Take a walk through any market town or city in the UK and there’s a strong chance that you will stumble across a pub called The Royal Oak. There are over 400 such establishments across the country. Each takes its name from the moment in history that supposedly saw King Charles II flee, defeated, from the Battle of Worcester during the English Civil War. With hundreds of Roundhead soldiers searching the nearby terrain, he evaded capture by hiding within a pollarded tree.

The name’s popularity speaks to a certain element of British culture: a love of tradition, the desire to preserve eccentric details of history and, of course, a clear Royalist favour. But there is a universal element as well to this tale of an individual seeking refuge in the arms of nature. Wherever one turns in history, the natural world is presented as a place that heals and allows reflection, a place that consoles and inspires. A different realm, perhaps, where the mind is focused and free from distraction.

It’s no coincidence that three of the world’s largest religions can be traced back to a spiritual leader who finds revelation in the great outdoors. Jesus of Nazareth spends 40 days and nights wandering alone through the Judean desert. Muhammad escapes to a cave on Mount Jabal al-Nour to pray, alone, for weeks at a time. The Buddha is said to have travelled to the woods outside Uttar Pradesh to begin his search for enlightenment.

The myths of most nations present the natural world as a place of supernatural power. The epic of Gilgamesh begins with its hero travelling to the Cedar Forest to confront the gods of Mesopotamian myth who were said to dwell there. On the northwestern slope of Mount Fuji, Japan’s Aokigahara forest (sometimes called the Sea of Trees) has long been thought of as a resting place for the souls of the dead.

Our era of scientific study and growing atheism sometimes looks upon such legends as a form of needless superstition. Yet the connection between our inner life and the habitats outside of human control deserves to be explored further. A recent study conducted by the University of Exeter Medical School found that a few hours each week spent in a place of natural beauty could improve people’s health and wellbeing.

It’s not hard to see why woods, beaches and coastlines (or deserts, hillsides and glaciers) are such calming places. The rough edges of nature are subject to a different timespan than human affairs. An oak tree planted in the year of Charles II’s famous escape (1651) would today only be halfway through its natural lifecycle of approximately 600 years. The stresses and anxieties of life have little choice but to dissolve from our minds the more we walk and wander through such landscapes.

Anyone who is struggling to find peace, whose thoughts are preoccupied with business concerns or the nagging anxieties of family life, would be well advised to spend an hour somewhere free from light pollution, where the night’s sky can be gazed upon in all its majesty.

On an evening walk, you look up and see the planets Venus and Jupiter shining in the darkening sky. If the dusk deepens, you might see some stars – the constellation of Orion and many others. It’s a hint of the unimaginable extensions of space across the solar system, the galaxy, the cosmos. They were there, quietly revolving, their light streaming down as spotted hyenas warily eyed a Stone Age village and as Julius Caesar’s triremes set out after midnight to cross the Channel and see the cliffs of
England at dawn.

The sight has a calming effect because none of our troubles, disappointments or hopes are relevant. Everything that happens to us, or that we do, is of no consequence whatever from this celestial point of view.

There are few things so universally experienced in life, and at the same time, so debilitating, than feelings of anxiety. Certain situations seem to provoke it very badly. Lying on the sofa, late on a Sunday evening, for instance, thinking about the many obstacles that must be climbed once the alarm clock sounds the next day.

It can manifest as a sudden sense of airlessness, a feeling that something is not quite right. And because it can be so hard to understand what exactly is going on, within our minds, to create this sense of dread, it can leave us feeling even more powerless.

Freud once described anxiety as: “a riddle whose solution would cast a flood of light upon our whole mental existence.” Understanding anxiety, its roots in the mind and the body, is the only way to begin to address it. Below are five recommendations for how to handle anxiety, at work and elsewhere: beginning with long-term recommendations to help think about anxiety, before moving onto simpler, practical tips for the everyday.

1. Embrace What Anxiety Is Telling You

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard famously compared anxiety – in typically grandiose terms – to the “dizziness” experienced by someone “whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss”.

This is a very elaborate way of saying that most people get a pang of vertigo when they look over the side of a tall building or cliff, but it helped to establish something important about why someone might suddenly feel so nervous and full of dread.

For Kierkegaard, anxiety is a fact of life. It is the price everyone must pay for possessing the freedom to act and make their own decisions. A person feels dizzy when looking over a ledge, he argued, because – deep down – they are forced to recognise that they have the freedom to do as they please, even something as awful as harming themself.

