Sheepdog Skill: Clarity Under Pressure

Let's start with discussion about what stress actually does to your brain.

This is the science.

Understanding what's happening in your brain under pressure, it's not just academic, but it's tactical.

You need to know this stuff because it's just what happens.

It tells you precisely where to intervene when that threat is detected, whether it's real or perceived.

See, what happens is when the threat hits, again, real or perceived, most of the time it's not real, your amygdala fires.

And immediately it fires and fast and it's looking for danger.

It's going to then bypass your rational mind, your rational processing center entirely by initiating your stress responses.

What does that look like? Cortisol spikes, adrenaline flood your system, your heart rate goes through the roof, your breathing will shallow and accelerate, and blood will rush from the extremities to the core and from your frontal lobe to other areas of your brain, which means you're not going to be able to make a decision.

That last part is critical.

Blood moves away from your frontal lobes, which is the seat of your rational thinking and judgment and your complex decision-making and language.

Evolution optimized this for survival because when a predator's chasing you, you're not going to sit down and do a flowchart.

You're not going to deliberate and hang out and have a brainstorm session.

You're going to run away and fast.

The problem is that most modern crises and virtually all leadership crises require exactly the same capacities that this stress response degrades.

You need your frontal lobe online precisely when the stress response kicks off, when it's trying to take it offline.

So you need an intervention.

And that's what stress fog is, right? It basically debilitates you.

What's that feel like from the inside? Tunnel vision, a narrowing of your field of awareness, time distortion.

Things can feel like they're happening too fast or paradoxically too slowly.

Complex problems become impossible to hold in your working memory.

You simply can't remember all the details.

And your ability to weigh options and consider consequences, basically to choose wisely, all of it degrades under that high cortisol, high pressure environment.

And your good judgment goes out the window.Here's the part that most people don't fully reckon with, though.

This happens to everybody, not just weak people or undertrained.