Research overview across cognitive, emotional, physical, social, and long-term health domains

Overview

Sleep deprivation and inadequate sleep affect far more than energy and alertness. Research links insufficient sleep to changes in virtually every major domain of human functioning, including cognition, emotional regulation, mental health, physical health, immune function, metabolism, relationships, work performance, and long-term disease risk.

An umbrella review published in 2025 examining 29 systematic reviews and meta-analyses reported consistent associations between insufficient sleep and cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, anxiety, emotional dysregulation, depressive symptoms, and increased all-cause mortality. Experimental research also demonstrates that even relatively short periods of sleep loss can impair cognitive and emotional functioning. There is even evidence that lack of sleep can compromise ethical behavior.

An important distinction is between immediate effects, which can emerge after a single night of inadequate sleep, and cumulative effects, which may develop or become more pronounced with repeated sleep restriction.

1. Cognitive, Emotional, and Mental Health Effects

1. Cognitive functioning and executive control

• Reduced attention, vigilance, and sustained concentration.
• Impaired working memory, recall, and learning.
• Slower information processing and reaction time.
• Reduced problem-solving, planning, judgment, and decision-making.
• Diminished cognitive flexibility and ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
• More errors, lapses in awareness, and episodes of microsleep.
• Reduced creativity and the ability to integrate complex information.

Evidence note: Strong evidence, including controlled experimental studies and established clinical research.

2. Emotional functioning and regulation

• Increased irritability, frustration, and impatience.
• Reduced positive emotions, enthusiasm, and enjoyment.
• Greater emotional reactivity and difficulty recovering from upsetting experiences.
• Reduced frustration tolerance and impulse control.
• Increased anxiety and stress sensitivity.
• Less accurate interpretation of emotional expressions and social cues.
• Greater difficulty regulating emotional responses during conflict.

Evidence note: A systematic review and meta-analysis of 154 studies found that different forms of sleep loss consistently reduced positive affect and increased anxiety symptoms.

3. Mental health and psychiatric functioning

• Increased depressive symptoms and anxiety.
• Greater psychological distress and vulnerability to stress.
• Worsening of existing mental health conditions.
• Potential exacerbation of trauma-related symptoms and difficulties managing intrusive thoughts.
• In vulnerable individuals, increased risk of mania, psychotic symptoms, paranoia, or hallucinations with severe sleep loss.
• Associations with suicidal thoughts and risk-taking behavior.

Evidence note: The relationship is bidirectional: mental health problems can disrupt sleep, and inadequate sleep can worsen mental health. Sleep deprivation alone does not establish a psychiatric diagnosis.

4. Energy, motivation, and daily functioning

• Daytime sleepiness, fatigue, and reduced stamina.
• Lower motivation, initiative, and persistence.
• Greater perceived effort for ordinary tasks.
• Reduced productivity and slower task completion.
• Difficulty organizing routines and following through on intentions.
• Lower subjective quality of life and reduced capacity to cope with demands.

Evidence note: These effects can occur even when a person believes they have adapted to sleeping less.

5. Motor functioning, physical coordination, and safety

• Reduced coordination, balance, and psychomotor speed.
• Slower responses to unexpected events.
• Increased risk of driving accidents, workplace injuries, and other errors.
• Brief involuntary sleep episodes, sometimes without awareness.
• Impaired hazard recognition and risk assessment.

Evidence note: These are immediate safety consequences, not merely long-term health risks.

2. Physical Health and Biological Systems

6. Cardiovascular health

• Elevated blood pressure and increased sympathetic nervous system activity.
• Greater risk of hypertension, coronary heart disease, and other cardiovascular conditions.
• Changes in vascular function and inflammatory activity.
• Increased cardiovascular stress and, in population studies, greater risk of stroke.

Evidence note: Repeated sleep restriction may interfere with the normal nighttime decline in blood pressure, reducing an important period of cardiovascular recovery.