Freedom is often frightening. Being solely accountable for all the thousands of decisions made in an average month can quickly become overwhelming if we think about it for too long. But the good news is that this is far from unusual. Everyone experiences those feelings of panic and uncertainty. And even more importantly, it can be a spur to action. Those unpleasant feelings, so long as they don’t overwhelm us, can be a reminder of our own potential in the world. That we have the power to choose, to say yes and no, and steer our own path through life.

Some degree of worry or alarm is a healthy, legitimate response to the demands that life places on us.

2. Let Anxiety Guide Your Self-Reflection

Of course, some forms of anxiety are more severe than that described above. Severe panic attacks, or a long-term bout of anxiety that leaves someone feeling ‘frozen’ with fear about the future is of a different nature entirely.

When thinking about such long-term problems, it can be helpful to look to the discipline of psychoanalysis for guidance. Sigmund Freud helped to establish the foundations for studying anxiety in his 1926 book Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety. In it, he argued that anxiety was often provoked by setting off a memory of the trauma we experience as very young children. In particular, the fear that we will be overwhelmed by feelings of discomfort that we are powerless to solve. Infants are helpless to satisfy their hunger or comfort themselves when feeling sad or unwell, and this experience of helplessness can lie deep within our unconscious mind long into adult life.

The solution is to reflect on these early, formative experiences. To ask what it is about the present situation that is invoking this sense of dependence, impotence and frustration. The more that we improve our self-understanding in this area, the better equipped we become to counter-balance and resolve such negative emotions.

3. Use Your Body

Naturally, there are times when reflecting on your existential freedom or contemplating formative experiences of powerlessness will not be quite so helpful. In cases where a particular event is making us feel anxious (the build-up to a major presentation, perhaps, or an annual performance review), there are direct tools we can use, in the moment, to cope.

Anxiety makes our mind flit around. We hesitate, fixate on something suddenly, then remember something else that grabs our attention. These disordered thoughts are the result of the extra adrenaline that courses through our body as a response to stress, but – with no actual obstacle on which to focus our minds (no predator to run away from, no river that we urgently need to swim across) – it generally makes the problem worse.

This is why breathing techniques can be so helpful. They force us to concentrate on an elemental bodily process. Calming our minds without losing the sense of alertness that we will soon need. Practising ‘Box-breathing’ – so-called because it is a square, four-step process – only takes a few minutes and has the added benefit of slightly slowing our heart rate. Simply inhale slowly, while counting to three, hold your breath for three seconds, and then exhale while counting to three. Rest for a further three seconds, and repeat the process.

Another technique that can help to calm our nerves is called progressive muscle relaxation. To do it, simply focus on tightening a particular muscle in your body (for example, your left foot or thigh), whilst inhaling, and keep it tensed for five seconds. Once you have counted to five, relax the muscle and exhale deeply. You can then work your way around the body, focusing on different muscles. You can do this for as long as you need to feel fully relaxed, but five minutes or so should make a difference.

4. Exert Control Where Possible

It is one thing to recognise that the world is disordered and uncertain, and another to suggest that we have to simply abandon ourselves to whatever comes our way. Often, the most important tool in tackling anxiety is to increase the amount of control that we have over external situations. The more that we feel able to shape our circumstances, the more relaxed we become.

This is why it’s important to identify sources of anxiety. At work, certain situations can provoke more stress than others. Your line manager or HR representative should be receptive to conversations about what you need, whether that’s missing a non-important meeting to give you more time to prepare for another one later in the day, or spending time outside of the office when a major deadline is approaching.

People often feel under pressure to do everything and anything that is asked of them, but sometimes it’s necessary (and healthy) to say no to things. If you have too much on your plate, if you predict that an extra task to complete will make you feel worse, it’s good to push back on the request and see if it can be handled by someone else.

Saying no is not a sign of weakness or incompetence. Often, it’s a sign of strength.

5. Take a Holistic View

Anxiety may be triggered by individual moments in the day or certain situations, but it can also come about gradually. It can slowly creep up as a result of exhaustion and overwork. When someone is stretched too far, time poor and distracted, unhealthy choices become more convincing. Whether that’s another cup of coffee, another glass of wine or more time on social media instead of trying to get to sleep.

When we are busy, often the last thing that seems useful is an additional piece of admin, such as keeping a journal. It feels like homework. An extra burden to deal with late at night after a busy day. Yet journaling our thoughts is useful in two directions. Firstly, it helps to demonstrate patterns that we might not notice initially. Our anxiety triggers will be more obvious when looking back over our recorded memory of last week than when the situation itself was in motion. Secondly, it can demonstrate whether our time is being spent in the right way.

