Why You Can’t Think Under Stress

Name: Why You Can’t Think Under Stress
Uploaded: 2026-05-05T12:52:44+00:00
Duration: 1 min 28 s
Channel: Jake Burhans
Description: In this solo YouTube talk, Jake Burhans explains why stress makes us lose access to the knowledge and strategies we have learned. He describes how the…

5 May 2026 · 1 min

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1:28

In this solo YouTube talk, Jake Burhans explains why stress makes us lose access to the knowledge and strategies we have learned. He describes how the reflective, creative part of the brain—the pre‑frontal cortex—shuts down in milliseconds when we enter a survival, fight‑or‑flight mode. Blood flow is redirected away from the pre‑frontal cortex to the body’s extremities, so the ideas we have stored in our mind become unavailable. Because the learned response exists only as a cognitive insight and not as a conditioned pattern in the body, we revert to older, subcortical habits under pressure. Burhans argues that to act differently under stress we must turn those insights into embodied, conditioned responses. He recommends practicing new reactions in safe, regulated environments through repetition and visualization, thereby wiring new neural pathways that can be accessed when stress hits.

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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.