Here’s what they found. In the brains of the students who received negative feedback the sympathetic nervous system lit up. This is the “fight or flight” system, the system that mutes the other parts of the brain and thus allows us to focus only on the information most necessary to survive. When this part of the nervous system is triggered, your heart rate goes up, endorphins flood your body, your cortisol levels rise, and you tense for action. This is your brain on negative feedback: it responds as if to a threat, and it narrows its activity. The strong negative emotions produced by criticism “inhibits access to existing neural circuits and invokes cognitive, emotional, and perceptual impairment,” psychology and business professor Richard Boyatzis said in summarizing the researchers findings.

Negative feedback doesn’t enable learning. It systematically inhibits it and is, neurologically speaking, how to create impairment.

In the students who received attention focused on their dreams and how they might go about achieving them, however, the sympathetic nervous system was not activated. Instead it was the parasympathetic nervous system that lit up. This is sometimes referred to as the “rest and digest” system. To quote the researchers again: “[T]he Parasympathetic Nervous System . . . stimulates adult neurogenesis (i.e., growth of new neurons) . . . , a sense of well being, better immune system functioning, and cognitive, emotional, and perceptual openness.”

In other words, positive, future-focused attention gives your brain access to more regions of itself and thus sets you up for greater learning. We’re often told that the key to learning is to get out of our comfort zones, but this finding gives the lie to that particular chestnut—take us out of our comfort zones and our brains stop paying attention to anything other than surviving the experience. It’s clear that we learn most in our comfort zone, because that’s our strengths zone, where our neural pathways are most concentrated. It’s where we’re most open to possibility, and it’s where we are most creative and insightful.

Research has shown that we often judge ourselves harshly and that we tend to experience negative emotions more quickly and with greater intensity than positive emotions. The nervous ape doesn’t like to be vulnerable or ask difficult questions. Reality can feel threatening. Of course, we may truly believe that loving the work and seeing more clearly is the better approach — the true path to sustainable safety, satisfaction, and success — but the nervous ape needs calming and convincing to go that route.

Abigail and Lucia were both responding to an incredible stressor in ways that were natural for them. We all do this. Our habitual responses—patterns of both thinking and behaving—that arise when stressful events occur are what psychologists call coping styles. Our coping styles affect the way we deal with every challenge that comes our way, from a minor disagreement to major catastrophe, and a key part of every coping style is how we use our relationships. Do we seek help? Do we accept help? Do we turn inward and face challenges in silence? Whatever coping style we use has an impact on those around us.

Summarizing their own and other’s research, a distinguished group of Canadian psychologists led by Toni Schmader (Schmader, Micheal Johns, and Chad Forbes) points to three things that typically happen when people are under this threat. First, they’re stressed. Their heart rate, blood pressure, and sweating are elevated. Activity in their prefrontal cortex is often suppressed— which makes it more difficult to control attention, thinking, emotions, and behaviour. It’s harder to engage in the task at hand. Second, they’re self-conscious. The exhort themselves to double down, to disprove the stereotype. Then they monitor themselves to see if their efforts are working. Third, they try to suppress negative thoughts that, if allowed to surface, would deepen their sense of threat.

Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen tested the effect of a similar intervention at the college level. They exposed freshmen to a persuasive message that presented the social stresses of college life as transient and as something everyone experiences. This message improved Black students’ grades over their next three years in college when compared to Black students who didn’t get this message. How did it do this? Further analysis showed that it helped Black students see college stress as something not peculiar to their identity. It reduced their identity threat. They could trust their environment more— churn less— and their grades reflected it.