How our brain becomes more vulnerable under the pressure.

Another interesting article to think about and leave some notes. Did you ever noticed, that sometimes when you are under pressure and task is difficult, your fast solution to that task is most of the time not accurate.

I am not talking about regular situations, only in a condition, when is something new and somebody pushing you with deadlines.

I read about Kahneman model. He describes that we have two systems (Of course it is not so binary): System 1: Fast thinking. It activates automatically when we notice known patterns and the answer is coming very fast, i.e. how much is 2+2? Your brain automatically will answer 4.

System 2: Slow thinking. This part of brain is responsible for analyzes and thinking, when you have a complex task and answer is not straightforward, i.e. how much will be 27x32? You can’t give fast answer, because you need to multiple it in you head and use upper part of your brain.

So by using empirical data, we see, that most of the time, when you have a complex task and brain under pressure it doesn’t use prefrontal cortex and more and more move thinking to lower (System 1) part of brain. But why?

Because when your brain is under pressure, it is trying to not solve a task, it is trying fast, as much as possible, to escape that feeling, especially anxiety. Once it is done, you think your task is done with a right solution, but it is not. You didn’t try to analyze all options and you found the quickest solution to escape that anxiety. This is the reason when you sign some important document without reading it properly, and few moments later you realized, why I did that?

Most intellectual people have a safeguard for that cases and it is called intellectualization. It means they turn anxiety into the tool to analyze the situation and find better solutions to a task. But it also has some downsides. If you use this intellectualization too much, then you are under risk to loose control over feelings and emotions.

What to do?

Well, as always it is very important to find optimum. When you have a new task and you feel anxiety, stop and ask yourself, what if that task will disappear now? Will I feel better myself? If yes, then you are on the right track and trying to solve the problem/task and it is worth to continue; if not, then you are trying to fight with anxiety and most likely your solution to the task will not be so accurate.

Breathing or meditation can help here. But this is not a panacea and most likely you will face same situation again.

Pause can help. Even not so long, few hours can switch your brain to prefrontal cortex to work in regular mode and do their job.

So bad decisions is not a lack of intellect. This is a safeguard how intellect trying to solve unknowns.

Personally this correlates to me very strongly. I had a situations, when I felt anxiety and tried to solve task as fast as possible to escape that feeling completely. After reading that article, I can try to understand why and what to do. Will it help me? I don’t know, will see in future :)