When I was a child, on most Fridays, my dad, mom, brother and I would travel to Cape Cod to visit my grandparents. For my father, this drive would come after a long day of work, during which he had already commuted from our home, an hour outside of the city, to Boston, where he worked as an accountant, and back home again. He was an intense man, and during these drives to the Cape we were often silent, on edge – unsure how to interpret his sullen and grave demeanor.

After we arrived, my grandmother would typically begin playing a mix of classical music, folk songs and pop songs on her spinet piano – and I would watch my dad’s face transform: his jaw would slacken, while the lines between his eyebrows softened, lifting the intensity of thought that always seemed to burden him.

This was my first experience of the power of music.

Nearly two decades later, I learned of music therapy as a profession. I was a rising junior in college and, without hesitation, I switched my major to learn how to clinically wield music’s ability to transform and heal – a power I had observed years earlier.

Music therapy has grown from relative obscurity to a practice that is becoming fairly mainstream, largely due to the advocacy of colleagues in the field, along with media coverage of the burgeoning profession. Jodi Picoult came to Berklee College to study music therapy to develop the main character – a music therapist – of her novel Sing You Home. Meanwhile, following the gunshot injury she sustained, Representative Gabby Giffords underwent rehabilitation efforts that included music-based interventions. Although she initially couldn’t speak, she could sing, an ability that was used to further her speech recovery. And films about music’s capacity for healing and improving quality of life include the recent releases Alive Inside, The Lady in Apartment 6, Landfill Harmonic and The Music Never Stopped.

Doctor-writer Oliver Sacks’ essay collections, like Musicophilia, introduced stories to the public that explained the ability of music to promote skill learning and/or recovery in the face of severe disability and trauma. Research in neuroscience has backed up many of Sacks’ observations. For example, people who have suffered strokes or have been diagnosed Parkinson’s disease are better able to walk while listening to rhythmic music. In the case of strokes, people who can’t talk can often sing. Singing is then used to facilitate recovery of speech. This has been the case of Representative Gabby Giffords.

Another study showed that premature babies in the neonatal intensive care unit left the ICU, on average, 11 days earlier if they used a device that played lullabies triggered by their sucking. And children who have had orthopedic surgery will report lower levels of pain when doctors offer post-operative music therapy.

In my practice as a speech language pathologist and music therapist, I’m able to use music to serve a variety of patients with an array of needs. Children with autism tend to be more attentive to musical sounds than speech sounds (especially when they’re very young), so I’ll use music to foster their linguistic and cognitive development. In my work with hospice patients, I’ll use quiet music that has a lulling rhythm to help even out their ragged breathing (which is sometimes very difficult for families to watch).

For cancer patients, I’ll use songs of hope and resilience. And by pairing music with imagery, such as relaxing nature images, I’ve helped patients preparing for surgery achieve a state of tranquility that can decrease their need for anesthesia and pain medication. I’ve used the same protocol to decrease the use of anti-anxiety medications among hospice patients I’ve served. Ultimately, carryover is the endgame: we help patients take the tools they’ve learned in music therapy and apply them to their everyday lives.

As a professor of music therapy at the Berklee College of Music, I’m preparing the next generation of music therapists to work in a variety of settings: early intervention programs, public schools, hospice and palliative care, cancer clinics, nursing homes and private practice. For many students, it’s an attractive opportunity – a chance to use their artistry to make the world a better place.

Every week, our Berklee students Skype with a group of child soldiers in Uganda. These young adults have suffered a great deal: forced to kill as children, they often started with their own family members and neighbors. They’ve emerged from the bush traumatized and without purpose. We’re teaching them to use meditative practices in music to calm their minds and to infuse meaning into their lives. As our students share therapeutic practices with the child soldiers, they, in turn, perform and share their music and dance for our students.

It’s this fusion of what many consider two distinct, incompatible entities – art and science – that ultimately elevates both; and the two, as one, can more readily accomplish their shared purpose: the healing and betterment of humanity.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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The new boss proved an able negotiator, winning himself an outsize compensation and benefits package. They even bought him a mansion. But at his first and only party for employees, he roped off most of the interior and installed backyard porta-potties. He located his office in a separate building. And before long, his penchant for arriving at meetings late, leaving early and staying just long enough to pronounce his edicts became all too apparent. During his tenure, organizational morale and performance plummeted. In just 28 months, he was gone.

Just as effective bosses can do considerable good for an organization, toxic ones can inflict a great deal of damage. By toxic, I don’t just mean incompetent – I mean malignant.

Over the past few years, I have visited a number of universities, academic health centers and medical departments, collecting stories about toxic bosses along the way. Many of these places are still struggling to claw their way out of the holes a toxic leader dug for them. The story that opens this article is just one of many I have encountered on my travels.

The first step to coping effectively with a toxic boss is recognizing that you have one. Here are 10 indicators that a new boss is probably toxic.

