Below is a lightly edited transcript. For the articles that inspired this one, see here, here, and here.
Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr. Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our heads. But there are patterns. Patterns of thought, patterns of feeling, patterns of action. That’s the brain’s job—creating the patterns that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday life.
We call these things ideologies, rituals, biases. And there’s something else I’ve learnt teaching this stuff: we’re animals first. You can’t escape these patterns, but you can choose which ones to emphasise. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast. You choose if it works for you.
Now, I’ve already done a longer intro than I plan to ordinarily do because I hate long podcast intros. But since this is the first podcast, I may as well talk about the vision I have for this thing.
I write a lot at my website, btrmt., but people don’t always have the time to read the articles. Frankly, they complain about it. Plus, since I started as an Associate Professor in the behavioural science department here at RMA Sandhurst, I find that I’m essentially lecturing on the very same stuff. So I thought, why not take all the good stuff I’m already teaching in verbal format and share it here?
But since I don’t have a lot of time, I’ve got to be pretty strategic about this. I’m going to take one idea that I teach, see if I can turn it into a podcast in two or three hours after class is done, and we’ll see how things develop.
Because this is the first podcast, I’ve got to choose something that really bites, that hooks you. I started talking about this idea when I started doing leadership consultancy—there were some executives that had a problem with it. But it was so useful, it’s become a mainstay in my arsenal. In consulting, in keynotes, in the one-on-one stuff I do. The students here really like it when I slip it in. In fact, come to think of it, it might actually be one of the bits I used in the taster lecture I delivered to get this job in the first place.
Since I’ve mentioned my workplace, I should say the opinions expressed here are obviously my own. They don’t reflect Sandhurst or the British military or the United Kingdom more broadly. It’s just Dorian doing his little podcast.
But the idea—the idea is that stress is a good thing. So let’s get into it.
Why We Think Stress is Bad
I want to start off with this article from the Atlantic that I love. It’s the quintessential example of the kind of thing I have in mind. The author, a management professor, says: “In other words, stress makes you fight, flee or freeze, not think. What would a prudent reaction be at this moment? This makes great evolutionary sense. Half a million years ago, taking the time to manage your emotions would have made you a tiger’s lunch. But in the modern world, even if you don’t have tigers to outrun, you can’t relax in your cave because the emails are piling up.”
This is it. This is the expression of what stress is that I’m specifically targeting today. This idea that it evolved thousands, millions of years ago to outrun lions on the savannah or whatever the case may be. But now it’s just triggered by all these non-lethal mundane problems that we face in day-to-day life. Stress is poorly calibrated to the modern world. It gets in the way. It hinders our performance. It stops us behaving how we want to behave. It gets in the way in our relationships. It’s a bad thing, fundamentally.
And I want to counter that. Because I think that not only is stress typically calibrated perfectly for the modern world, it’s also the only thing that gets us to perform at all. At work, in relationships, whatever—stress is the thing that gets the job done. And in that sense, I think it’s actually the most valuable biological technology that we have.
The Yerkes-Dodson Law
I think what’s happening here is some kind of misunderstanding of Robert Sapolsky’s work, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. It’s the core premise, although it’s a misunderstanding that’s sort of wrapped up with work that’s been done in the trauma community. These two ideas have gone smooshed together.
This idea of fight, flight or freeze really originated to describe hypervigilance—a life or death response to a threat. The kind of thing that kicks in when you almost get hit by a car, a near miss of that kind. And most people are not responding to email notifications with fight or flight. People with a lot of trauma—people with PTSD, for example—often respond to mundane stuff with fight or flight. But people who don’t suffer that kind of thing typically respond to these things absolutely normally. So if you’re responding to email notifications with fight, flight or freeze responses, then there’s something wrong and you shouldn’t just be putting up with it.
Rather than adopt this model, I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about the Yerkes-Dodson Law.
The Yerkes-Dodson Law is a really old model of stress—maybe 1915, 1917, over 100 years old. A lot of people will be introduced to this through a first-year or high school psychology course. But it’s really simple. Even though it’s old, even though it’s simple, it’s still contiguous with what we know today about the human stress response.
