INTRODUCTION
CLICK
“Come on, thamby,” Mum says. “It won’t be long, and we are going where we will be safe from the fighting.”
Safe. It is the word that everyone uses, all the time, to explain everything. When our dog Veera wanted to come with us, I had to tell him no. But he wouldn’t listen because he knew we were going. The last time I saw him, he was cowering, tail down and whimpering. Mum had to close the door because I couldn’t.
“We won’t be safe if he comes, thamby,” she had said, wiping away my tears.
When I hugged my grandmother, she whispered in my ear, “This is my home and my country, and not all the stupid fighting sons and nephews and grandsons in the world will take me away from it. Remember that.”
“I’m not fighting,” I said, pulling away, stung by her inclusion of “grandsons.” “And I never will.”
She laughed then and pinched my cheek, but not hard. “You will not have to, because you are going where it is safe.”
Safe. We had to leave our home at night, so we would be safe. We had to go across the smelly mudflats to another house that was more safe. We had to leave town—maybe even the country—to go where it was safe. Daddy would go on ahead to make sure it was safe. We had to leave Veera behind, so we would be safe.
There were all these rules for being safe. And only the grown-ups knew them. And they kept changing them all the time. Being safe was slow and boring and meant lots of waiting. Until being safe suddenly happened very fast and was painful and scary. And then being safe was back to slow and boring.
Behind us, a young man jumps up and shouts, “Katamarang!”
I and the dozens of others waiting turn to the lagoon to see the barge approaching in the distance. Everyone is getting up excitedly. The barge chugs toward us, puffing smoke. As it gets closer to the dock, the mixture of steam and petrol in the air smells beautiful and free to me. The dockman starts pulling out the boarding planks.
“Stay all where you are,” a voice barks through a loudspeaker in English. Four soldiers in a jeep screech to a halt by the dock. Two of the soldiers get out of the jeep with rifles. They start moving through the crowd, searching people.
The soldiers pass by us and look in our bags. I can smell cigarettes on them, foul and nasty. I want to shout out, or punch out, or jump up, or run. Things are happening fast again. I want to outpace them. My mum puts an arm over me and breathes quiet words as the soldiers move past us.
“Be still, thamby. Look down. Remember where we are. Don’t give them any reason.”
I heard about where we were on one of my last days at school. Many people had been shot dead on the lagoon. Boats full of dead bodies—men, women, and children—and soldiers pushing them into the water with their feet. As I look down at the surface of the water, I imagine their faces looking up at me.
The barge has a slow, gentle rise and fall, up and down with the swell of the lagoon, like it is a breathing animal. I copy it with my own breathing, like I used to with Veera, and it makes me calm.
As we file on, the soldiers stand, rifles in hand, watching us board. I don’t look back at the people who are not allowed on as we cross the boarding planks. I don’t think about them.
Then, once the last ones are on, the soldiers also get on the barge. The passengers—my family too—move like sheep being herded: all at once, to get as far away as possible from the soldiers and their weapons. When the barge starts moving, the two soldiers stand opposite us, taking up an entire half, while we are all jammed into the other half. Like Veera, cowering.
The soldiers start to smoke cigarettes. Even their lighters look scary. I had heard those stories too; about what soldiers did with lighters. But as they smoke, I’m watching their cigarettes wobble, and I realize their hands are shaking. They are scared too. Despite the guns, they are scared.
Something in me goes click. I think: “Mum is scared. The people with us are all scared. The soldiers are scared. But I don’t have to be scared. And if I’m not scared, neither should anyone else be. We can all feel safe.”
I shake my mother’s arms off and start to walk over to the soldiers from our hemmed-in group. My mum lets out a strange, terrified whisper-scream. Others in the group call me back. But I don’t look back. I carry on, putting one foot in front of the other. The soldiers suddenly look up from their talking and smoking, startled to see me so close.
“Can I see your gun?”
They stare at me. I ask again, pointing. And they start to laugh.
“I have a nephew your age,” one says.
“I’m eight,” I say.
“My nephew is nine now,” he replies. “I haven’t seen him in…” He trails off and smiles at me.
“Am I taller than your nephew?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says, “you are very tall.”
The younger soldier is about to light another cigarette, and the one talking to me says, “Not in front of the boy.”
They look at each other and both start to laugh again. One of them reaches out and ruffles my hair. We carry on talking. Behind me I hear more talk and laughter. I look back and all I can see is my mum smiling and crying at the same time.
Everyone relaxes when they see me having fun with the soldiers. Passengers move around, talking to one another. The barge becomes more sociable, relaxed. When we all disembark, the soldiers wave goodbye to me and my family, and we carry on with our journey to safety.
I’m well aware that this experience could have gone very differently. Many accounts of the brutality of the civil war in Sri Lanka—at that time, in that location, on those vessels—attest to how fortunate we were. And I’m not for a moment suggesting that I was somehow responsible for changing the course of events. My experiences in conflict zones since then have taught me that a single moment of empathy is seldom enough to change the orders or intentions of warring parties bent on violence.
