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Employees' emotional impulsivity decreased, as well as increased resistance to frustration and perseverance in solving difficult tasks. The work was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Goldschmied et al., Tapping to modulate frustration and impulsivity: A pilot study).

40 subjects aged from 18 to 50 years were selected for the experiment. They were randomly divided into two groups. Before the experiment, all participants were asked to maintain a steady, optimal healthy night's sleep regime for several nights. 

Previously, both groups filled out questionnaires in which self-assessment of drowsiness, mood and emotional impulsivity was performed. After that, all the subjects performed complex, frustrating tasks on the computer (the type of tasks where achieving the right solution seems simple and easy, but in fact it is very difficult to solve them, and sometimes impossible at all). 

After that, the participants of the first group were given a regular working break, and the members of the second group were also given the opportunity to sleep for an hour. After that, all testing procedures were repeated again.

It turned out that in the group with a "quiet hour", compared with the initial morning measurement, emotional impulsivity decreased and resistance to frustration increased – the subjects spent significantly more time searching for a solution to the problem and did it more persistently. At the same time, in the control group, both of these indicators decreased on the contrary.

According to scientists, their results suggest that providing an additional break at the workplace for sleep can help maintain high performance and emotional stability among employees and bring potential benefits to employers. However, they emphasize that this is only a pilot study and the discovered phenomenon needs to be studied in more detail and on a larger sample. 

Impulsivity is the tendency to act without sufficient conscious control, under the influence of random external circumstances or emotional experiences. Frustration is a mental state that occurs in response to a real or perceived inability to satisfy their needs. Frustration is characterized by the presence of emotions such as frustration, anxiety, irritation, anger and despair. Albert Ellis, the founder of rational-emotional cognitive therapy, also introduced the concept of "low resistance to frustration" or, as he otherwise called it, "short–term hedonism". Low resistance to frustration underlies such phenomena as procrastination in the workplace, as a person strives for situational immediate pleasure or avoidance of tension "here and now", which, as a result, leads to long-term stress and collapse over a long distance.

01.07.2015