I’m mostly talking about social interactions mostly – like when you forget the most important thesis during exam, getting pizza sizes wrong when ordering or when prompted a question “what are chips made from?” and you answer “fries”
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Because the kind of stress you experience is not the kind of stress that we evolved to deal with.
The kind of stress we were prepared for historically was “oh shit I’m about to die.” This gets our bodies ready to fight or run away. It isn’t really complex decision-making.
Modern stress is not something that we evolved to deal with.
In general evolutionary traits only have to be more successful in a population than the alternative, additionally their can be other cultural or biological factors that can mask or mitigate the negative aspects.
There is two aspects to this, partially it is what the other person said. Stress was designed *specifically* for life-or-death situations, not test taking. Stress was meant to help us survive but is not well adapted for modern stressors, like test taking or being suddenly told you get two sides with your meal instead of one. So, the responses stress causes aren’t really designed to help in those situations, it’s just the only reaction the body is designed to have.
Additionally, there are two types of stress. Acute and chronic. Acute stress is what you think of fight or flight and is caused by epinephrine/adrenaline (your body releases cortisol too, but the feeling you have is mainly caused by adrenaline). This is the one that makes your heartbeat faster, gives you a burst of energy, etc. This, again, was designed to help you fight for your life, not pass a test. Cortisol causes mostly *chronic* stress, which is something we really aren’t adapted for at all. When you constantly have stressors over a long time, your body constantly releases cortisol. This has negative impacts on your blood sugar, immune system, blood pressure, weight, mood, impairs your sleep cycle, etc. Allowing yourself to be too constantly stressed out and have too much cortisol flowing all the time causes more long-term effects than anything, and can cause long term impairments to both your physical and mental health.
This is why stress management is important, and having stress outlets improves both physical and mental wellbeing.
I have read, but am having trouble finding the information online now, that in a real, “DO IT NOW OR DIE!” situation, you may be better off if your brain shuts off and you just panic. Instinct takes over and you get away any way you can, while someone who doesn’t will think, “Is this the best way to run or tha….”, or “Should I fight it or ru….”, with the sentence ending abruptly because they die.
Cortisol tries to prepare you for this sort of situation, a situation where thinking is deadly and freaking out is good. Good for cavemen, perhaps, but maybe not so good for being asked out, dealing with a spider, or speaking in front of people.
As many people eluded to… its basically to stop a sabertooth tiger from eating you or your tribe when its freezing outside. It’s not to help you remember what size pizza to order on your smartphone in a warm house after you had probably a good breakfast and lunch.
This comes up in theorpy a lot especially when talking about “burn out”. We evolved based on that tiger and cold but when the tiger went away and we got warm from the fire it went down. Now a days it’s like wake up, I have 50 bills, a 30 year morgage, interacting constantly with people and need to order this 12″ pizza for the family by 5. Then go to sleep with 40 bills and a 30 year morgage. So it doesn’t decrease ita just a constant. So people burn out and make mistakes.
Cortisol is just one of the hormones released when subjected to stress, the first being adrenaline and nor-adrenaline, later cortisol is released to keep the body and brain alert after the fight or flight response is activated.
But its intensity may differ and in some social situations it’s perfectly okay to be “stressed”. So for example, if you are about to ask your crush on a date, your body will go through the same process as it would have if it saw a lion and for people with social anxiety this may result in a panic attack.
But for other less intense situations, if you suffer from social anxiety (and when I say this, I mean if one suffers from the classic physical symptoms of it), your examples could just be due to increased brain activity.
Your pre-frontal cortex is used for rationality, logic, thinking, etc but during the stress response, the old or emotional part of the brain takes over (not completely) but enough to activate fight or flight which depending on the intensity, will result in more electrical signals being passed around in your neurons (brain cells).
So it could simply be that you(by which I mean your pre-frontal cortex) cannot keep up with these barrage of electrical signals (read more and more different kinds of thoughts, whether good or bad) and just say the first thing which you can come up with trying to be as relevant as possible.
Hope it helps, feel free to ask more questions!
Edit : also as someone said, fight or flight is just an acute stress response, chronic and stress disorders are different, saying ‘chips’ instead of whatever could be just your brain tired for any reason, not paying attention, thinking about something else to full blown panic attack, so there’s no correct way to pin point the cause like that.
Ordering the wrong size of pizza is not stress/anxiety related. Forgetfulness is not stress/anxiety related. (Not in this context)
Does it take more than one external stimulus to trigger cortisol in the bloodstream? I don’t mean to answer a question with a question. I postulate that our primitive ancestors used smell and sound as well as sight. What is the smell of an exam at school? Or even better yet driving a car isn’t a primal act of survival. Running jumping hiding I would say are examples of primitive actions. So driving may stress some people out but it hasn’t been around millions of years
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