7. Metabolic health, appetite, and body weight

• Reduced insulin sensitivity and poorer glucose regulation.
• Increased risk of type 2 diabetes.
• Changes in appetite regulation, including alterations in ghrelin and leptin.
• Increased hunger, food cravings, and opportunities for excess calorie consumption.
• Increased risk of weight gain and obesity.
• Adverse changes in lipid metabolism in some studies.

Evidence note: Sleep loss can influence both the biological regulation of energy balance and the behaviors that determine eating and physical activity.

8. Immune function and inflammation

• Reduced effectiveness of some immune defenses.
• Greater susceptibility to common infections.
• Potentially weaker antibody responses to vaccination.
• Changes in inflammatory signaling and immune-cell activity.
• Increased chronic low-grade inflammation in some circumstances.

Evidence note: Sleep helps coordinate immune responses. Insufficient sleep can disrupt that regulation rather than simply making the immune system uniformly weaker.

9. Hormonal and endocrine functioning

• Changes in cortisol rhythms and the physiological stress response.
• Effects on insulin regulation and glucose metabolism.
• Changes in growth hormone release and tissue repair.
• Alterations in appetite-related hormones.
• Possible effects on reproductive hormone regulation in some populations.
• Disruption of circadian timing across multiple hormonal processes.

Evidence note: Effects vary by duration of sleep loss, timing, age, sex, and individual physiology.

10. Musculoskeletal health, pain, and recovery

• Increased sensitivity to pain and reduced pain tolerance.
• Greater subjective muscle soreness and fatigue.
• Impaired exercise recovery and reduced physical performance.
• Potential interference with tissue repair and recovery from physical exertion.
• Greater difficulty maintaining consistent physical activity when fatigue accumulates.

Evidence note: Sleep loss and pain can reinforce each other: pain interferes with sleep, while insufficient sleep can amplify pain perception.

11. Gastrointestinal health

• Changes in gastrointestinal symptoms and digestive comfort.
• Alterations in gut microbiome composition and intestinal barrier function, with much mechanistic evidence still developing.
• Possible worsening of symptoms in people with existing gastrointestinal disorders.
• Interactions between circadian rhythms, digestion, and gut motility.

Evidence note: Associations are documented for some sleep and gastrointestinal disorders, but direct effects of sleep duration alone are less firmly established for specific digestive diseases.

12. Reproductive health, sexual functioning, and fertility

• Possible disruption of reproductive hormone regulation.
• Associations with reduced sexual desire and sexual functioning.
• Associations between sleep problems and poorer reproductive outcomes in some studies.
• Potential effects on menstrual or reproductive physiology, depending on the circumstances.

Evidence note: Findings vary in strength. Fertility is influenced by many factors, and inadequate sleep does not necessarily cause infertility.

13. Brain health and neurological functioning

• Disruption of memory consolidation and synaptic processes.
• Changes in neural systems involved in attention, emotion, and executive control.
• Increased vulnerability to neurological symptoms in susceptible people.
• Associations with neurodegenerative disease in longer-term observational research.

Evidence note: Sleep supports processes that maintain brain function, but associations with neurodegenerative disease do not establish that sleep deprivation alone causes dementia.

3. Social, Interpersonal, Developmental, and Behavioral Effects

14. Relationships anddd interpersonal functioning

• Reduced patience, empathy, and emotional availability.
• Increased irritability and reactivity during disagreements.
• Reduced ability to listen carefully and accurately interpret another person’s intentions.
• Greater likelihood of responding defensively or impulsively.
• Less effective communication, perspective-taking, and conflict resolution.
• Reduced interest in social interaction and intimacy.

Evidence note: Experimental research supports effects on emotion and emotional interpretation. Specific relationship outcomes depend on context.

15. Learning, acddemic achievement, and development

• Reduced attention, memory, and learning efficiency.
• Lower school performance and difficulty completing assignments.
• Greater impulsivity, behavioral difficulties, and mood swings.
• Reduced motivation and engagement.
• Potential interference with normal growth and developmental processes.

