Feedback conversations derail when one or both parties allow their emotions to get the better of them. This article was written for those who have already read our book, The Feedback Breakthrough, and wish to explore the topic further.

Why do many of us have a hard time responding well to candid feedback—even when we sincerely believe feedback is critical to achieving our goals? The answer is simple: our brains are wired that way.

There are three areas of your brain that play a significant role in how well you respond to stressful situations—whether it be a fast-approaching work deadline, the threat of losing your job, or a difficult feedback conversation:¹

1. Your Amygdala

Your amygdala is responsible for detecting danger and triggering a fear response, thus preparing you to counter the perceived threat. The amygdala’s role is to keep you alive. Think of it as your hyper-vigilant watchdog. Whether you run into a mountain lion or are receiving candid feedback from a frustrated supervisor, your eyes and ears send information to the amygdala (i.e., your watchdog) which then interprets the images and sounds. If your watchdog detects a threat, it instantly sends a distress signal to your hypothalamus (i.e., its barks!). While your watchdog is incredibly quick at detecting and responding to threats, it does a poor job of differentiating between physical and psychological threats. Consequently, it tends to respond to these very different threats in much the same way.

2. Your Hypothalamus

Your hypothalamus serves as your hormone control center. Think of your hypothalamus as your emergency response team. As soon as your emergency response team receives the threat signal, it floods your brain and body with hormones (e.g., cortisol, adrenaline) that prepare your body to stand and fight or escape to safety. These hormones speed up your breathing and heart rate, increase your blood pressure, tense your muscles, improve your reflexes, and sharpen your senses. Blood is redirected to those areas of your body that are most critical to fight or flight—your muscles, heart, and lungs. Organs that are not critical to your immediate survival receive less blood—your digestive system slows down, as does your prefrontal cortex. Whether facing a mountain lion or an angry boss, your hypothalamus gets the same distress signal from the amygdala, and it reacts in much the same way.

3. Your Prefrontal Cortex

Your prefrontal cortex is responsible for your executive functions: problem solving, reflection, planning, judgment, emotional expression, building rapport, self-awareness, impulse control, inhibition, and creativity. Think of the prefrontal cortex as your executive suite—or the proverbial adult in the room. Your executive suite tends to take its time making decisions; it likes to explore the options. What it lacks in speed, your executive suite makes up for with creative and logical solutions, controlled emotions, and well chosen words. Your executive suite needs a lot of energy to function effectively; it does not operate very well in the dark—in other words, when it is deprived of oxygenated blood.

We like to think that we are in control of our own brains. That is largely a myth. Of the 86 billion neurons residing in our heads, neuroscientists tell us that we have direct conscious control over a very small fraction of them. The rest of the brain just does its job, without us having any access to what it is doing or thinking. In popular culture, that part of the brain is called the subconscious, and our amygdala and hypothalamus are part of that subconscious. This means that in the early stages of dealing with a perceived threat, your watchdog and emergency response team are operating largely without adult supervision.

When you are hiking in the wilderness and see a mountain lion a short distance away, your watchdog takes charge. It alerts the emergency response team, resulting in a chain reaction: your brain and body are flooded with hormones, the lights in your executive suite are dimmed, and power is diverted to those parts of your brain and body that were designed for fight or flight. The wiring between your senses (eyes, ears, etc.), your amygdala, and your hypothalamus is so efficient that the fight-or-flight hormones start flowing even before your executive suite has a chance to evaluate and interpret the incoming data. While you can be thankful for the watchdog’s quick reaction when you meet a physical danger along your path, you are not well served when it and the emergency response team hijack your brain during a difficult conversation.

Two forms of intelligence play a critical role in your ability to learn from feedback: EQ and IQ. Emotional Intelligence represents your ability to manage your emotions, empathize with others, pick up on subtle emotional and verbal cues, build rapport, communicate your ideas clearly, manage relationships, and defuse conflict. IQ is a measure of your intelligence: your ability to think, reason, analyze information, understand complexity, and gain and use knowledge. While IQ can help you get into the college of your choice and achieve good grades, EQ exerts more influence over how well you relate to others and how successful you are in your career.

