CALM AND COOL THINKING

Of all the things that can stop thinking, hardly anything is as effective as stress. As a psychological experience, stress has a disorganizing effect on thought. It effects our brain to almost exclusively focus on whatever is the object of the sense of threat, danger, or fear. How well do you think when you’re stressed or under pressure?

Regarding stress, there are two major kinds—acute and chronic stress. Acute stress is the obvious one. It occurs whenever there is something that you define as dangerous or threatening. The “danger!” message is what then activates “the general arousal syndrome.” Most people know this as the “Fight/ Flight, Freeze” of the nervous system. And when that occurs, blood is literally withdrawn from the brain (no wonder we can’t think as well!) and stomach (and feel queasy) and sent to the larger muscle groups to prepare for fighting or fleeing.

Yet while these facets of acute stress are obviously physical and dependent on the anatomy of the brain (and body), they are completely relative to your definition of what’s dangerous. This explains why what is stressful to one person is not stressful to another. It also explains why there’s differences in the stress intensity of an experience. The more a person knows how to think about the experience and has resourceful skills for dealing with it, the less she will find it stressful. For the person who doesn’t know how to think about it or what to do, the same experience can be extremely stressful. Like beauty, stress is in the eye (and mind) of the beholder.

With this understanding, we can now recognize how it is that stress is psychological. A memory of a traumatic moment with an experience can make one especially sensitive to experiencing something as stressful. So also the more you think about it using the various cognitive distortions. Whether you over-generalize, awfulize, emotionalize, or use some other cognitive distortion, doing such amplifies stress so that the emotion triggered (fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, etc.) then undermines calm and cool thinking. You cannot think at your best when stressed. No one can.

The fear response that leads to stress physically and literally shuts off your higher executive functions in the prefrontal cortex so that you can react to an immediate danger that is threatening you. Flooded by the emotions, you have knee-jerk reactions that are hardly within your control. If you do not go into reacting, you might freeze up and become inflexibly rigid. Now you might be going blank, “can’t think,” can’t focus, and so feel that you are losing your mind. And if your mind doesn’t freeze up, perhaps you are responding by fleeing— literally and emotionally

running away from the stress trigger. In every one of these ways, you become cut off from your best thoughtful, mindful, and rational thinking.

Chronic stress creates the same kind of responses except that because it is chronic, the stressful overload comes gradually and usually comes upon you at unawares. This means that you will not even aware when it is happening. If you do become aware, it is the “last straw phenomenon.” You now might think that the final trigger that set you over the edge was the cause. But it was not. It was simply “the last straw.” You hit a threshold point and couldn’t take any more. Physically your blood pressure may have been off the charts, but you didn’t notice. You couldn’t. Amazingly, high blood pressure is not something that you can feel.

Chronic stress is an overload. It comes from another message, “too much.” It arises from a sense of “enough, no more!” Its subtly arises because everything habituate. That means that you can get used to living in high levels of stress, taking on far too many things, never feeling like you get a break from things, and then one day, one thing pushes you over the top. Chronic stress is much more a killer than acute stress precisely because it is so subtle.

If you want to be a great thinker— clear, concise, thorough, accurate, wise, etc.— you will need to learn to be cool and calm under pressure. You will want to develop the emotional intelligence to monitor and regulate your emotions. You will want to cultivate your meta-cognitive powers for mindfulness. You may also want to get to Brain Camp when it comes to a city near you.