Picture a graph—an x-axis, a righty-lefty bit, and a y-axis, an upy-downy bit. Plot on it a bell curve, like a little mountain or a hill, an inverted U if you like. Put yourself down the bottom left corner of your little hill.
What we’re looking at is that as stress is low, performance is low. As arousal in the body is low, performance is low. You’re not going to do anything when you’re not stressed, when you’re not aroused. As stress goes up, performance increases. You’re moving up the hill now because stress is recruiting interest and attention and all the cognitive and physical resources that you need to get the task at hand done.
As you keep going up your hill, as stress keeps going up, performance keeps going up until you reach the peak. At this point, you’re talking about optimal stress and optimal performance. If you’ve heard of a flow state, this is the kind of thing we’re talking about here. It’s where you’re completely absorbed by the task at hand, where your capacity to do something is completely met by the challenge you’re facing. This is the kind of time where you would find yourself sitting down, doing the thing, and three hours fly by, and you look up and you’ve missed lunch. The same exact thing happened as I was trying to set up for this first podcast. You just lose track of time. You’re completely occupied by what you’re doing. The peak of the stress curve—optimal stress, optimal performance.
Now, if you continue to get stressed, you’re going to start falling down the other side of our little hill. You’re going to become more stressed, but your performance is going to decline. You know this. You’ve experienced this much stress before. You get the jitters when you’re this stressed. You get some brain fog. You start to stammer, stutter your words. You’re just not thinking as clearly when you have too much stress in the system.
Most people, when they’re talking about stress, they’re talking about the right-hand side of our stress curve. When people are falling down the wrong side of our hill. But there’s so much to be gained by understanding the left side of the curve—that gentle uphill to optimal stress, optimal performance, the peak of stress and performance.
Let me put this into perspective for you. Imagine you have a project due. An assignment if you’re in school, a presentation at work, something for your kids, maybe something for the PTA meeting. You know that if you devote your spare time to it, it’s going to take you about a week to get this project done.
Now, let’s say that the due date for this thing is next year, 12 months from now. Where are you on our little stress curve? I would suggest that you’re down the bottom. Low stress, low performance. You are just not motivated to do this project unless you are a particularly disciplined kind of person, or you’re super bored. There’s just not any motivation to do it. It’s due in 12 months. Why would you use what spare time you have getting it done? No stress whatsoever, no performance.
But if we move that due date up—let’s say it’s due next month—then you are all of a sudden going to be much more motivated to get that task done. If that due date is closer, there’s a little bit more stress in the system and you are much more likely to be paying attention to that task, to thinking about what needs to be done, to collecting the resources that are going to get it done.
Now, let’s imagine that the due date is next week and it’s going to take you a week. Now we’ve moved all the way up to the top of the hill. We are going to spend all our spare time doing this project. We know that we just don’t have enough time to do anything else. Optimal stress, optimal performance. We could not be spending more time on this project than we can right now.
And then, of course, you can start to slide down the hill. The due date is in three days or it’s due tomorrow and it’s going to take you a week. Now there’s too much stress. You’re starting to panic. You’ve got all this sick feeling in your stomach. You’re getting the jitters. You’ve got brain fog. You’re just not doing as good a job as you would if you hadn’t left it until it was too late. And I’m pretty sure you’re all familiar with that feeling.
This is the stress curve. It’s a straightforward way to describe stress.
But look, there are a couple of things that are interesting beyond just the basic curve. Beyond low stress, low performance; optimal stress, optimal performance; high stress, poor performance.
One quirk is that for simple tasks, this doesn’t really obtain. If the task is super simple—say, somebody is holding a gun to your head and saying, “look at this red button, don’t look anywhere else”—you’re not going to have much trouble looking at the button. It’s a simple task. Even if you have maximum stress in your body, you’re not going to have difficulty. So if the task is super simple, you see low stress, higher stress, high performance, optimal stress, optimal performance—and then it plateaus at that point. This is more for complex tasks.