While EQ and IQ are separate functions, both reside primarily in the prefrontal cortex. Researchers have estimated that when our brains are hijacked by our subconscious (the amygdala and hypothalamus), we lose access to approximately 15 percent of our IQ points and 20 percent of our EQ points.² In effect, the hormones (cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine) mute our reflective capacity in order to improve our reactive abilities—in other words, they dim the lights in the executive suite. When power to our executive suite is reduced, our ability to understand and process feedback is compromised, as is our ability to respond appropriately.

If your watchdog and emergency response team dim the executive-suite lights and take over the conversation whenever you’re confronted by an angry supervisor or a less-than-diplomatic colleague, you are in trouble. You’re more likely to get defensive, become angry, cut others off, stop listening, escalate the conflict, say things you will later regret, and alienate potential allies. Even when your watchdog and emergency response team decide that it is better to flee than to fight, you are still more likely to act in ways which fail to serve your interests: you mentally disengage from the process of finding the best possible solution, you stop asking clarifying questions, you stop seeking new information, and you nod in agreement but resent the giver for trying to control you. And if you do make a change based on the feedback, it is likely to be half-hearted at best.

If you hope to find the gift in every feedback conversation and use those insights to achieve your goals, you must first learn how to prevent your subconscious from calling the shots. In addition, on those occasions when your subconscious does take over, you need techniques to get the watchdog and emergency response team to stand down and turn the lights back on in your executive suite.

There are seven proven ways to keep your executive suite in charge, thereby giving you access to 100% of your IQ and EQ points:

1. Reframe feedback by changing the question.
2. Change the stories you tell yourself.
3. Ask yourself thought-provoking questions. (And ask the other party “Clarifying Questions”.)
4. Take control of your breathing.
5. Seek feedforward.
6. Take a time-out.
7. Get a good night’s sleep

1. Reframing Feedback by Changing the Question

A major reason we react emotionally to criticism is we think it tells us something about ourselves—something less than complimentary. Some of the sting in criticism can be removed by changing the questions we ask ourselves.

Instead of asking: “What does this feedback say about me?”

Try asking: “What does this feedback tell me about the giver’s preferences, worldview, needs, frame-of-mind, or position?”

The first question will trigger a self-protective response in many of us. The second is more likely to pique our curiosity and make it easier for us to follow the advice of Eleanor Roosevelt, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

2. Changing the Stories We Tell Ourselves

The stories we tell ourselves have the power to either provoke or calm our watchdogs. If I tell myself, “She is deliberately distorting the facts to embarrass me,” I position the other person as my enemy and unleash the watchdog.

If I tell myself, “There are two sides to every story, and my version of events may be no more accurate than hers,” I acknowledge that our difference of perspective is not motivated by malice, but merely reflects the fact that we are both human. In other words, the watchdog has no reason to be alarmed.

Listed below are some of the typical stories we tell ourselves during difficult conversations.

• On the left are stories that make us more anxious and trigger our defenses.
• On the right are stories that calm the amygdala, and teach it how to differentiate between physical threats (when we want the watchdog to set off the alarms) and psychological threats (when we want it to chill).
• While our watchdogs are not blessed with great intelligence, they can learn new tricks, and stories are how we teach them those tricks.

Next time you feel anxious while on the receiving-end of candid feedback, check to see if you’ve been telling yourself stories from the left-hand column. If you have, take a deep breath, and replace those self-defeating stories with some of the more helpful stories on the right.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

When people criticize us we usually tell ourselves stories to make sense of the feedback. Some stories help us remain non-defensive and find the gift. Other stories achieve the opposite.