If you’re lacking time to exercise, socialise, cook for yourself or spend time on activities that help you to relax (ideally, without too much alcohol), then a journal will make it more obvious. Unhealthy habits can spiral. The late night junk food we eat because we’ve been too busy to prepare something more nutritious is unlikely to leave us feeling physically nourished or good about ourselves.

When anxiety becomes a problem, it’s crucial to take an audit of everything in our lives. It allows you to make sure that your individual needs are maintained as a priority alongside other commitments. Finding time for such things is not a luxury, it’s a necessity in taking care of your health and wellbeing.

Cicero, Illinois is a small suburb of Chicago. What was once a distinct township, now swallowed by the urban sprawl of its parent city, is most famous for providing Al Capone with a base of operations during the prohibition era, where he sold his bootleg liquor from a criminal network of cabarets and gambling houses. But at the same time that the notorious gangster was making a fortune from his illicit trade in vice and violence, history was being made elsewhere in the town, at the large Hawthorne Works factory owned by Western Electric.

In 1924, the company dispatched a team of engineers to conduct an experiment at Hawthorne. They wanted to know if the workers who wound coils of wire to make relays (the switching device of old-fashioned circular telephone dials) would be more efficient if the lighting was modified on the factory floor. This began a series of investigations that are famous among social scientists and management theorists, because they changed the way people think about the entire environment of work itself.

Workplace illuminations

Over the course of three years, a select group of teams were moved to different rooms with varying qualities of natural and artificial light. One team was even moved to a room with fully blacked-out windows so that the variations could be maintained during well-lit summer months when their colleagues (somewhat cruelly) were able to enjoy the sunshine. The researchers were pleased to discover that even small increases in the amount of light seemed to improve productivity. In the interest of scientific probity, of course, they began to then slowly dim the lights, assuming the same trend would occur in reverse. But nothing of the sort happened.

Instead, they discovered that productivity continued to be raised (compared to the control group) as the lights went back down in brightness. The role of the lights seemed to make no difference whatsoever. Productivity was measurably higher, but it was impossible to say why. Until that is, an influential organisational theorist called Elton Mayo became involved.

Social patterns

When Mayo visited Hawthorne in 1928, he initiated further experiments that altered workers’ break times and schedules. Again, productivity was improved by the alterations, but there seemed to be no discernable pattern as to what drove the improvement. The confusion led Mayo to a famous conclusion.

He decided that the increases in productivity were not the result of anything he or the other researchers were changing, but were instead caused by the study itself. Because the workers had been split into smaller sized groups, there was a distinct growth in the motivation of the team itself and their feelings of responsibility to one another. Greater levels of camaraderie were noticeable. The teams seemed much more content.

Whilst the data and research methods of the Hawthorne experiments are still debated today, their impact on modern work culture is plain to see. From that moment on, interest in team-building and the informal social dynamics of the workplace became of great interest. Corporate away days and training seminars really began life as a couple of men with clipboards, visiting a telephone factory on a Sunday and messing around with the light fixtures.

For team building workshops, speak to us about our Team Connection and Away Day learning journeys including Adaptability, Creativity, and Playfulness workshops. Get in touch with us via [email protected] for more information and bespoke packages.

If one were to conduct an assessment of an average person’s brain – the neurological equivalent, say, of a mid-year performance review – the feedback on offer would be very mixed.

On the one hand, of course, there would be many highlights. We have our brain to thank for the thoughtful, kindly-worded message that reached a friend in the midst of a crushing break-up. Especially high praise would be handed out for the flash of inspiration that led us to be proactive about securing a new mortgage deal just before interest rates began to climb.

And yet, there would be an equal number of red ticks: areas in dire need of improvement. We have the organic matter housed inside our craniums to thank for all the wasted hours spent scrolling through social media rather than picking up the beautiful hardcover journal collecting dust on the bedside table. Our faulty brains must receive some part of the blame for the blurting out of idiotic comments, the regrettable accusations, the choice of unhealthy snacks, and the endless putting-off of things that we will only find ourselves in a rush to do later.

Naturally, this is bad news for the world of work. Our brains, unlike machines, are not built to be switched on and off with the regularity of an office rota. Many of us crave to make better use of our time, to be more effective in those daylight hours which carry so much potential for doing and deciding.

The question, in our time-scarce lives, is how to make the most of what we have.

A Ship of Fools

The brain is – despite years of patient education and encouragement – frequently uninclined to think logically through its dilemmas. It is primarily an instrument of instinct. Substantial portions of its lower basal folds operate with the rabid ferocity of those belonging to a lizard or a rat; it responds at lightning speed to threats and temptations, with impulses honed over a 200,000 year history, but it is entirely reluctant to stay still for a while, pull out a pen and paper and analyse its feelings and desires.