But my childhood experience does pose several questions, and as I will show in the pages ahead, they lead to one I have explored in many different ways throughout my life: Why did I break free from my mother’s “safe” arms? Why did I ignore the pleas to come back? What compelled me to walk up to an armed soldier and ask to see his gun?
What actually happened in that moment, in that click?
THE INVERTED U
I have learned that click moments such as the one I experienced can be found in all situations—from pilots landing downed aircraft to commuters navigating disruptive incidents to children play-fighting. Every single one of us will be able to identify click moments of our own.
Take work, just by way of illustration. If I asked you to think about times when you have experienced overt pressure in your job, you are likely to groan and think of some or all of the following: overbearing bosses, demanding clients, ineffective or insensitive colleagues, apathetic junior staff, grumbling partners, and impossibly slow suppliers.
Imagine I then asked, when has pressure been useful at work? I bet we will all remember some bright spots. Perhaps having to work on a thorny problem, late at night, and suddenly reaching a breakthrough idea that made sense of the whole project. Maybe you had a group of colleagues whose differences in perspective initially triggered frustration and anger, but then you found an unexpected form of words that made everyone shift into mutual respect, and a memorable working partnership resulted. Once you start, you will be able to identify many examples in your working life where pressure had an upside and the click moments that got you there.
In fact, there is a wealth of research on the subject of when stress and pressure might be good for performance. Examples cover the full spectrum of human experience. From gymnasts in China to interior designers in Germany; from airport staff in Ghana to soldiers in the US; from market traders in Uganda to clinicians in the UK. These real-world observational studies, spearheaded by psychologists, anthropologists, and management scholars, have been reinforced by many hundreds of lab-based experimental assessments. “When is stress useful?” has been one of the most significant questions in individual and group psychology in recent years. It has been asked so many times, in so many settings, that in seeking a rigorous and credible answer I have been able to collect evidence covering the work of thousands of individuals and teams from around the world.
Now think back to those unproductive work stresses. Most likely you will remember feeling under threat, resorting to risk-averse and rigid thinking, being demotivated and losing your sense of purpose. The more stress you face, the worse these things get. At their very worst, as many of us have learned first-hand, these experiences can diminish our healthy functioning, and not only at work. Even before COVID-19, workplace stress was seen as being at near-epidemic levels. In the UK alone, over fifteen million working days were lost due to stress in 2018.
But this is only part of the story. It is equally well understood that with too little stress and pressure, we become disengaged, de-motivated, and unfulfilled. The Midlife in the United States investigation, a nationally representative study that has been running since 1995, measures psychological and social factors that influence health. One of the most fascinating workplace-related findings was that the lack of stimulation in work has a long-term cognitive effect on employees. This may seem counterintuitive: we assume that as we grow older we should challenge ourselves less. Many of us naturally seek out less complex and stressful tasks and occupations as a means of protecting our state of mind and general well-being. But in fact the opposite happens: the lack of stimulation and productive stress actually diminishes our mental and biological well-being and lowers our peak performance.
Psychologists have been investigating the effects of both too much and too little stress for well over a century. In 1908, Harvard psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson designed an experiment that tested the positive and negative effects of stress on performance. Today their work is referred to as the Yerkes-Dodson law, represented by the inverted U curve shown on the following page.
The Midlife study found this relationship to hold true across all participants: if we put ourselves in positions where we continually have to learn new skills and take on new challenges, this results in stronger cognitive performance—and this becomes especially marked as we get older. The same results have been reinforced by thousands of neuroscientific studies of so-called “super agers,” who perform mentally and physically at levels comparable to people half their age: the secret trick is to regularly push yourself beyond your comfort zones both physically and mentally.
This is very clear evidence that pressure and stress can be vital for our well-being. The same phenomenon has been identified in many professions—fighter pilots, engineers, medical staff, police officers—and in many day-to-day activities—playing sports, speaking in public, even participating in weight-management programs.
Thanks to its ubiquity, the inverted U has become popularized, developed, built upon, and used extensively in neuroscience, psychology, and medicine.
The right-hand side of the curve represents the negative effects of stress. When we experience too much stress, we are overloaded. We feel it’s hard to organize our thoughts and gain control of the situation. We can just feel like shutting down and escaping the source of stress. This is an entirely natural response. The process is what brain scientists call downshifting: the protective neurological dampening that occurs when you’re under threat, moving your thinking from the cognitive, reflective, creative parts of your brain to the more primeval areas geared toward survival.
By contrast, on the left-hand side, we experience boredom, apathy, and lack of motivation. This is not where we shut down, but rather where we switch off; we stop learning and growing. In fact, if we experience too much “underload” as babies, it can affect our cognitive performance for the rest of our lives.
In between the two is the sweet spot where we experience what psychologists have called eustress.
We start to move toward this sweet spot when we switch from perceiving a stressful situation as a challenge rather than a threat. This is where we start to move from the left- or right-hand below-par-performance sides into the peak-performance zone. We click into being at the top of our game: into Upshifting.