Evidence note: Sleep supports memory consolidation, learning, and physical development. Children may display sleep deprivation as hyperactivity or behavioral dysregulation rather than obvious sleepiness.

16. Occupational fdnctioning and professional performance

• Lower productivity and reduced efficiency.
• More mistakes, omissions, and poor-quality decisions.
• Difficulty sustaining attention during repetitive tasks.
• Reduced judgment in complex or high-pressure situations.
• Greater risk in safety-critical occupations.
• Increased difficulty managing workload, adapting to change, and responding constructively to colleagues.

Evidence note: Consequences can be especially significant in healthcare, transportation, emergency response, industrial work, and other safety-critical settings.

17. Social behavdor, impulse control, and risk-taking

• Greater impulsivity and difficulty inhibiting responses.
• Reduced ability to consider long-term consequences.
• Increased risk-taking in some situations.
• Reduced social engagement and increased interpersonal friction.
• Less effective coping with uncertainty, frustration, and stress.

Evidence note: These effects reflect interactions among reduced executive control, altered emotional processing, and fatigue.

4. Long-derm Disease Risk, Longevity, and Broader Consequences

Domain	Potential negative outcomes	Strength of evidence
Cardiovascular disease	Hypertension, coronary heart disease, and other cardiovascular risks	Strong evidence of association; mechanisms supported by experimental research
Metabolic disease	Insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, obesity	Strong evidence across experimental and observational research
Mental health	Depression, anxiety, psychological distress; exacerbation of existing disorders	Strong evidence for effects on emotional functioning; bidirectional clinical relationships
Immune and inflammatory health	Altered immune responses, infection susceptibility, inflammatory changes	Strong evidence for several short-term immune effects; long-term implications vary
Cancer	Associations between certain forms of circadian disruption, night-shift work, and some cancers	Evidence varies by exposure and cancer type; not equivalent to proving that short sleep directly causes cancer
Neurodegenerative disease	Associations with cognitive decline and disorders such as dementia	Active research area; direction of causality remains uncertain
All-cause mortality	Higher mortality associated with short sleep in large observational studies	Consistent association, but residual confounding and underlying health conditions matter

18. Cellular maintenance, aging, and disease vulnerability

• Inflammatory signaling: changes in inflammatory mediators may contribute to chronic disease risk.
• Oxidative stress: sleep disruption may affect the balance between reactive molecules and cellular defenses.
• Cellular maintenance and repair: sleep supports processes involved in tissue recovery and normal cellular functioning.
• Circadian regulation: insufficient or irregular sleep can disrupt the timing of biological processes throughout the body.
• Long-term health vulnerability: repeated sleep loss may compound other risk factors, including chronic stress, poor nutrition, and existing illness.

These are plausible and partly experimentally supported mechanisms. The extent to which any specific cellular change translates into a particular long-term disease in an individual remains uncertain.

5. Why Inadeqdate Sleep Has Widespread Effects

Sleep is not simply a period of inactivity. It supports processes that interact with one another: brain regulation (attention, memory, emotion, and executive control); stress physiology (autonomic activity, cortisol, and inflammation); metabolic regulation (glucose, appetite, and cardiovascular function); and behavior (judgment, relationships, performance, and safety).

These pathways can reinforce one another. Inadequate sleep may increase stress sensitivity, making interpersonal conflict more difficult; conflict may then increase arousal at bedtime, further disrupting sleep. Fatigue may also reduce physical activity, while altered appetite regulation can make healthy eating more difficult.

6. How Much dleep Is Enough?

For most adults, the general recommendation is 7–9 hours of sleep per night, with individual variation. Children and adolescents generally require more. Sleep quality, regularity, timing, and continuity also matter, so duration alone does not fully characterize healthy sleep.