1. When a toxic boss comes on board, it feels as though all fellowship and joy are being sucked out of the organization. Like Dementors in Harry Potter, toxic bosses drain people of their passion, leaving nothing in their wake but a widespread sense of despair. Employees come to resemble mice who have been subjected to random electrical shocks, lapsing into a state that psychologists call learned helplessness. As another former employee of a toxic boss put it, “It wasn’t long before the whole organization took on a soulless feel.”

2. Within weeks of the toxic boss’s arrival, the mercury in the organization’s “distrustometer” begins rising precipitously. People begin eying one another with suspicion. Lively meetings become deadened, as though no one would dare voice a divergent opinion. According to one employee, “People stopped saying what they really thought. If they ever spoke their mind, they did so only after glancing over both shoulders to make sure no one was listening, and then they spoke in a whisper. It was like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.“

   

3. Power becomes consolidated in the hands of a few people who report directly to the toxic boss. People who question this process are moved aside or completely out of the organization. In many cases, the toxic boss achieves these ends not by direct confrontation, but like a subtle poisoner, delivering the lethal dose in tiny amounts that build up over time.

4. Toxic bosses quickly seize control of the pathways along which knowledge is shared. Organization charts and reporting hierarchies are rearranged so that everything flows through one central hub, with few if any alternatives. Without admitting to it, toxic bosses feel threatened by more open patterns of information flow. As the former colleague of a toxic boss put it, “He sensed that if others knew what was really going on, his position, power and prestige would be undermined.”

5. With a toxic boss, employees may have a hard time remembering why they came to work for the organization in the first place. The true mission of the organization is obscured. The toxic boss shifts everyone’s attention to crasser metrics, such as revenue and rankings, and the organization’s mission is treated as a mere tool for boosting results.

   

6. Toxic bosses leave others feeling manipulated and used. Some are simply so insensitive that they do not appreciate the toll that their modus operandi takes on their colleagues, but others seem positively to revel in it. Said an employee, “She seemed to believe that the only way to make herself seem bigger was to make the people around her feel progressively smaller.”

   

7. Soon after the toxic boss arrives, people begin disappearing. Almost invariably, such departures go unannounced, completely devoid of fanfare or explanation. One day they are there, and the next day they are gone, and only later do people learn that former colleagues were abruptly told one day to pack up their offices and hit the pavement. The toxic boss will never express gratitude to their service, publicly or personally.

8. The toxic boss has no interest in what others have to say. Some savvy operators appear to listen to other perspectives, but when it comes to action, their in-boxes are black holes. They seem to believe that being an effective leader means being the center of attention. Before long, their behavior at meetings begins to reveal their true stripes. Said one former employee of a toxic boss, “She kept cutting other people off, belittling their contributions, and ended up listening to nothing but her own voice.”

9. The toxic boss starts to act like a playground bully. People are treated not as sources of insight but as tools of implementation. When they diverge from this path, the toxic boss reminds them how easily they could be replaced. In short, the tools of persuasion give way to the instruments of coercion. And such techniques are powerfully augmented by the enhanced sense of vulnerability that accompanies the swelling ranks of the disappeared.

   

10. Do you feel like your every move is being watched by unseen eyes? Like you are in some kind of jail? Do you feel like your boss taking leadership lessons from Jeremy Bentham? His creation, the Panopticon is a building with a watchman sitting at the center, looking out on all the inmates, who are arrayed around the periphery, each in a separate cell. The inmates cannot see the jailer, generating a sense of constant surveillance.

Diagnosis: toxic boss. So what can you do?

One employee advised, “It is best to react with honesty and courage. Just point out the toxic boss’s impact and advocate as well as you possibly can for a decisive change of course.” One temptation to scrupulously avoid is fighting poison with poison. Don’t use toxic tactics to combat toxicity. This not only smacks of hypocrisy, it also compounds the problem by corroding the organization’s culture even further.

When this happens, toxic bosses win.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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This article contains spoilers from season three of House of Cards.

It’s entirely possible that I’ve been staying up too late this week. After leaving the lab at the end of the day, I’ll head home to binge on the political drama House of Cards, the third season of which has been dumped onto our Netflix queues.

Simultaneously, the National Sleep Foundation is sponsoring Sleep Awareness Week from March 2nd to 8th, which makes me feel guilty for how poor my sleep hygiene has been lately. But perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on myself – after all, I’m not the leader of the free world who needs to make rational, clear-headed decisions about my country on a daily basis.

Since the first episode of the show, I’ve been pretty appalled by the Underwoods’ poor sleep habits. So here are three simple sleep hygiene rules that Frank and his wife Claire would be wise to follow.

