times ran the following two headlines side by side: "Listen Up, Everybody: I'm in Menopause," and, "'omg, my mom joined facebook!!'" After I stopped chuckling, I realized that the two stories perfectly captured the current emotional spectrum of my life.

Elizabeth Hayt was reporting on women who actually "flaunt their menopausal symptoms. If they are not erupting in the literal heat of the moment, they are flinging wisecracks, adopting a single-sex argot comprising wry, offhanded quips and punctuated by knowing winks and nudges."

Michelle Slatalla, on the other hand, a woman of a certain age herself, was describing her newfound commitment to avoid becoming an old-fogey Luddite. She had joined Facebook. And her teenaged daughter busted her with an IM saying, "wayyy creepy, why did you make one! You won't get away with this....everyone in the whole world thinks its super creepy when adults have facebooks."

Weird, my husband just joined Facebook and that's pretty much exactly what our youngest daughter said to him.

I get it: my generation came of age rejecting the trappings of the one that preceded ours, and being young (but not a child) was empowering and liberating and thrilling. And now that we are undeniably not young - the oldest of the 77 million boomers are now 61 - how do we deal?

On the one hand, legitimacy often comes from public acknowledgment. If we talk publicly and loudly about menopause, maybe it loses its cultural ick factor, and we validate our rite of passage.

But we also cannot bear to feel out of it. So we struggle to find our places in the lightning speed shifts within the techno-world.  And while these two impulses - shout out to the world that we're getting older, and also trying to stay with it - might seem contradictory, they both are healthy ways to approach aging.

Women bonding together to simply joke about their menopausal conditions generates solidarity and reassurance. And a sense of community is central to healthy aging.

A few years ago, the University of Chicago's Louise Hawkley and John Cacioppo published a paper, "Loneliness is a Unique Predictor of Age-Related Differences in Systolic Blood Pressure," in the journal Psychology and Aging, that tells you everything you need to know in its title.

And joining Facebook is a twofer. Community and novelty. I'm not sure figuring out how to post something on an acquaintance's wall or "poking" some friend of a friend will lower your brain age, as Nintendo promises with their Brain Game, but it has to keep us more mentally nimble and more connected to the world, and those are proven ways to help us age more contentedly.

Weight, Wait. Don't Tell Me

If you’re like me, you exercise for several reasons: it makes you feel better, it’s good for your cardiovascular system, and it helps you lose or maintain the weight that no matter how virtuous we think we are each additional year seems to lard on. Unfortunately, according to a recent piece in New York magazine, the whole losing weight by exercising thing may not be true. What??? Say it ain’t so.

The author of the piece, Gary Taubes, who wrote the new book, "Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease," says that while the new joint guidelines for physical activity and health published by the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine "suggest that 30 minutes of moderate physical activity five days a week is necessary to promote and maintain health," they pointedly didn’t say that "that more physical activity will lead us to lose weight.

"Indeed, the best they could say about the relationship between fat and exercise was this: 'it is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditures would be less likely to gain weight over time, compared with those how have low energy expenditures. So far, data to support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling.'"

Taubes argues that the one thing certain about exercise is that it makes us hungry and so when we burn more calories, we also end up consuming more. The most comprehensive study of the relationship between exercise and weight loss, an analysis in 2000 by two Finnish researchers of data on the subject over the last 20 years, discovered, very discouragingly, that even successful dieters who were trying to maintain weight loss eventually gained it back, regardless of whether or not they exercised.

OK, shoot me now.

Fortunately, Taubes gave me some hope. According to him, "because insulin determines fat accumulation, it’s quite possible that we get fat not because we eat too much or exercise too little but because we secrete too much insulin or because our insulin levels remain elevated far longer that might be ideal."

So what’s that mean in practical terms? George Cahill Jr., a retired Harvard professor of medicine and an expert in insulin secretion, suggests that the consumption of easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars (like those found in soda pop and potatoes, pasta, rice, donuts and beer) are fattening us up because they spike our insulin levels, which in turn causes our tissues to retain fat.