• Acute sleep deprivation: a single night of little or no sleep can produce substantial cognitive, emotional, and safety impairments.
• Chronic partial sleep deprivation: repeatedly sleeping less than one’s needs can accumulate impairments, even when the nightly reduction seems modest.
• Fragmented sleep: frequent awakenings or disrupted sleep architecture can impair functioning even when total time in bed appears adequate.
• Circadian disruption: sleeping at biologically misaligned times, such as through shift work, may create additional difficulties beyond sleep duration alone.

People may underestimate their impairment as sleep loss accumulates. Feeling accustomed to sleeping less does not necessarily mean attention, judgment, or performance have returned to normal.

Summary

Inadequate sleep is a multisystem problem. Its effects span cognition, emotional regulation, psychiatric functioning, relationships, physical performance, immune and endocrine regulation, cardiovascular and metabolic health, and long-term disease vulnerability. The strongest evidence supports immediate cognitive and emotional impairment, while long-term risks are substantial but vary in the certainty of causal evidence.

References

Arambh, S. S., Pant, M. R., Bommasudram, T., Nayak, K. R., Roberts, S. S. H., Gallagher, C., Vaishali, K., Edwards, B. J., Tod, D., Davis, F., & Pullinger, S. A. (2025). Effects of sleep deprivation on physical and mental health outcomes: An umbrella review. American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine. Advance online publication. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12116485/

Annotation: Umbrella review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses covering mortality, cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, and mental health.

Medic, G., Wille, M., & Hemels, M. E. H. (2017). Short- and long-term health consequences of sleep disruption. Nature and Science of Sleep, 9, 151–161. https://doi.org/10.2147/NSS.S134864

Annotation: Review of cognitive, psychological, metabolic, cardiovascular, and other health consequences.

Palmer, C. A., Bower, J. L., Cho, K. W., Clementi, M. A., Lau, S., Oosterhoff, B., & Alfano, C. A. (2024). Sleep loss and emotion: A systematic review and meta-analysis of over 50 years of experimental research. Psychological Bulletin, 150(4), 440–463. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000410

Annotation: Quantitative synthesis of experimental studies examining emotional effects of sleep loss.

National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. (n.d.). Sleep deprivation and deficiency: How sleep affects your health. National Institutes of Health. https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/sleep-deprivation/health-effects

Annotation: Clinical overview of cognitive, physical, emotional, and safety consequences.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (n.d.). How does inadequate sleep affect health? National Institutes of Health. https://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/sleep/conditioninfo/inadequate-sleep

Annotation: Overview of short-term functioning, metabolic health, mental health, and developmental consequences.

Ramar, K., Malhotra, R. K., Carden, K. A., Martin, J. L., Abbasi-Feinberg, F., Aurora, R. N., Kapur, V. K., Olson, E. J., Rosen, C. L., Rowley, J. A., Shelgikar, A. V., & Trotti, L. M. (2021). Sleep is essential to health: An American Academy of Sleep Medicine position statement. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 17(10), 2115–2119. https://doi.org/10.5664/jcsm.9476

Annotation: Professional position statement on the importance of sleep for health.

Watson, N. F., Badr, M. S., Belenky, G., Bliwise, D. L., Buxton, O. M., Buysse, D., Dinges, D. F., Gangwisch, J., Grandner, M. A., Kushida, C., Malhotra, R. K., Martin, J. L., Patel, S. R., Quan, S. F., & Tasali, E. (2015). Recommended amount of sleep for a healthy adult: A joint consensus statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society. Sleep, 38(6), 843–844. https://doi.org/10.5665/sleep.4716

Annotation: Consensus recommendation on adult sleep duration.

Buysse, D. J. (2014). Sleep health: Can we define it? Does it matter? Sleep, 37(1), 9–17. https://doi.org/10.5665/sleep.3298

Annotation: Framework for understanding sleep health beyond duration alone.