MENTALITY, ORIGINALITY, PURPOSE
When we experience a click moment, our brains move into a higher cognitive process, and we are able to come up with novel ideas, associations, relationships, and solutions.
You might say, “Aha, necessity is the mother of invention!” While this is indeed part of the story of Upshifting, it is an imperfect and often misleading aphorism. Evidence and experience suggests that most of the time, the pressure of necessity actually leads us to convention, not invention. When we are under pressure, most of us gravitate toward the safe, the tried and tested. A more accurate (and less aphoristic) statement would be “necessity—under certain conditions, and with essential ingredients—can lead to invention.”
Upshift is an exploration of how we can turn pressure into performance and crisis into creativity. In this book, we’re going to go around the world and find out about people in every walk of life and how they have reached and capitalized on the Upshift sweet spot.
We will learn that there is an underlying pattern to how all of these people have converted necessity to invention—how they have dealt with and harnessed pressure and stress and how they have responded to crises through creativity.
Necessity does indeed provide the stimulus, the catalyst for the click. But I have found that capitalizing on necessity requires three essential ingredients. When we have them all, we Upshift.
These same three things apply to parents managing weekly budgets, office workers navigating workplace stresses, and disaster responders working in war zones. I have even used them to better understand my actions as an eight-year-old boy on that barge.
If you think back to your own experiences of productive stress at work, you probably remember having the sudden feeling that the pressure could perhaps be capitalized upon, that it was a challenge and not a threat.
In my memory, it was the shaking of the cigarettes held by the soldiers that made me realize that although they were different from us (soldiers, armed, in charge), they were also like us because they were scared.
It was the wobbly cigarettes that made me click from the mentality of facing a distressing threat to facing a stimulating challenge. As we will see, when a threat is reappraised as a challenge, we reevaluate the whole situation and its limitations, and the possibilities that might unfold.
In this way, click moments open the cognitive and emotional door to Upshifting. But we still have to walk through. This means harnessing the originality of ideas and approaches that emerge under pressure and stress.
That soldier didn’t get on the barge thinking he would engage with one of the displaced civilians—and a child, at that. On one level, it was an innocent interaction that belonged to a prewar era. At a certain point during our conversation, we all started to see our situation from a different perspective, the possibility of being people being together, being safe. The situation had changed into something utterly unexpected.
Finally, the Upshift of pressure into performance, of crisis into creativity, depends on a shared sense of purpose.
The soldiers and I could not have been more different. They had orders, were on the front line of a civil war, and were trained and experienced. I was young, a member of the opposing ethnic group, innocent. The soldier’s own nephew bonded us. A similar age, a similar height, and—although I have no way of knowing this—perhaps a similar cheekiness.
Looking back, the moment when he stopped his companion from smoking in front of me was the first step to a sense of shared purpose: the recognition that my safety mattered. How we then talked and laughed together, a process of developing a feeling of mutual safety between us, which then spread to everyone else on the barge.
These are the three ingredients of what I now understand as Upshift: mentality, originality, and purpose.
As a child, I believe I Upshifted several times, and those occasions are among my most intense memories of growing up. Most are ordinary examples: teaching myself to ride a bicycle because of absent adults, or overcoming my older brothers’ unkind school bullies. But the episode on the barge stands out. Among my childhood memories, it is one of the few where I can remember exactly what I thought and how it felt: an extended experience not viewed through a vague mist, but captured and crisply delineated.
My childhood experience of living through and fleeing from the Sri Lankan conflict has loomed over and shaped some of my most important life decisions. In my early twenties, on a journey across India with one of my best friends, I met Sri Lankan refugees who had left at the same time my family did almost two decades previously, but were still living in a tin-hut slum on the edge of Chennai. It made me realize how lucky we were, despite all the troubles we had experienced as a family fleeing from war in a foreign country.
I spent days in a V-shaped depression before coming to the realization that I had to try to help people who were suffering from the same kinds of situations my family had managed to escape—albeit not unscathed. Within three years, my professional life became reoriented to work on conflicts and disasters.
I have now spent two decades working with and advising organizations like the Red Cross, the United Nations, and Doctors Without Borders (Médicins Sans Frontièrs). I have worked to bring innovation and creativity into the international responses to extreme events.
This has led me to many corners of the world where tragedy has struck: tsunamis in the Indian Ocean and Japan; earthquakes in Pakistan, Haiti, and Nepal; cyclones in Bangladesh and Myanmar; floods in Indonesia; conflicts in Gaza, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine; epidemics in Haiti and West Africa; and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
What I have learned—like many others working in crisis response—is that extreme events stretch the boundaries of what is possible. They create huge losses and unspeakable heartbreaks, it goes without saying. But amid devastation and destruction, time and again, I saw many different kinds of people demonstrate the mentality, the originality, and the purpose that meant they could do more, save more, and restore more. In writing this book, I moved beyond crisis response to examine other contexts—from the military to space travel, from sports to arts. And I have seen the same ingredients—and click moments—in every area of human endeavor.
Which brings me to one of the most renowned examples of Upshifting in recent years.
Copyright © 2023 by Prathaban Ramalingam