Led through life by this faulty piece of machinery, it can begin to feel as if our steering principles are no better than the Ship of Fools made famous by Plato in his Republic. Whilst the ancient philosopher described a crew of oafish, argumentative sailors as an allegory for poor political leadership, the motif became a popular piece of medieval imagery; a perfect way to represent the weaknesses and gullibility of the human race.

Brought to life memorably by Hieronymus Bosch in a painting from the late 15th century, he portrayed a galley of buffoons who make merry as the ship drifts along an estuary. They sit idly, with tankards stuck to their oars, enjoying meat and drink as the current carries them out to sea. (The viewer is left with little doubt as to how they will fare in that wide expanse of water.)

The image is helpful because it admonishes us. In representing the worst excesses of our instincts, we are reminded of the need for strategy. If we are to avoid becoming like a rudderless ship, cast adrift in an unforgiving ocean, we must assess our resources and form a clear plan.

There’s no better place to begin, than with the brain itself.

An Audit for the Brain

In 1978, a team of scientists led by Hugh Clow and Ian Robert Young at EMI Laboratories in England revealed a cross-section of the human brain as seen through the electronic eyes of an MRI scanner.

The simple black and white images it produced marked a breakthrough in the study of those neurological signals and cerebral transmissions that constitute our conscious experience of life. Today, we are closer to understanding what makes this sensitive and complicated organ tick. We know that, to get the most out of it, we can’t treat it like a machine.

In fact, a recent study from the Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital in Paris has shown that long periods of mental exhaustion cause a build-up of toxins in the prefrontal cortex. Over time, this seriously degrades our ability to make decisions and can bring about longer-term health issues.

It might seem fanciful to talk about a mid-year review for the brain, but the idea has its merits. To be effective with the time provided to us, we have to get the most out of those periods where our brain feels refreshed and ready to concentrate. An annual review of our thinking habits might offer some helpful guidelines: a list of our best and worst decisions, with an accompanying analysis of how tired we were, how greedy, how impulsive, might offer a helpful set of guidelines for future thinking.

The brain is a sensitive organ. Powerful when used to its best purpose, but a liability when overworked or overtired, harnessing its supreme gifts of concentration and analysis, means approaching it with a clear idea of what can and can’t be expected.

We’re used to singing the praises of the human mind and body: these are, from many perspectives, two of nature’s greatest feats of engineering. We have brains capable of doing fractal equations and translating Finnish into Bengali. Our bodies can scale the Matterhorn and send balls over a tennis net at 120mph.

And yet for all that, we are still often left facing the inescapable reality that the machines we’re trying to live through are riddled with flaws. Many of them making themselves known between 9am and five in the afternoon.

Wisdom teeth and flawed minds

We are the outcome of evolutionary processes that have left us less than ideally adapted to many of the tasks of modern life. Just as our anatomy is filled with redundant or vestigial organs (our wisdom teeth and appendixes are a medical liability, at best), so too our minds are not especially well-suited to hour after hour of staring at spreadsheets or having to change task suddenly, with little preparation.

Our species is rather good at adapting in certain ways, but not in others. Human beings tend to be very resourceful and creative (thousands of years spent in small hunter-gatherer groups, roaming the plains in search of food is testament to this), but we also tend to thrive within a given order of things.

No wonder then, if we struggle, when so little certainty can be found.

Fluidity and change

For much of history, humans have lived with many gradual changes in circumstances (migrations from one place to another, experimenting with different crops, etc.). These generally took place while the structure of society itself remained constant.

We lived in relatively small groups and communities where our role was clear. There was likely a stable hierarchy, a simple code of behaviour that everyone (bar the extremely rebellious) could follow with ease.

In the last few hundred years, the opposite has been the case. New technologies and a rapid mixing of populations makes everything far more fluid. Not only might we change jobs every couple of years, we might change the country or city we live in on a semi-regular basis.

The certainty of centuries ago is long gone. If people generally take such things in their stride, this is cause for celebration, evidence of how resilient we generally are. But when we also find adaptation difficult, this should be cause for even greater sympathy.

We are, after all, signing on for a big undertaking with brilliant, but flawed equipment.

Adaptation in the workplace

We all know our brains don’t always function as smoothly as we’d like them to. They are prone to get distracted, indulge in semi-romantic daydreams or start thinking about an idiotic comment we made last week.