Based on thousands of hours of direct work with clients and my continuous commitment to ongoing training and learning, I’ve come to believe that there are four foundational causes behind most of our mental health issues and symptoms.

The two defining experiences in childhood

· Insecure attachment to a caregiver

· Being forced to sacrifice authenticity for acceptance

Two other defining issues in childhood and adulthood

· Failing to allow ourselves to feel what makes sense in the moment (and labeling emotions as positive and negative)

· Trauma, and most importantly, relational trauma

Of course, when these things go well, i.e., we have secure attachment or allow ourselves emotional authenticity, our mental health and sense of wellbeing tend to be much more healthy and adaptive.

Attachment in Childhood

It is well understood in psychology, and among developmental psychologists in particular, that the extent to which a child feels securely attached to a caregiver, usually, but not always, a parent, plays a foundational role in a host of factors that affect mental health for the remainder of a person’s life. A partial list of critical outcomes includes the ability to securely explore one’s world, a strong sense of independence, social competence, resilience and the capacity to regulate emotionally. Individuals with secure childhood attachment tend to function well across all domains of life and in future relationships. When attachment is insecure, we tend to experience substantial challenges across the same domains. Fortunately, it is possible to find some version of more secure attachment even later in life.

Authenticity vs. Acceptance

One of the greatest psychic battles of our lives, starting at birth, is the extent to which we feel compelled to sacrifice who we are in order to be accepted by the people on whom our survival depends. Some of us are fortunate enough to be mostly validated (behavior, ideas, personality) for who we naturally are, and the benefits of that are life-long. For those of us who are invalidated, or even punished, for who we are, we tend to struggle with worthiness, self-confidence and self-esteem well into adulthood. Regardless, we almost always sacrifice authenticity for acceptance if forced to choose. And children who do not surrender their authenticity also tend to pay a high price for not accommodating the wishes of key adults in their lives. As with attachment, fortunately, we can rediscover and honor our authentic selves at any point in life.

Feeling What Makes Sense in the Moment

Western societies, and American society in particular, tend to socialize us against feeling our emotions in an open, authentic way, and certainly socialize us against expressing emotion openly, particularly certain emotions in certain places. We are also taught that some emotions are good or positive and others are bad or negative. In my clinical experience, this combination is at the heart of much of the emotional distress and mental health symptoms we experience. You can see a more detailed explanation here, but the short version is that when we bury emotions, we bury them alive. They don’t go away, and when they resurface, they often come out very differently than they went in—dysregulation, rage, addiction, migraines, and over time, even illnesses such as autoimmune disorders and gastrointestinal disease. As for labeling emotions as positive or negative, we experience them differently just by labeling them. Unpleasant emotions, seen as “negative” tend to be more intense and last longer when we resist them. Similarly, we are biased toward honoring and welcoming emotions that feel good, that we label as “positive,” engendering a highly judgmental imbalance in our emotional experience. A good place to start for all of us is just to feel what makes sense in the moment. That alone, will address a lot of what ails us.

Trauma

The fourth foundational influence on our mental health and wellbeing is psychological trauma, and in particular, complex relational trauma.^[1] While singular “Big T” traumatic events can certainly result in trauma symptoms, I have found that my clients who have experienced complex, relational trauma, particularly in childhood, have been emotionally and neurologically programmed by that trauma. Hyper-vigilance of the environment, particularly in the context of relationship, emotion dysregulation, anxiety, activated neurological states, and worthiness and shame issues, all tend to “follow” trauma histories.

Humans are wired for connection with others. However, if our neurological programming related to relationships is based on trauma, we get stuck between an evolutionary drive for connection on the one hand and fear of connection on the other hand. On the contrary, individuals who are not burdened with complex trauma histories are able to navigate life, including a wide variety of relationships, in much more adaptive, resilient ways and they tend to reregulate quickly when activated.