I get it. If I maintain a more even-keeled level of blood sugar, by eating throughout the day small amounts of protein – cheese, eggs, yogurt - with small amounts of complex carbohydrates – fruits, beans, whole grains - then my insulin levels won’t spike.  And with this new approach, if I balance what I eat with a reasonable amount of exercise, I should be able to maintain my weight.

On the other hand, I confess that my visits to the gym have fallen off sharply since I read this news that exercise won’t by itself keep me trim. In the game of aging and staying fit, there are no silver bullets.

Tears are more than just a wet blanket.

Israeli neurobiologists have discovered that “merely sniffing negative-emotion-related odorless tears obtained from women donors, induced reductions in sexual appeal attributed by men to pictures of women’s faces.” Dr. Noam Sobel, a professor of neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute in Israel suggests that tears are a chemical form of language, saying, “basically what we’ve found is the chemo-signaling word for ‘no’ — or at least ‘not now.’ ”

That tears serve a biochemical communication function doesn’t particularly surprise me, but I think their evolutionary role is vastly broader than merely suppressing sexual arousal in men. Psychic tears can also be socially adaptively helpful in a wider array of situations – at work or home -- by communicating submission. Tom Lutz, a University of Iowa professor and author of Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears, describes such crying as “the human equivalent of a dog putting its tail between its legs – please, we can say with tears, I am already abased, do me no further harm.”

We know that psychic or emotional tears, because they are exceptional, force us and those around us to acknowledge that something important has just happened – my boyfriend proposed to me, my boss yelled at me, I was deeply moved by a sense of the divine, my dog died – and that we should pause and take a moment for reflection.

Big Boys Should Cry

I’m no John Boehner fan.  And I’m even less of a Mitch McConnell fan.  But as a person who chokes up at a movie or book or a news story most days and full-on cried during Toy Story 3, as tough as it is for me to admit it, I feel for both of them right now. Crying politicians are nothing new. Remember Democratic Presidential candidate Ed Muskie, who lost the 1972 nomination after he teared up during a press conference in New Hampshire while defending his wife? And Hillary Clinton, who also famously choked up, in 2008, also while campaigning for President in the New Hampshire primary?

House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio, left, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. (Photos by AP Photo)

I understand the modern default assumption that a politician is using emotional displays cynically. (See Clinton, Bill.) And I understand why women, especially women who politically oppose the un-compassionate conservatives Boehner and McConnell, are tempted to revile them for tearing up, which Senator McConnell did this week delivering a farewell speech to his friend Judd Gregg (of New Hampshire -- again New Hampshire!) while Boehner apparently gets weepy on a daily basis. But I’m made uncomfortable that these apparently authentic emotional displays by powerful men are fair game for ridicule.

Men completely controlled the workplace when women first went into the labor force in significant numbers during the late 60s and 70s, so we females believed that to be successful we had to “man up,” and emulate their emotional restraint. For forty years women have had to adhere to a poker-faced workplace persona that denies essential aspects or our emotional wiring.  Nancy Pelosi said of Boehner in The New York Times magazine, “You know what?  He is known to cry.  He cries sometimes when we’re having a debate on bills.  If I cry, it’s about the personal loss of a friend or something like that.  But when it comes to politics – no – I don’t cry." But a hard outer shell of pseudo-invulnerability comes at a cost to both genders.

Women cry, on average, four times as often as men – according to neurologist William Frey, an average of 5.3 times per month, compared with 1.4 times for men. And this isn't just a function of cultural training – women generate far more prolactin, the hormone responsible for milk production that also controls the neurotransmitter receptors in our tear glands, and women’s tear ducts are anatomically different from male tear ducts, resulting in a larger volume of tears. In a 2009 survey I conducted with J. Walter Thompson probing the nature of emotion in the workplace I discovered that *both* women and men divide themselves into two large camps:  those 25% who cry regularly and those 75% who tend not to cry frequently.  McConnell, Boehner and I are part of the 25% of us who are members of the “crying tribe.”  We also discovered in our survey that when we do tear up on the job, women can be our own worst enemies – a plurality of women consider people who cry at work  "unstable," whereas roughly that same fraction of men see tears on the job as only "slightly unprofessional."  In other words, women see tears at work as some kind of moral/psychological failure, but men don’t.