For all these reasons and more, getting things done can be challenging enough. But when we add to this the fact that, as of 2020, the average person in the UK will hold 12 jobs over their lifetime (changing role roughly every four years) – and that, even within those roles, there are any number of restructuring efforts, new systems and changes of manager to worry about, it’s little surprise that the stress of work is just as readily found in actual day-to-day tasks as it is the business of handling such frequently shifting circumstances and expectations.

For Sarah Stein Lubrano, a Faculty Member at The School of Life, the difficulty with these fluctuations is that they put a great strain on how we see ourselves. How we understand our role in the social world of work, and life more generally.

“To adapt to change,” she says, “we often have to alter our sense of self, or what Freud termed the ego. For example, if we’re asked to take on a different role at work, it might mean that we have to stop being the ‘fun colleague’ and start being the ‘task-setter’. Or if the company changes its direction, then we might have to think about ourselves as belonging to a rather different type of organisation, which in turn makes us a different sort of person.”

“It can be useful to think about how much of our resistance to change is also about a resistance to a changing sense of self.”

Clearing the path

Work helps to give us a sense of identity, but because our jobs can change so frequently this same fact can also play havoc with our sense of self.

There is no simple, one-size-fits-all solution to how to make adaptation easier. Different people struggle for different reasons. But it can be said that questions of identity, self-worth and fulfilment all have answers that fall outside the realms of Gannt charts.

In order to deal with our troublesome ill-adapted bodies (and the strain we put them under), we invented medicine, nutrition and exercise. To help us cope with our equally wonky minds, we need to lean just as heavily on philosophy, therapy and psychology.

It seems reasonable to suggest that the principle of innovation drove Ancient Greek engineers to develop the first steam engine known to history. The fundamental ideas that would inspire the early stages of the Industrial Revolution almost two thousand years later – giving us steam trains and piston-powered factories – were to be found in the Aeolipile: named for Aelous, the Greek god of air and wind.

Also known as a Hero’s engine, the device used steam to rotate a central sphere on its axis just as later engines built by James Watt and Thomas Newcomen would – with one crucial difference. Whilst the engineers of Georgian Britain were preoccupied with industrial concerns such as power, speed and efficiency, their Ancient Greek equivalents had different priorities. Namely, how to make stage doors open and shut as if by magic.

Historical sources offer very little detail on how the Aeolipile was used practically, but many academics believe that it was considered something of a novelty. An amusing distraction that might be wheeled out at parties, rather like a lava lamp or a player piano. At best, it may have had an almost sacred function, used to create small mysteries of automatic motion in temples (such as opening and closing doors) that could inspire a sense of divine wonder among those paying their respects to the gods.

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, of course, this may seem faintly ridiculous. Ancient Greek engineers held in their hands the keys to a new phase of efficiency and scientific discovery. Using a steam engine as a sort of elevated magic trick might strike contemporary minds as rather like buying a brand new laptop and using it as a doorstop. Yet this contradiction demonstrates something crucial about the nature of innovation and where it leads. Impressive technologies sometimes arise at times when the outlook necessary to make full use of them hasn’t yet been developed. The history of business and trade suggests this happens more often than we would expect.

In the 1990s, for instance, when the internet was still a fledgling system of dial-up modems and access to computers was relatively limited, most dot-com companies were preoccupied with attracting investment to spend on improving their website and technology. The huge amount of information collected when early internet users visited their site was known colloquially as “digital exhaust” and treated as an insignificant by-product of how computers connected to the World Wide Web.

Today this ‘exhaust’ is often described as “the new oil”. It is central to the business offerings of most big tech companies and has sparked numerous debates about online privacy, yet it took close to two decades for most people to cotton on to its value and importance.

This phenomenon – where the pieces to a new puzzle lie before us, but the overall pattern that makes sense of this puzzle has been missed – was brilliantly described by the physicist and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn coined the term “paradigm shift” to describe how, over time, the scientific theories that people use to make sense of the world gradually move out-of-joint with the latest evidence. This process is gradual. It often moves in generational cycles, propelled by a new batch of inquisitive minds with different values and perspectives.

The world of business, naturally, is not quite that of Einstein and Curie. The fundamentals of trade and exchange are unlikely to undergo a paradigm shift so extreme as the discovery of radiation and subatomic particles. Yet, as we’ve seen, in everything from the recent growth of online retail, to the importance of apps and automated processes, such innovations occur with predictable regularity. Any business leader is likely to respond with a simple question – how can I anticipate such changes or detect a shift that’s already underway?