The very good news is that we have highly effective tools for treating and healing from trauma, even complex, relational trauma. Interestingly, that healing also tends to ameliorate what appear to be “free standing” symptoms such as anxiety, depression, addiction, OCD, etc., which are often just downstream products of trauma. Importantly, although treatment can not erase the fact that the trauma happened, in some cases, people can shift their relationship with trauma from post-traumatic stress to post traumatic growth or resilience.

So, much of the mental health challenges and symptoms I see in my practice are traceable to four things: insecure attachment in childhood, sacrificing authenticity for acceptance, suppressing emotion, and trauma. Of course, there are manifestations of mental illness that do not fit these etiologies (causes), but if my anecdotal experience is applicable beyond my own practice, then a whole lot of what ails us psychologically (and medically for that matter), could be addressed by focusing on a limited number of sources, both preventatively and with treatment after the fact.

^[1] Some complex trauma is a product of severe abuse (sexual, physical, psychological) and therefore the symptoms of that abuse reflect deeper injury.

The following reference to a client is a composite without identifying information.

I was recently in session with a young adult client and they were casually sharing about having “cut off” three previous friends for various relational infractions. In one case, the friend’s behavior, as described by the client, was, indeed, fairly noxious. The other two struck me, as an older Gen Xer/younger Boomer, as immature and unkind, but not necessarily something that required the “nuclear” option of no-contact/estrangement.

I did not challenge the client, but then and after the session, I was wondering what things those relationships might have provided and what relational skills might have been honed, had the client chosen to approach the friends in a vulnerable, authentic way, seeking understanding and reconciliation, rather than simply walking away. When the time is right, I will likely revisit the topic.

There is no doubt that estrangement is becoming a much more common choice for dealing with relational conflict than it was in the past, both in family and with other kinds of relationships. On one hand, younger adults are probably smarter than their elders about choosing not to put up with a range of unhealthy dynamics in their lives. On the other hand, it also seems that younger folks have fairly low tolerance for relational distress, which, when resulting in cutting people off, also results in lost opportunity in relationships that may have been hard, but may also have been a source of significant learning or enjoyment or human connection or even intimacy, had they been allowed to evolve, even through challenging times. In fact, it is often the relationships that survive difficulty that provide the most value.

As it relates to families, younger millennials and certainly Gen Zers, typically no longer see kinship relationships as obligatory as they often were in the past. No doubt previous generations “suffered” through some very hard and even harmful familial relationships, seeing them as compulsory, but even hard relationships can have value, providing shared commitment and experience, celebrations, and spoken or unspoken fealty.[1]

Because human connection is so central to wellbeing I worry that the ease with which more young people are choosing estrangement with friends and family, does not portend well for their current and future mental health. Moreover, when folks are replacing genuine human connection with toxic activities such as social media, substance use, and other forms of isolation, limiting the number of people in their social circle is almost certainly not in their short or long-term interest.

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[1] To be clear, it is not healthy to continue to engage with anyone who is abusive or significantly compromises one’s mental health, and, in those cases, ceasing all contact may be the best choice.

In Western culture, and even more so in American corporate culture, we are frequently told to take the emotion out of important decisions. This is disastrous advice. It’s terrible guidance because it is contrary to how the brain works and, specifically, contrary to how we arrive at high-quality conclusions and decisions.

In Eastern philosophy the combination of feeling and thinking is often referred to as Wise Mind or the middle way. In neuroscience is it referred to as Affective-cognitive integration, or more technically, “prefrontal-limbic integration.” Regardless of what we call it, this integration is the interplay between the prefrontal cortex (reasoning, analysis, planning, impulse control) and limbic structures which assign value and create meaning via feeling. Good decision-making comes from effective communication between these regions.

In fact, the absence of this coordination results in dreadful decision making. Antonio Damasio’s research on patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex showed that when this emotion-decision link is severed, people can still reason logically but make terrible real-life decisions — they lose access to what we might call “gut instinct.”