Unhelpful stories are pessimistic, denigrate both giver and receiver, and agitate our amygdala:	Helpful stories are optimistic, give the benefit of the doubt, and calm our amygdala:
She’s tactless because she doesn’t like me and is out to get me!	She’s trying to help me be successful but is struggling to find the right words.
He gets angry for no reason. He’s a terrible person.	He’s upset because he really cares about the customer.
She’s frustrated because she thinks I’m dumb.	She’s frustrated because she knows I can do better.
This person is being unfair. There’s no gift to be found here.	Fair or not, I owe it to myself to figure out where this person is coming from.
He is being blunt because he doesn’t respect me. He doesn’t care about my feelings.	He doesn’t walk on eggshells around me because he knows I’m strong and can handle it.
I’m an idiot. I’m not cut out for this job.	I made a mistake. We all make mistakes.
I’ll never recover from this. The sky is falling!	This is a temporary setback. I can fix it.

Note: Telling ourselves more helpful stories is a scientifically proven technique for gaining control over our emotions. At the same time, it is rarely helpful to try to give a positive spin to someone else’s negative stories and feelings. For example, telling yourself, “I don’t need to be angry—she is just trying to help me,” or, “Fair or not, I owe it to myself to figure out where this person is coming from,” will almost always lead to a more productive conversation. On the other hand, telling someone else, “You shouldn’t be angry—I’m only trying to help you,” or “Fair or not, it’s in your interest to understand where I’m coming from,” will agitate rather than calm that person’s watchdog. (Ideas for calming others’ watchdogs when you are giving them feeback can be found on pages 79-98 of The Feedback Breakthrough.

3. Asking Ourselves Thought-Provoking Questions

The only part of the brain that can answer thought-provoking questions is the prefrontal cortex. When you ask yourself tough questions, they’re answered in the executive suite. If the lights in your executive suite have already been dimmed by the hormones flooding your system, your executive suite will send out an urgent request for more power. As your executive suite starts to draw more energy from your brain’s power grid, the fight-or-flight systems in your brain receive less power; your anxiety will subside, your heart rate will drop, your capacity to think clearly will return, and you will start to communicate more effectively.

Next time you feel anxious while receiving candid feedback, ask yourself some of the questions below:

• What does this tell me about the feedback giver’s preferences, priorities, goals, etcetera?
• What can I learn from this feedback? Where’s the gift? How can I use this to help me achieve my goals?
• Putting my areas of disagreement aside, what is the kernel of truth in her feedback?
• What he is telling me appears to be a misperception, so what did I say or do that might have contributed to this misperception? What can I do to ensure this doesn’t happen again?
• What might lead an otherwise fair-minded person to see me this way? What does she see that I’m missing?
• What response from me will help us find common ground?
• How can my response communicate confidence rather than insecurity, openness rather than defensiveness, maturity rather than immaturity, and taking responsibility rather than avoiding it?
• How can I summarize and accurately restate his concern so he knows I have been listening and I understand?
• Why is this feedback making me feel anxious, upset, or frustrated?
• Are my own stories the cause of my anxiety? What are more optimistic (but equally plausible) stories to explain the data or illustrate the likely outcomes?
• Is the delivery or packaging triggering my defenses? What can I do to set the packaging aside?
• Is my anxiety triggered by my fear that this is going to hurt our relationship? What can I do to preserve and strengthen the relationship?
• Am I anxious because I don’t trust the motives of the feedback giver? How would I respond if a trusted coach or friend were to give me the same feedback?
• Am I frustrated because I do not trust the feedback giver’s information, logic, or capabilities? Is it possible I’m the one who is misinformed or not thinking clearly? How would I respond if the feedback was coming from someone I considered highly capable and well informed?
• Am I upset because she is criticizing something I’ve always considered a strength? If so, what can I learn right now to build on that strength?
• Am I anxious because he is criticizing something I’ve always been insecure about? Is this a weakness I need to learn to manage rather than fix? If so, how?

