Give Your Colleagues Some Brain Pleasure. Ask Them for Help.

One day, a colleague, Jackie, who was a relatively new teacher, told me about a question that one of her students had presented to her. She said that after class, she had spent quite a bit of time searching for answers on the internet but to no avail. Finally, she decided to ask me. (*If you are curious, you can see the question and my explanation at the end of this article.)

It turned out to be a fun interaction as I had struggled with the same question earlier in my career. I was able to give Jackie some suggestions about how to explain it to her student, and together we made a little exercise that she could give to him.

On my drive home after classes that day, I realized that I was feeling great, but I didn’t think that there was any specific reason for it. A while later, I happened to come across some research that explained my exuberant emotion. And it had nothing to do with it being a Friday.

According to brain research, our brains are designed to want to help others. Studies show that when we do something for others, the part of the brain that becomes active is the same one that is stimulated by food and sex. In other words, it’s pleasurable.

So why do we often hesitate to ask for help?

Thinking about asking someone to help us is painful. Researchers have found that when we feel physical pain, for example, if we hurt our leg, an area of our brain becomes active. Surprisingly, that same area of the brain becomes active when we think about asking someone to help us.

The researchers explain that when we ask for help, we worry that we are bothering that person, or that we will be rejected or liked less, or that that people will think that we are weak or stupid.

This uncomfortable feeling is especially strong at our workplace because we want to show our expertise to our boss and co-workers and to look confident. If we need help, we believe that others will consider us as being unqualified for the job.

According to Heidi Grant, a social psychologist and author of Reinforcements: How To Get People to Help You, there is no evidence that people will think less of us if we ask for help. In fact, according to research, people will actually like us more if we do ask for help and like us more after they have helped us.

So, thanks to Jackie’s willingness to ask me for help, she got an answer to her question, and I ended up with a happy brain for the rest of the day. Oh, and she is still one of my favorite colleagues.

A free reading unit for students: I knew this research could be especially interesting and useful for my students, so I put together a reading unit, Why It’s Hard to Ask People to Help You. Feel free to download it to use with your students.

The article in the unit includes more about research into why people hesitate to ask for help and into the more effective and less effective ways to ask for it.

*Jackie’s questions from her ESL students:

“While eating our dinner, we enjoyed the sunset.” What grammar term is the word “eating”?

My explanation:

It’s called a reduced form. The writer is reducing an adverb clause to a phrase.

Original sentence: While we ate our dinner, we enjoyed the sunset.
Reduced form: While eating our dinner, we enjoyed the sunset.

We can use these with subordinators like: before, after, while and since.

This phrase can come at the beginning of a sentence as in the example above or in the middle of a sentence:

She bumped into a chair while she was looking at her smartphone.
She bumped into a chair while looking at her smartphone.

Two points that students need to know

First, the reduced form is always verb-ing no matter what the clause is.

(original) After he got the job promotion, he became very busy
(mistake) After got the job promotion, he became very busy.
(correct) After getting the job promotion, he became very busy.

Second, we cannot reduce the clause if the subject in the dependent and independent clause is different.

(original) While her mother was driving the car, the baby fell asleep.
(mistake) While driving the car, the baby fell asleep. (It sounds like the baby was driving the car.)

If you’d like to see the complete set of exercises that you can download to use with your students, here is a link “Before going to sleep, I always check under my bed for monsters.” What is “going”?