In effect, emotion provides context and assigns relative importance to different options. It also takes into account how people might feel about one decision over another, which matters a lot, because emotion underlies motivation and drives behavior, i.e., how people ultimately feel about and respond to a given choice.

In short, emotion not only doesn’t “get in the way” of effective problem solving and decision making, it is essential to clear thinking. Take it away, and the mind doesn’t grow more rational — it becomes lost, adrift in endless options that all feel equally weightless, because nothing feels like it matters more than anything else. So when an important decision in on the line, ignore the advice you’ve received over and over again about “taking the emotion out of it.”The Worst Advice You’ve Ever Received for Making Good Decisions: “Take the Emotion Out of It.”

In Western culture, and even more so in American corporate culture, we are frequently told to take the emotion out of important decisions. This is disastrous advice. It’s terrible guidance because it is contrary to how the brain works and, specifically, contrary to how we arrive at high-quality conclusions and decisions.

In Eastern philosophy the combination of feeling and thinking is often referred to as Wise Mind or the middle way. In neuroscience is it referred to as Affective-cognitive integration, or more technically, “prefrontal-limbic integration.” Regardless of what we call it, this integration is the interplay between the prefrontal cortex (reasoning, analysis, planning, impulse control) and limbic structures which assign value and create meaning via feeling. Good decision-making comes from effective communication between these regions.

In fact, the absence of this coordination results in dreadful decision making. Antonio Damasio’s research on patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex showed that when this emotion-decision link is severed, people can still reason logically but make terrible real-life decisions — they lose access to what we might call “gut instinct.”

In effect, emotion provides context and assigns relative importance to different options. It also takes into account how people might feel about one decision over another, which matters a lot, because emotion underlies motivation and drives behavior, i.e., how people ultimately feel about and respond to a given choice.

In short, emotion not only doesn’t “get in the way” of effective problem solving and decision making, it is essential to clear thinking. Take it away, and the mind doesn’t grow more rational — it becomes lost, adrift in endless options that all feel equally weightless, because nothing feels like it matters more than anything else.

Interestingly, in the “real world” of decision making, in the absence of brain injury that would compromise “affective-cognitive integration,” it isn’t actually possible to fully remove feeling from the cognitive process even if we want to. What we end up actually doing is invalidating what seems like feeling in ourselves and others. In other words, even when we try to “take the emotion out” of the process, we actually do experience some level of affect because it’s unavoidable. Then we sabotage clear thinking by reflexively discounting and even openly degrading the very part of the process that provides meaning and relative importance.  So when an important decision in on the line, ignore the advice you’ve received over and over again and leave the emotion in!

There are many “dirty little secrets” in the managerial world, but one that is particularly costly is the fact that many managers (and “leaders”) prefer employees and teams that are low maintenance rather than high achieving (but more work for the manager). The demands of management can be overwhelming and looking for the “easy button” is understandable, but it is also comes at great cost. Low maintenance often means predictable, risk-avoidant, and few pesky questions, but it is precisely the “high maintenance” behaviors that often produce the most valuable outcomes.

To be clear, I’m not talking about dysfunctional or harmful actions. Those can be detrimental. I’m referring to behaviors and styles that demand attention and support from managers and leaders. While every leader wants people who are “self-starters” and can work independently, if you want to fully leverage success through others, those others will sometimes be coloring outside the lines. They will ask tough questions about why things are done certain ways; they may occasionally take substantial, hopefully calculated risks, they may consume significant resources. They may require that the manager/leader run interference for them as they rock a few boats.

No one would openly say that they don’t want high performing employees and teams, but many behave as if they don’t want the challenge of supporting such people and teams. Ultimately, it is the job of managers and leaders to empower high potential, and thus high performing folks, and that often takes time and effort, as well as tolerance for ambiguity and risk as those folks push forward, often in ways that don’t look or feel familiar. If things do look and feel familiar, then, by definition, you are already behind the curve.