If cortisol (stress) is supposed to help us be prepared for life or death situations, then why do a lot of people (incl. me) make such stupid mistakes when under it’s influence?

Question

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”

In: 23

Answer 1

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)