Asking Clarifying Questions

“‘Are you kidding me?’ is not a
clarifying question.” —Liz Dixon

Sometimes your emotions will be triggered by the other person’s emotions. Whatever you can do to help the other person keep their watchdog in check will help you remain calm. One way to do this is to ask the other person thought-provoking questions to engage their prefrontal cortex. But beware: some questions are more likely to provoke rather than calm the other person’s watchdog. Below we offer a few suggestions for asking the right questions in the right way.

1 . Avoid questions that make you sound defensive: “When was I defensive? How was that defensive?” Instead, focus your question on the future rather than the past: “What can I do in the future to be non-defensive and demonstrate that I am open to others’ ideas and input?”

2. Avoid questioning the giver’s information, logic, motives, or perceptions: “Why would you say that? Are you serious? What’s your problem? What were you thinking?” are all likely to provoke a defensive response. Instead, be clear about your intent: “I want to understand your concerns and what you think I should do. You said my instructions were vague and confusing. If I were to do this again, what could I say to make things clearer and minimize confusion?”

3 . Listen generously. We fail to listen to others when we are preoccupied with our own needs. The secret to effective listening is not abandoning your need to be heard but deferring it until the other person feels understood. Once others feel understood, it is easier for them to silence their own internal conversations and listen to you. To paraphrase Stephen Covey: seek to understand before you seek to be understood. So when others start responding to your clarifying questions, do the following:

• Do not interrupt, rush them, or complete their sentences.
• Maintain eye contact without staring.
• Demonstrate interest with affirming responses such as head nods, appropriate facial expressions, and brief verbal prompts (e.g., Uh-huh, go on, tell me more).
• Paraphrase, summarize, and seek confirmation that your words accurately reflect the giver’s concerns.

4. Taking Control of Our Breathing

Slow, steady breathing has the power to turn off the fight-or-flight reflex, thereby decreasing our heart rate, blood pressure, and stress levels; controlled breathing does this by stimulating the vagus nerve.³ The vagus nerve extends from our head to our stomach, connecting most of our vital organs along the way, and is the longest nerve in our body. It facilitates communication between the lungs, heart, and brain. If our breathing is fast and shallow, our lungs hurge our brains and hearts to counter the perceived threat. If our breathing is deep and slow, our heart and brain get the message that the emergency is over; the watchdog and emergency response team can stand down, and full power can be restored to the executive suite. Splashing your face with cold water, or drinking ice-cold water, are reported to have the same effect as controlled breathing.

Next time you are feeling anxious during a difficult conversation, or in any other social setting, sit up straight and take control of your breathing: breath in through your nose for three or four seconds, hold it for a second or two, and then breathe out through your mouth for a slightly longer count.⁴ Lucy Northcliffe-Kaufmann, associate professor of neurology at New York University, summarizes the benefits of controlled breathing:

“If you’re in a stressful situation … if you consciously slow down your breathing
just for one minute, or even a few seconds, you can put yourself in a calmer state
and be able to better communicate.” ⁵

5. Seeking Feedforward

When you ask for input on a presentation you just gave, you’re asking someone to look into the past and give you feedback on your performance. When you ask for input or advice on a future presentation, you’re asking for feedforward. By seeking input on your work both earlier and more often, rather then waiting for the feedback to come to you, your ability to receive candid feedback without getting anxious will improve. Because you are initiating and guiding the conversation, you will feel less stressed, the advice will feel less judgmental and threatening, and your less likely to feel blindsided. (Read page 28 in The Feedback Breakthrough. Also, take The Feedforward Challenge in our free online you’re paper, What if the Models Don’t Work?)

6. Taking a Time-Out

Putting a little distance between you and the feedback giver can work wonders for both your IQ and your EQ. If you need a little time and distance from the feedback, simply ask for some: “Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I need a little time to digest this. Can we explore this some more after our team meeting tomorrow?”

