11 gifts for the workaholic in your life

It’s something of a holiday tradition in many homes: after a day of idly opening presents, chatting with family, and eating everything, we break out the board games. This is my favorite part of the season because I absolutely love a game of Scrabble or Apples to Apples or The Settlers of Catan. I may love them a bit too much though, as they tend to bring out the worst in me. I may become competitive, petty and paranoid, convinced that someone is cheating or that fate is working against me. If I don’t win, I do my best not to show it (a façade that took years to master), but on the inside I’m sulking, and stewing over the defeat for the rest of the night.

Why do some of us take these games so seriously? Why do they have the power to transform us from amicable adults into bumptious brats? And why are we so quick to forget that it’s just a game?

OUR BRAINS ARE PROCESSING IMAGINARY LOSSES AS REAL ONES

Well, that’s just it: once engaged, our brains don’t really know it’s just a game.

“The human brain never evolved a mechanism to separate a game from reality,” says Don Vaughn, a postdoctoral scholar at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. “If a lion was chasing one of our ancestors on the savanna, it was real, every time. There were no movies, plays or simulations. Modern neuroscience has revealed that just thinking about imagined situations activates the same brain regions as the actual experience. So when you have to pay $2,000 to your sister for landing on Boardwalk, your brain is really experiencing loss.”

This feeling of loss results in a chemical reaction, as Vaughn explains, noting: “If we could look into your brain at that moment, we would actually see dopamine neurons (the same ones that give you that feeling of reward from food, and approval) stop firing as much: the hallmark sign of a real, negative outcome.”