Jake Burhans explains why stress shuts down your prefrontal cortex in milliseconds, redirecting blood flow away from the thinking part of your brain. Under pressure, you lose access to learned strategies and revert to old habits. To change how you act under stress, you need to practice new reactions repeatedly in safe environments until they become automatic.
This is why all of your insight goes away when you're stressed out. Everything that you've learned, the ideas, what you read in the book, you learned on a podcast, the ideas, the strategies, those live in the reflective creative part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain is exactly the part of the brain that goes offline when you snap into stress or into a pressure mode. So you're feeling the stress of the day, or someone sends you an email, or someone ticks you off and you flip into survival mode, which happens in milliseconds. But you learned about how to respond in that situation. Just goes offline, right? All the blood flow goes out of your prefrontal cortex, goes down into the body to the extremities. You're getting ready to fight or flight from a situation, right? So it's not enough to just know anything. And this is the reason behind, oh, I knew better, but I just snapped. Why? Because you only knew it in your mind, right? It wasn't a conditioned pattern in your body. So when you hit stress or pressure, right, you just reverted to those subcortical systems of what you had been trained to do. So if you want to not react when someone makes a comment to you, you need to make that way of thinking and responding more familiar in your system than the current way of operating. So under stress and pressure, right, it's going to default to those patterns that you want. We can do that through a number of different things, obviously through repetition in safe environments. So visualization is a great way to do that. We can sit down when we're in a regulated state and visualize in our brain how we want to respond. If we can begin to wire those new neurons, we can change how we respond under pressure permanently.