7. Getting a Good Night’s Sleep

Sleep has been scientifically proven to positively impact our lives in many crucial ways, including our longevity, physical health, mental health, and our ability to function effectively in a modern society.^6,7,8

Functioning effectively in every aspect of our lives depends on our ability to learn, be productive, solve problems, communicate effectively, stay motivated, make good decisions (including ethical choices), think creatively, control our impulses, and regulate our emotions. Sleep deprivation sabotages every one of these abilities, along with our ability to engage in productive feedback conversations.

In this section, we will (1) explain the process whereby the lack of sleep hurts our ability to both give helpful feedback as well as respond effectively to criticism, and (2) spell out the scientifically-proven habits that lead to better sleep.

Sleep Deprivation and Our Ability to Handle Feedback Conversations

As we have previously stated, your prefrontal cortex (executive suite) and your amygdala (watchdog) are strongly coupled within your brain. This coupling enables your prefrontal cortex to rein in your amygdala when it barks at the wind or lunges at shadows. But sleep deprivation enfeebles this coupling, leaving your watchdog with neither leash nor guardrails. Without effective guardrails, your interpersonal skills are likely to be pushed aside by your survival instincts.

In practical terms, when we are sleep deprived we are more likely to do the following when giving feedback:

• Unintentionally exhibit hostile facial expressions and employ a threatening tone of voice.
• Distort the truth (exaggerate, use superlatives, etc.).
• Blame people for things over which they have no control.
• Assume bad intentions when none exist.
• Question the character and integrity of others.
• Issue ultimatums and threats.
• View the recipient’s reasonable explanations as baseless excuses and unreasonable defensiveness.
• Fail to both listen and exhibit empathy.
• Lose our cool (raise our voices, hurl expletives, etc.).

And when we are on the receiving end of criticism, sleep deprivation causes us to:

• Interpret both neutral and semi-friendly facial expressions as hostile.
• Mistakenly assume negative intent on the part of the giver.
• Feel attacked/threatened.
• Respond defensively rather than listen with curiosity.
• View a gentle reminder or helpful suggestion as a punishing put down.
• Counter attack by pointing out the giver’s faults rather than asking questions, listening, and seeking earnestly to find the gift.
• Blame others, distort the truth, and in other ways refuse to take responsibility for your role (as big or small as it might be) in creating this situation.
• Catastrophize the feedback (“I’m an idiot. This will cost me my job. My boss hates me.” etc.), thereby fostering a personal sense of shame, hopelessness, or betrayal.

Research has demonstrated that the loss of emotional and impulse control can result from as little as one very bad night’s sleep or four to five consecutive nights of slightly-less-than optimal sleep (i.e. where the individual gets 30 to 60 minutes less sleep than is optimal).

Habits that Lead to Better Sleep

Now that you know how the lack of sleep can hurt both you and those around you, it’s time to compare your sleep habits with the recommendations of sleep scientists. Given your unique physiology and circumstances, a few of these habits may not work for you, but most of them should help you get a better night’s sleep—and thereby boost your capacity to engage productively in difficult (but helpful) feedback conversations:

