Red Zone Blue Zone: Impacts on Thinking

Red zone is when the cortisol and adrenaline shifts into our system and takes over and we get into a stress response. So it's the sympathetic nervous system in action. Again, an evolutionary process that has protected us for eons. Um, blood flow moves somewhat away from the prefrontal cortex. There's some research that says it, it does go to the prefrontal cortex, but only to solve something immediate. Immediate danger but not see the bigger strategic picture. So the blood flow then goes out to the arms, the big muscle groups, so that we can indeed run away, flight. We can indeed fight if we wanted to. From that, the research that is done by Barbara Fredrickson, Amy Arnston, many, many others have really identified that we lose a measure of our creativity and our strategic thinking in the midst of that, and that our thinking becomes much more rigid, much more narrow-focused. And so that's when we start draining our resiliency and our optimism and our ability to look at things from a perspective of I have control, I have influence, what can I do? Blue zone being very much the opposite. That's a state where we are much more likely to be able to be curious and not reactive. Curious, not furious is a phrase I've heard before. We're able to see the bigger picture and be curious and wonder about what are the options, what's really going on. We're in a place where we have a much greater capacity to connect with ourselves and certainly with others and to collaborate and to co-create and to take action in a productive, strategic manner.