Entire industries are dedicated to solving this problem of ‘future-proofing’ an established company. At The School of Life, our workshops and classes encourage habits of thinking around innovation and entrepreneurialism that emphasise the emotional core of such imaginative leaps. We might ask – where do people’s frustrations currently lie? What shift could take place in this industry that would transform negative feelings into positive? Or make people feel excited, once again, about something they had taken for granted? We can also look inwards, exploring feelings of jealousy as an indicator of what other people are doing that feels exciting, fresh and full of possibility.

But the simplest answer to this question may be that innovation is ultimately a gradual process, one that evolves in response to surrounding changes. The philosopher Otto Neurath used a wonderful metaphor to describe how this gradual, almost imperceptible shift can take place in the living domain of language:

“We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.”

A truly ‘future-proof’ business is one that gradually reconfigures itself, according to the prevailing winds, so that it never finds itself benighted on the rocks of a future that arrived all at once.

Most of us grow up at the centre of a very responsive world. Parents re-organise their lives so as to accommodate the needs of their offspring. They spend a good deal of time selecting just the right presents at birthdays and blame themselves if the gifts fail to delight. Careful account is taken of a child’s mood and physical state: if they’re tired, we’ll go home; if they’re hungry, we’ll eat… 

One of the ambiguous achievements of good parenting is that the child comes to assume that other people really can be alert to their needs; that our genuine requirements, properly stated, will meet with recognition and understanding. But inevitably, as we grow into adults, we slam into something very frightening: the rigid indifference of the wider world to a lot of what we are and want. A parking ticket won’t be waived because you are in a hurry and need to pop into the corner shop to buy a lemon. The tax office won’t say, ‘We understand, you’ve been a bit stressed recently and so why don’t you just return your details when you can, we know how it is…’ Citing these kinds of needs makes perfect sense in intimate relationships. But it is hopeless as soon as we cross the boundary from personal dealings to a zone that dominates the modern world and can be broadly summed up under the term ‘bureaucracy.’

Bureaucracy is an ever-present, ever fertile source of agitation in our lives. You’re calling the phone company to change your payment plan. They want to know your online account number, which you’ve forgotten. But you do have your password, your address, your mother’s maiden name and information about your first pet (a Collie-Kelpie cross called Pipi). Unfortunately this won’t suffice. The service person doesn’t doubt your identity; you both know it would be bizarre for an impostor to attempt to use your credit card to reduce a payment on a phone connection. But without the particular account number, you can’t proceed. It’s maddening not just because it is time-consuming and inconvenient. It sets off fundamental alarm bells because it is bringing one into a situation where compassion, understanding and human connections have no power whatsoever to solve problems; where ‘who you are’ (in other words, a rather decent, honest, well-meaning individual) doesn’t matter in the least. The deeper stress is that the details of your life count for nothing against the purely formal requirements of an administrative system.

The evolution of bureaucracy is a major development of the last 200 years. In traditional societies, power used to be personal – and the relationships to people intimate. The clan chief knew and was related to the governed. There was therefore always a sense – even if it might have been frustrated in practice – that one might be able to sway the powerful to one’s cause. The downside was that opportunities for favouritism, nepotism and bribery were endless. There was constant special pleading – and exceptions to the rules. But at least, when you were up against it, you had a chance that a real human might listen to your cries. 

Bureaucracy has, on the whole, been an enormous achievement: a logical, fair, dispassionate machine for dealing with large numbers of people without fear or favour. This was the point beautifully articulated by the German sociologist Max Weber at the end of the 19th century. Weber argued that government and industry become modern when, operating on a vast scale, it introduces universal fairness, instituting systematic processes and standardising rules – so that there are ‘correct’ ways of doing everything. It no longer matters who your uncle is or who your sister happens to be married to. 

Bureaucracy is a fine achievement of maturity. But it can – at points – lead to very painful conflicts with the specific contours of individual cases. This is the nightmare of being trapped in an unheeding, deaf, cold cage. 

But the apparent unresponsiveness of bureaucracy is not brought about by a deliberate desire to ignore people’s particular situations. It’s an unfortunate unavoidable by-product of good and reasonable intentions. One’s specific needs are being ignored in the broad interests of fairness and of keeping a big, complex undertaking going. It’s not – as our panic reactions sometimes suggest – that bureaucracy is out to get us or that those who manage it are in themselves soulless sadists. The explanation is strangely banal. It’s that the price of an overall drive to efficiency is that some small percentage of cases will become horribly entangled and blocked for what can look like wholly obtuse reasons.