• Go to bed and get up at the same time seven days a week. Avoid sleeping in on the weekends—even if the previous night’s sleep was sub-optimal.
• Reduce your daily intake of nicotine and alcohol. Limit yourself to one drink of alcohol during or after dinner (one ounce of alcohol three hours before bedtime). If you currently drink more, gradually cut back until you reach one ounce.
• Avoid over-the-counter and prescription sleeping pills. Pills can help for very short periods of time, but beyond that your brain becomes habituated to them and they lose their effectiveness. And to make matters worse, when you stop taking them your insomnia will rebound even stronger than before.
• Reduce your daily intake of caffeine. Avoid coffee, caffeinated colas, and chocolate after 2 PM.
• Regulate your body clock by getting more sunshine, especially first thing in the morning. Open your drapes immediately upon awakening and close them at dusk (or earlier if the afternoon sun increases the temperature of the room; a hot bedroom impedes sleep). If you can’t eat outside, eat your breakfast next to a sun-exposed window. Don’t wear sunglasses first-thing in the morning or while commuting to work. If possible, take a walk outside during your lunch hour and eat lunch in front of a sun-exposed window. If you wake up well before sunrise or if you live in an area that experiences frequent dark and cloudy mornings, you may want to install LED lights that give off alertness-promoting blue light. You may even want to purchase a light-therapy lamp to get your day started (one that will give you 10,000 LUX of full-spectrum light). Winter, with its reduction in sunlight, is when light-therapy lamps become essential for some people. Although full spectrum light includes some UV light, the amount of UV light is too low to cause any health problems. (And as long as you aren’t among those who have extremely valuable works of art on their walls, you don’t have to lose any sleep over UV light from therapy lamps.)
• Start to wind down at least one hour before bedtime. This means do not work, use your smart phone, or watch TV. Instead, do something that relaxes you. This might include listening to calming music, knitting, playing a word game (non-electronic) by yourself, opening a coloring-in-book and going to work with crayons and pencils, or reading a book (one that is not too exciting, upsetting, or disturbing—in other words, avoid reading thrillers and most newspapers at the end of the day).
• Avoid napping late in the day. If you do feel a strong need for an afternoon nap, limit it to 30 minutes and start no later than 3 PM.
• Help your core body temperature drop in the evening. Our natural body clocks are partially driven by our body temperature. In order to sleep soundly our core body temperature needs to fall at least one degree Fahrenheit (98.6 to 97.5 for the average person, but up to two degrees for some individuals). Our body temperature starts to drop about two hours before our regular bed time—coinciding with our brains release of sleep-inducing serotonin—and continues to drop for several hours after we fall asleep. The following techniques will help (rather than impede) your core temperature drop in the evening:

1. Exercise moderately for 30 minutes in the afternoon (3 to 6 hours before bed): this could include things like gardening, washing the car, or house cleaning.
2. Reduce your light exposure in the evening. Install blackout drapes in your bedroom and close them at dusk. Because blue light suppresses the natural production of serotonin (thereby promoting alertness), it is important to reduce blue light as best you can in the evening. LED lights emit high levels of blue light, so replace the LED lightbulbs in your bedside lamps with lightbulbs that are specifically designed to block blue light. Also, stop using your computer, tablet, and smartphone (all major sources of blue light) at least one hour (and preferably two) before bedtime. Also eliminate other sources of light while you’re sleeping, such as night lights, digital clocks, etc.
3. Take a hot bath or shower at least two hours before bedtime. When you exit the bath/shower your circulatory system will go to work to reduce your temperature, thereby preparing you for sleep.
4. Some people find it helpful to put their pillow cases in the freezer in the evening and place them over their pillow when they go to bed.
5. Reduce the temperature of your bedroom. Although each individual might have a unique ideal temperature for inducing sleep, most people sleep best somewhere between 60 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit (sleep doctors recommend setting your thermostat between 60 and 67 degrees). Aim to get your room close to your ideal sleeping temperature by the time you slide between the sheets. This might require you to close your drapes in the early afternoon if it gets a lot of sun exposure later in the day.