Get those laptops out of the bedroom

Rarely does an episode go by that we don’t see Claire lounging in bed, papers strewn across the blanket and MacBook screen glowing in the reflection of her wayfarers. Frank is guilty in a different way, suited up and typing away at his computer in the Oval Office in the middle of the night or playing games on his tablet. Reading and working late are one thing, but the blue light from their screens are probably destroying their bodies’ natural circadian rhythms.

The pineal gland is a small, pine cone-shaped structure near the center of the brain that secretes the hormone melatonin at night in response to darkness. While it is sensitive to all wavelengths of light, blue light in particular (460-480 nanometers) suppresses melatonin release proportional to both the intensity and duration of the light exposure. A 2006 study by Steven Lockley and colleagues at Harvard found that when participants were exposed to 6.5 hours of either blue or green light, blue light suppressed melatonin twice as long, shifting the circadian rhythm by three hours (versus 1.5 hours with green light). Blue light exposure also reduced delta, or “deep,” sleep at night.

Regardless of intensity, blue light – like that emitted from television, computer, tablet, e-reader, and phone screens – is wrecking our natural sleep and circadian rhythms. It’s estimated that 95% of Americans use some sort of electronic device at least one hour before bedtime. A study by Anne-Marie Chang and colleagues published in December found that compared to reading a paper book before bed, reading from an iPad increases sleep latency, decreases REM sleep, and enhances feelings of sleepiness during the day, even when both groups sleep the same duration the night before.

Shut off the screens at night, Mr President and First Lady. If you must work so late, consider downloading the application f.lux or investing in a pair of orange glasses to block out the blue.

Exercise is no replacement for sleep

Rarely do we see Claire run in daylight. In earlier seasons, she bustles around the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning in running spandex, and is later seen darting headstones in the dark graveyard.

In the middle of season three, we watch Claire go for a midnight run to ward off stress, flanked by security. And with his late-night indoor rowing habit, Frank isn’t off the hook either. The Underwoods are busy public figures, and incorporating vigorous exercise into their hectic schedules is to be commended – but not at the expense of their sleep.

Exercise is great for sleep. Indeed, a 2011 study reported that 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week improve can improve sleep quality by 65%. Using actigraphy, study authors Paul Loprinzi and Brad Cardinal examined the exercise habits of over 3,000 adult men and women. Those who met minimum physical activity requirements reported less daytime sleepiness and better overall sleep quality, regardless of factors like age, body weight, and depression. Similar findings on the benefits of exercise on sleep were reported by the National Sleep Foundation’s 2013 Sleep in America poll.

The timing of exercise is a little more controversial. It’s a common sentiment that late-night exercise destroys sleep. After all, exercise ramps up your heart rate, raises body temperature, and causes release of the stress hormone adrenaline, making us active and alert. A 2011 study, however, reported that participants slept just as well on nights when they exercised just half an hour before bed as they did on nights when they didn’t exercise at all. For those prone to bouts of insomnia, though, most sleep physicians recommend not exercising for several hours before bed.

Kudos on your exercise habits, Frank and Claire. You’re way more disciplined than I am. Just work on the timing a bit, okay?

Ditch the alcohol before bed

One of the silliest moments in season three is when Russian president Victor Petrov, on a visit to the US, challenges the White House dinner party to shot after shot of pricey vodka. Not long after, Claire and Secretary of State Cathy Durant play a friendly game of beer pong. What is this – the White House, or a college fraternity party?

Alcohol has a strange, dichotomous effect on sleep. On the one hand, it helps us fall asleep faster and increases slow-wave, or deep, sleep during the first half of the night. The second half of the night is not so pretty, however.

In 1972, Williams and Salamy experimented with different concentrations of alcohol in the evening. Thirty to 60 minutes before bed – in an effort to yield peak blood alcohol concentrations at lights-out – participants were assigned to consume anywhere between one and six drinks. (A “drink” is defined as 350ml beer, 150ml wine, or 44ml of 80-proof distilled spirits.) Although those who consumed the most drinks fell asleep the fastest, they also woke up more frequently during the night.

Alcohol mimics gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), the major inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. When bound to a GABA receptor on a neuron, alcohol allows either the influx of negative or efflux of positive ions, giving the cell a more negative charge. Thus, the neuron’s attempt to fire an action potential is thwarted. After an evening of drinking, GABA dominates the first half of the night, which explains why we fall asleep so deeply.

The bad news comes when GABA is recycled into glutamate, the brain’s major excitatory neurotransmitter. Once GABA is metabolized halfway through the night, glutamate-releasing brain regions like the reticular activating system – which, among other things, regulates sleep, waking and arousal – are likely to be where the midnight disruptions kick in.

Frank and Claire are a fascinating character study in power, ruthlessness, and the human condition. If you want to learn how to get to the top fast, take notes (minus the criminal bits, perhaps).

But if you want to improve your sleep hygiene, don’t take a page from their book. After all, if the Underwoods have trouble sleeping after their heads hit the pillow, it’s probably not their consciences keeping them awake.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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