In 2009, the New York Road Runners released data on the people who hadn’t finished the New York City Marathon the year before. It turns out that dropout rates creep higher from about the six-mile mark and are the highest between the fifteen- and eighteen-mile checkpoints. From the eighteen-mile mark on to the finish line, just past the twenty-six-mile mark, the dropout rate falls sharply. If you can make it past the eighteen-mile mark, the odds of finishing tip back in your favor.
The wall is a real thing, and it’s at this point where people start weighing the costs of continuing against the rewards of finishing. It’s also the point at which disengagement becomes a serious consideration, like no other time in the race. Researchers from the University of Zurich and the University of Bern studied the thoughts that pass through marathoners’ minds before, during, and after hitting the wall. These runners in their study were, for the most part, experienced. Though some had taken up running only a year earlier, others had been running for thirty years. Every week, this group ran more than thirty miles each. After training for and competing in a marathon, these runners reflected on their experience at four points during the race.
As you might imagine, as the race progressed, runners thought more and more often about the benefits of giving up. At a steadily increasing rate, the lure of a cold compress on aching muscles and a stiff massage became temptations too appealing to deny. But as the runners neared the wall, their minds started racing, if you will, with other considerations. Thoughts turned more often to the benefits of continuing, like how good that finisher’s medal would feel hanging from their neck. They also thought more and more about the costs of giving up, like how disappointing it would be to see others wearing that medal when their own necks were naked the day after. In fact, the frequency of consideration of all such pros and cons peaked at the eighteen-mile wall and fell sharply thereafter. The mental juggling of costs and benefits was most active at the wall, the point in a marathon when dropout rates are the greatest.
If you’re a marathon runner and are physically up to the challenge, disengagement probably may not be the appropriate response. You can reasonably be assured that there is a second wind on the other side of the proverbial wall. But in other realms, it could be the healthy choice.
Carsten Wrosch, studying the experience of disengaging from relationship goals, created a way to index his participants’ usual experience when presented with the challenge of changing course. He asked: How easy is it to cut back on the effort you put into working on a goal that matters? How committed do you feel even after quitting? How hard is it to let go? His team aggregated all these answers to create an index reflecting how easy or difficult it was for each individual to disengage.
The researchers then sent the participants home with a bag full of small test tubes. Over the next four days, participants spit into these test tubes four times a day and put each tube in their fridge until they went back to the lab to turn them in. From these samples, the researchers could measure cortisol, a hormone our body creates that helps us to deal with stress.
When the researchers combined the results of the disengagement index and the cortisol samples, they found an important connection between the two measures. All participants exhibited their highest levels of cortisol within the first hour of getting out of bed. This is normal and expected. When we first wake up, our body produces cortisol to help us get moving. In healthy people the cortisol levels drop off over the course of the day, until we go to sleep. And in this study, participants who had a notably easy time disengaging saw their cortisol levels drop dramatically over the course of the day—by half in the first four hours, then by half again in the next four, and then slightly more right before bed.
However, people who had a harder time disengaging than the average person did not show the same drop in cortisol levels over the course of the day. Instead, their cortisol levels stayed about 30 percent higher at every checkpoint after waking up. This is dangerous, because sustained levels of cortisol can increase our vulnerability to illness and wear our body down. It appeared that those who struggled the most to cut themselves off from working on a goal they couldn’t accomplish were living chronically with more stress than people who found ways to disengage when the timing was right.
Wide Bracketing to Disengage
Vera Wang is one of the most sought-after contemporary female fashion designers. According to market sources, the retail value of goods bearing her name is estimated to exceed $1 billion per year. She dressed not only herself but also Jennifer Lopez, Chelsea Clinton, Ivanka Trump, and Chrissy Teigen on their wedding days. First Lady Michelle Obama chose Wang’s designs when hosting a state dinner at the White House to honor Chinese president Xi Jinping and his wife, Peng Liyuan. She has amassed a personal fortune of over $630 million.
But design is not where she started.
Wang was seven years old when she put on her first pair of figure skates. Although she grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the rink at Central Park wasn’t where she wanted her blades to touch ice; her sights were set on the competitive arena. Wang trained hard for a decade, and always intended her career to be one she would dress for in spandex and sparkles. In college, she hitched a ride to the North Atlantic Figure Skating Championships in West Orange, New Jersey. Her nearly perfect performance earned her the senior ladies’ title and a mention in Sports Illustrated.
After that, though, titles weren’t recurrent. As a teenager, Wang and her partner, James Stuart, competed at the U.S. national championships. They didn’t win. Wang wanted a spot on the Olympic skating team, but Peggy Fleming, the reigning ice queen, beat out Wang for a spot. After their pairs loss, Stuart decided to skate solo. And Wang decided to hang up her skates for good.
She regrouped at the Sorbonne in Paris, and realized that what she wanted out of her life didn’t need to come from the rink. In an interview with Style.com, Wang described her passions as “that love of beauty, that love of line, and that love of telling a story of some sort and reaching people emotionally.” She first thought she could find her passions in figure skating. When she reached a plateau and accepted that younger skaters were quickly closing in on her tenure on top, which had seen its term, she turned toward design instead. From one perspective, Wang was naturally widening the bracket of her life’s lens, and in so doing, the passions that had inspired early morning lace-ups now found their application in the world of fashion. We don’t know Wang for her fifth-place junior doubles performance at the nationals in Philadelphia, but we do know her for the empire of tulle and mousseline she built. Disengagement meant the opportunity for redirection, reinvention, and rediscovery. Knowingly or not, by adopting a wide bracket, Wang saw how all the little pieces could come together, and how other paths and choices might lead to the same outcome.
Indeed, when we assume a wide bracket, we see relationships across different activities and pursuits. If we’re considering a healthy diet, a wide bracket helps us see the connection between how much we’re eating and how much we’re moving. If we’re trying to reduce our anxiety, a wide bracket leads us to realize that the number of hours we spend in elective overtime at work comes at the expense of opportunities for self-care.