“We will stop here briefly to contemplate what would happen if she [Nancy Pelosi], or any female lawmaker, broke into loud nose-running sobs while discussing Iraq troop funding or giving a TV interview,” Gail Collins wrote in her December 16th New York Times Op-Ed column about Boehner. But instead of decrying (no pun intended) the operative gender double standard, and suggesting that the no-crying rule be enforced equally for male and female Speakers of the House, I think it would be much better to allow McConnell’s or Boehner's tearfulness to abolish the no-cry rule for *both* genders.  Women (and men) who are belittling Boehner and McConnell for getting emotional are not helping humanity’s larger cause – that all people should feel comfortable being as authentically themselves as possible. We can continue to despise their politics and cynical maneuvers but still grant them their humanity.

Are You Up All Night?

You might think, as I did until the other day, that we need less sleep the older we get. But according to The National Institute of Health, the truth is that older adults actually need as much sleep as young adults - seven to nine hours a night - for optimum health. It's just that it's often harder for older adults to fall and stay asleep. And that's bad for how we age. According the NIH, "Older adults who have poor nighttime sleep are more likely to have a depressed mood, attention and memory problems, excessive daytime sleepiness, more nighttime falls, and use more over-the-counter or prescription sleep aids. Poor sleep is also associated with a poorer quality of life." Yikes!  Staying up to watch Stephen Colbert might be ruining my quality of life?

Scientists are realizing more and more the physical effects of sleep deprivation. It weakens the immune system, preventing the body from being able to ward off infections, as well as affecting the body's chemical balances.

Healthy people start to show marked effects of aging after only a few nights of less than adequate sleep. And in a study done at the University of Chicago, Dr. Eve Van Cauter found that "after four hours of sleep for six consecutive nights, healthy young men had blood test results that nearly matched those of diabetics.

Their ability to process blood sugar was reduced by 30 percent, they had a huge drop in their insulin response, and they had elevated levels of a stress hormone called cortisol, which can lead to hypertension and memory impairment. Such physical effects were unheard of before this study, and as a result, scientists are now looking into connections with lack of sleep and obesity."

Obviously, our national sleeplessness is big business. What is new is just how big. In his upcoming book, "Microtrends," the pollster and worldwide CEO of the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, Mark Penn reports the following: "The private sector is leaping on the chance both to help people sleep at night.... The sleeping pill industry is having a field day: The new, nonaddictive Ambien did a record $2 billion worth of business worldwide in 2004, with the number of people aged 20 - 44 who use sleeping pills doubling between 2000 and 2004."

But what is nutty about the growth in the sleep-aid business is the equal growth in the caffeine business. According to Penn,  "From the stay-awake side, caffeine-packed energy drinks are the fastest-growing sector of the nearly $100 billion domestic beverage industry; between 2005 and 2008, those drinks are expected to bring in more profits than all regular soft drinks and sports drinks combined." All soft drinks and sports drinks combined! That is a staggering fact.

There's scarcely a magazine that I read these days that doesn't have a piece listing eight or ten things we can do to get a better night's sleep: go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, don't eat or drink too close to bedtime, don't watch TV or do work in bed, try a lavender bath, meditate, and on and on.

Mark Penn is onto something essential - we're simply medicating ourselves way too much. We use uppers (caffeine) and downers (Ambien, Lunesta) to try and gain equilibrium. I wonder if we scaled back on both we'd get a better night's sleep, save a lot of money, and be healthier?  Hmmmmm...I'll sleep on that.