Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
Tara Swart, a brain scientist with business savvy, has officially told journalists they don’t treat themselves right.
Further, she says, because of their self-neglect, journalists score lower than average in “executive functions,” that include “abilities to regulate their emotions, suppress biases, solve complex problems, switch between tasks, and think creatively and flexibly,” according to the Business Insider, an online business publication.
Swart is a senior lecturer in the Sloan management school’s executive education division at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That’s a place where well-healed corporations send executives-to-be to groom them for jobs that include huge offices, salaries and pressures.
And that should indicate Swart is good at what she does.
If you’re thinking this is proof that journalists are dupes who have been brainwashed to be “enemies of the people,” you’re wrong.
If journalists can put out volumes of thoroughly reported, understandable news to meet constant deadlines despite lower functioning in some areas, they must be very high-functioning in others.
Meeting sometimes multiple daily deadlines requires super-human effort, and most journalists discover abilities they never knew they had to meet them.
Swart says this means journalists endure a constant diet of stress aggravated by heavy workloads and light paychecks.
To combat this stress, she says, journalists consume too much booze, too much coffee and too many salty, sugary snacks.
The barrage of chemicals is not what does them in, however, she says. It’s the fact that alcohol, caffeine and whatever turns up in bad food cause dehydration.
The dehydration apparently dries out executive functions that apparently require wetter brain cells.
But journalists wouldn’t have it any other way, and that, Swart says, compensates for what could be shortcomings.
In fact, she says, journalists cope with their daily stresses better than bankers, traders and salespeople, because they believe in what they do.
In journalists, to paraphrase the kid in “The Sixth Sense,” she sees stressed people, and some don’t even know they’re stressed.
Journalists by and large, she said, show only normal amounts of cortisol, the stress hormone, in their blood.
She also finds that journalists are better than most at abstract thinking, which includes focusing on ideas, not events, and connecting ideas.
They also excel in separating, quickly, the important from the insignificant.
Ultimately, journalists are more likely than most to slam a fist on the desk with an offensive epithet, but they’ll also envision, gather and write several stories a day with alarming speed.
Then they’ll unwind with a beer or three and recover with coffee and bad food.
And tomorrow, they’ll come back and do it all over again.
They wouldn’t have it any other way.
Steve Hansen writes about our life and times from his perspective of a retired Tucumcari journalist. Contact him at:
stevenmhansen
@plateautel.net