The calming move is to see such unfortunate incidents as inevitable, rather than as avoidable affronts. If we take it for granted that the bureaucracies we deal with – banks, utility companies, airlines and governments – will be significantly inefficient 5% of the time, we will understand that every so often our dealings with them are sure to get tangled. The foundation of a newfound calm is understanding and historical perspective.

 Being calm does not mean that one thinks a situation is agreeable or interesting. It just means that one knows one would only add to the difficulties by fuming and seething. Which, stated in the abstract, sounds like a very small development. But when we recall the many times we might have fallen into soul-churning rage at the hands of bureaucracies, such calm reveals itself as a huge, and deeply benign, state of wisdom to aim for.

Play, in most people’s minds, is the opposite of work. To hear the word is to remember childhood afternoons spent running around a garden, chasing insects and splashing puddles. Or perhaps it conjures memories of football pitches and tennis courts, time given over to joyful activities with little pressure to produce or deliver anything beyond a few hours of uncomplicated pleasure.

Which is why it can be strange to consider a different argument. That we neglect play at our peril. That unbuttoning how we think of ‘serious work’ and incorporating more light-heartedness and experimentation into our routine can, in fact, boost the quality of our productive time.

There are at least three aspects of playfulness that allow this to be the case.

Play is immediate and fearless

“Play is what allows children to try things in a way that isn’t too scary before they go out in the world and experience things for real,” says Sarah Stein Lubrano, Faculty Member at The School of Life.

“As adults, our world often seems grave and deadly serious, which means that play is often viewed as immature – but it is precisely because of the fear and anxiety of the grown-up world that we need a place to experiment away from any nervousness about the consequences. It might seem counter-intuitive, but adults often need this much more than children, especially in the context of a work project.”

Children may be years away from mastering the practical sides of their adventures, but their bravery in concocting plans and attempting them, no matter what, is impressive. Much in the way that a six-year-old can pack their bag and announce their plan to walk to China that very afternoon, grown-ups can benefit from a similar indulgence in fearlessly diving into thought experiments, playing with ideas before allowing themselves to be weighed down by the sterner logic of ‘real life’.

Play is endlessly creative

It would be naive to imagine that work will always be fun. Even the most outwardly creative jobs still carry a certain amount of legwork and hard graft, but in the initial stages of a project, play is very good at opening doors. It’s also very good at keeping us motivated in the mid-point of a project, when enthusiasm is starting to wane.

“Even at work, where it seems like we should be entirely serious, constantly analysing risk, we actually still need to be able to try new ways of doing things,” says Sarah.

“It’s also really important that we stay curious, open-minded and even energised during difficult times. In that way, play is always essential.”

Play can remind us of what makes work meaningful

Work should help to connect us with certain pleasures. Whether those come from the sense of neatness and order we enjoy when perfectly finessing a spreadsheet, or the pleasure we take from seeing someone else enjoy the food we toiled over in a hot kitchen: play can help to reconnect us with joy in a way that is instructive as to what we can gain in our work. Work shouldn’t be drudgery and embracing the positive elements of play can help to point us in the right direction.

The ideal position of play in life was first explored by the Ancient Greeks. Among all their gods, two mattered to them especially. The first was Apollo, god of reason and wisdom. He was concerned with patience, thoroughness, duty and logical thinking. He presided over aspects of government, commerce and what we would now call science. But there was another important god, a diametrically opposed figure whom the Greeks called Dionysus. He was concerned with the imagination, impatience, chaos, emotion, instinct – and play. The ‘Dionysian’ involved dreams, liberation and a relaxation of the strict rules of reason. Importantly, the Greeks did not think that any life could be complete without a combination of these two figures. Both Apollo and Dionysus had their claims on human lives, and each could breed dangerously unbalanced minds if they held undiluted sway.

It’s important to keep in mind that these two sides of life, the frivolous and the imposing, the careful and the chaotic, can and should be embraced alongside one another.

There’s a pattern that goes like this: it’s late, given when we’ve got to wake in the morning, but instead of going to bed, we stay up. The next day, of course, we feel sluggish and weary and we promise ourselves an early night. Then it happens again: it’s already midnight and we’ve got a normal start the next day but we don’t turn in. It’s not that we’re full of energy – we actually feel desperately tired – but we resist going to bed. And the following day it’s the same: we’re worn out yet we don’t turn in until a very late hour. And it keeps on going.

At times during this cycle we feel deeply frustrated: we call ourselves idiots and worse: obviously we need to get to bed early, yet we are too stupid, stubborn and self-sabotaging to do so. And to our profound exhaustion we add the burden of self-disgust. But our anger at our own behaviour doesn’t lead us to change our habits. If our partner complains about our late hours we dismiss it as nannyish nagging – and it’s all the more irritating because we know they are right.