• Avoid significant fluid intake after 7 PM so you don’t have to wake up to visit the bathroom in the early hours of the morning.
• Avoid heavy meals close to bedtime.
• Some people experience fewer nighttime awakenings if they have a small snack before bed. If you are one of them, the snack should consist primarily of complex carbohydrates. Avoid foods high in protein (meat and fish), simple carbs, fats, spices, and MSG. Some people find a small glass of warm milk helpful in inducing sleep (as long as that extra liquid doesn’t drive them to the bathroom in the middle of the night).
• In the evening, keep your bedroom dark and quiet. If noises from within or outside your home disturb your sleep, you might find it very helpful to purchase either a sound machine or an app for your smartphone that provides white noise to mask those sleep-disturbing noises. (White noise is the combination of all frequencies audible to the human ear at the same intensity.) Other commercially available sounds—such as a babbling brook, crackling fire, waves spilling onto a beach, or chirping frogs—can also help you fall asleep if you’re being kept up by irritating noises or by intrusive thoughts. While some people find white noise helpful to fall asleep, others find the lower pitch of “pink” and “brown” noise more helpful. Whichever one works best for you, be sure to set it on a timer rather than let it run all night. Some preliminary studies warn that being exposed to these sounds throughout the night can compromise your health.
• Invest in a mattress that provides the support you need. If you’re struggling to stay asleep or you wake up with muscle or joint aches, your mattress could be too hard or too soft. If you and your partner need different levels of firmness, invest in a bed where each person can independently set the firmness of their side of the bed to provide optimal support.
• Reduce elevated stress hormones triggered by your work environment. Stress hormones remain in your system after you go to sleep and contribute to insomnia. Your stress response can be dampened by cognitive reappraisal (discussed earlier in this article) and daily meditation/mindfulness exercises for 10 to 20 minutes a day. This is most beneficial for sleep when done sometime in the late afternoon or early evening—but do not meditate within two or three hours of bedtime because you may fall asleep! Moderate exercise late in the day can also reduce your stress response.
• Override your negative thoughts when you’re trying to fall asleep. Negative thoughts might include ruminating about family or work problems, or catastophizing about things that might happen to you tomorrow if you don’t get enough sleep tonight (e.g., “I can’t fall asleep and I’m going to look like an idiot at work tomorrow”). Negative thoughts exacerbate our insomnia because they trigger an increase in body temperature, heart rate, and breathing rate. If you are having trouble falling asleep, either at bedtime or after you wake up in the middle of the night, try using guided meditation/mindfulness exercises to turn off your negative thoughts and relax. (While mindfulness can help you fall asleep, don’t try it while lying in bed until you’ve mastered it in the daytime. Mindfulness exercises can be frustrating for beginners, and that frustration will impede your sleep if you experience it while lying in bed). Another effective way to override negative thoughts is to turn on a “bed-time” story. These are available on sleep-aid apps you can install on your smartphone. These bed-time stories, lasting from 25 to 40 minutes, are delivered in a very soothing voice that has an almost-hypnotic effect on listeners. Whether you are a four-year-old child or a 44-year-old mother or father, bedtime stories may be your gateway to a better night’s sleep.

1 “Understanding the Stress Response,” Harvard Health Publishing, Harvard Medical School, May 1, 2018.
2 Reldan S. Nadler, Leading with Emotional Intelligence, McGraw-Hill, 2011.
3 Xioa Ma, Zi-Qi Yue, Zhu-Qing Gong, Hong Zang, Nai-Yue Duan, Yu-Tong Shi, Gao-Xia Wei, and You-Fa Li, “The  Effect of Diaphramatic Breathing on Attention, Negative Affect, and Stress in Healthy Adults,” Frontiers in Psychology, June 6, 2017.
4 Roderik J.S. Gerritsen and Guido P.H. Band, “Breath of Life: The Respiratory Vagal Stimulation Model of Contemplative Activity,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, October 9, 2018.
5 Quoted by Edith Zimmerman, “I Now Suspect the Vagus Nerve is the Key to Wellbeing,” New York Magazine, May 9, 2019.
6 Gregg D. Jacobs, PhD., Saying Good Night to Insomnia, Owl Books, 1998.
7 Arie Prather, PhD., The Sleep Solution: 7 Days to Unlocking Your Best Rest, Penguin Life, 2022.
8 Matthew Walker, PhD., Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, Scribner, 2017.

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“Anybody can become angry. That is easy.
But to be angry with the right person
and to the right degree and at the right time
and for the right purpose, and in the right way—
that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”
—Aristotle