It’s one of the weirdest features of being human: a completely clear sense that how we’re behaving is bad and counter-productive doesn’t get us to stop. Harsh criticism is the utterly entrenched human tactic for getting people to change – just as self-condemnation is our instinctive strategy for self-improvement – yet it doesn’t actually work. It induces panic, shame and despair but doesn’t bring about the desired alteration.

A gentler – and more productive – approach begins with curiosity: it takes the difficult area of behaviour seriously and asks what it wants and what it is seeking. It seems foreign, and almost irresponsible, to ask the key question: what’s nice about staying up late? Why, positively, are we doing it? (We shy away from this because it seems awful to suggest that there could be anything interesting or good about an action that’s clearly messing up our lives.) So what might we be trying to achieve by staying up late?

For many years, through childhood, night-time seemed immensely exciting. It was secret, mysterious zone when from our dark room we might hear the grown-ups laughing around the dinner-party table, talking of things we weren’t supposed to know about, and catch, perhaps, the sweet scent of cigar smoke. If we were ever allowed to be up late it was for a very special occasion: a new year’s party at Granny’s house, when bearded great-uncles would slip us chocolates and we’d crowd into a bedroom with our cousins to watch a long film; or there was the thrilling time we had to take a late-night flight at the start of an overseas holiday and the world seemed enormous and filled with adventure.

Later, in adolescence and when we were students, the night became glamorous; it was, when poets found their inspiration, when parties became wild, when our friends became most expansive in their plans to reform the world and when we finally kissed our first love.

And even though such lovely associations may not be at the front of our minds, we continue to have a subterranean, but significant, sense that to go to bed early is to miss out on the joys of existence. Our late-night activities might be utterly prosaic but just by being awake into the early hours we’re participating in an ideal of what adult life is supposed to be like. And so, night after night, the bed is there, quietly waiting for us to draw back the sheet, turn out the light, lie down and close our eyes, but it’s half-past midnight or 2am and we’re still up. We can look on ourselves with greater and legitimate tenderness. We’re not idiots because we stay up into the night; we’re in search of something important; the problem isn’t what we’re looking for but the fact that we can’t find it this way. The thrills that have implanted themselves in our memories were only by accident linked to being up late. The conviviality, the sense of discovery and adventure, the feeling of exploring big ideas and the experience of emotional intimacy have no intrinsic connection to the hours of darkness. The deeper engagement with a friend or a lover, the working through of a complex-idea, the determination to investigate a neglected area of our potential: these aren’t late-night speculations; they are the tasks of our day-time selves – requiring for their proper accomplishment, our poised and well-rested minds.

We will at last be able to let ourselves turn in early – and get the sleep we need – not when our irritation with ourselves reaches an unbearable peak and we renounce as hopeless our search for adult happiness and finally submit to the banality of an early bedtime, but when we relocate our longings and seek our pleasures where they can more realistically be found: in the bright, energetic hours of the new day.

Photo credit: Claudia Mañas on Unsplash

When it comes to deciding what to do with our lives, we are frequently presented with what looks like a very painful choice: the passionate path vs the safe path. The latter involves the slow mastery of a dependable profession; we will be bored — but we know we’ll never be fired. Meanwhile, the former is a high-wire act in which we fantasise generating an income from what we deeply love and yet we constantly fear penury and humiliation.

The choice can feel acute, but it may be less so than it seems, once we properly explore the concept of safety. We are never properly safe so long as we are doing something we hate or are pursuing out of cowardice.

In the deeply competitive conditions of modernity, our back-up career – the one we adopt out of fear — will be someone else’s central ambition; our plan B will be someone else’s plan A, which places us at an immediate disadvantage in terms of the energy and focus we are able to muster. The ‘safe’ choice might ruin us.

By contrast, what we love is what we are obsessed by anyway, we’d do it for free — which decisively increases our chances of mastery while reducing the price of failure. A decade of mixed results on a passion-project is inherently less onerous than unspectacular returns for a whole career in a hateful field.

It is in the end not very safe to use the one life we have forcing ourselves to do what we know from the outset we won’t enjoy — simply in order to keep living. This isn’t safety; it’s masochism. We may all have to spend our first two decades suffering through the education system; but at some point, we are allowed to leave school; at some point, we need to have a shot at answering what life could be about beyond obedience and timidity.

It is not very common to have a passion; most of us don’t. Yet if we are blessed enough to have one, we are risking far more than we should by failing to heed its call.