And maybe performance is a bit of a misnomer because there’s certain kinds of things that this is less good for. Down the bottom of our hill, low stress, low performance—this is the area where we’re optimising for something else. Cognitive flexibility. Reward-seeking behaviour. Exploration behaviour. Creativity, essentially.
If what you’re seeking is creativity, then you want low stress. And you know this. If your project’s due in a month or two months and it’s going to take you a week, you’re thinking not really about getting the project done as fast as possible. You’re thinking of all the ways it could be done. Maybe you can pick a different theme, different colour scheme, different fonts. Maybe you can incorporate this avant-garde thing into it that you wouldn’t otherwise consider because you have the time for that. Low stress—it’s not precisely performance but it’s creativity, it’s a different kind of thing.
As you go up the hill, as stress increases, one of the reasons that you get better performance is because it promotes cognitive rigidity. You’re engaging in more stereotypical thinking and behaviour. You’re doing things how things should be done, not thinking about how they could be done. If it’s due in a week, your project, then you’re not thinking of changing the fonts. You’re just doing the project as you know it needs to be done to get it over the line.
So that’s one of the benefits and the drawbacks. This cognitive rigidity is the thing that helps you achieve performance. But if you want creativity, you don’t really want to be injecting too much stress into the system.
So far, we’ve been talking about this biological mechanism—mapping the biological response to stress. But there’s also a psychological dimension to it. I’m going to talk about a particular cut on this by an endocrinologist by the name of Hans Seyle. He’s writing about this in the 1970s. It’s an old model, and there are newer models that can give you better fidelity, but for the purpose of this little lecture, I’m going to talk about Hans Seyle’s model of Eustress.
Eustress is good stress. It’s the left side of the stress curve. Low stress, low performance; a little bit more stress, high performance; all the way up to optimal stress, optimal performance—that side of our hill. Eustress, good stress, is posed in contrast to distress. This is the right-hand side of our curve. Once you go over the peak, over the hill, down the other side, now you’re in distress.
He said that the fundamental difference here seemed to be something about how controllable the stressor felt to us. It’s the difference between a threat and a challenge.
Eustress, good stress, challenges—these are things that are controllable. It’s something that we have enough resources for. We have the capacity to do it. We have the time. We have the people to be able to accomplish whatever it is we’re trying to accomplish. We have the resources for it. And as a consequence, we’re much more oriented towards the possibility of success or reward as a consequence of what we’re doing.
In contrast, threats—bad stress, distress, the other side of the hill—this is characterised by uncontrollability. You’re badly resourced. You don’t have the capacity to do the task or you don’t have the time. You don’t have the people. You don’t have the material. And as a consequence, you focus much more on the possibility of failure or damage as a result of what it is that you’re doing.
This is a psychological dimension. I can give you an example. Let’s say your project is public speaking. You’ve gotten to the day and you’re standing up in front of everybody presenting—to the PTA meeting or at work—and you have a mental blank. You completely forget what you’ve meant to say. This is often a physiological thing. There’s so much adrenaline in your body that it’s just blotted out your cognitive thoughts and now you’re in distress. “I’m embarrassing myself, I’m not doing a good job, I’m gonna show myself up, I’m not gonna be picked to do this again.” You’re on the wrong side of the curve. You’re falling down that hill.
But then you remember: “Hey, I have notes for this. Why don’t I just pull them out?” So you pull out your little palm cards from your pocket and you look and you remember where you’re up to. It all comes back to you and you’re lurching straight back into your performance, right back where you left off. You might still be a little jittery because there’s that physiological effect, but even though there’s all this stress in the body from that experience, you’re still performing now. You’ve moved much closer to eustress, to good stress rather than distress.
So it’s not just a biological thing. We’re not just talking about the sympathetic response and the parasympathetic response. We’re talking also about this psychological dimension, this difference between something that is controllable versus uncontrollable.
Using Stress Wisely
Now, the last couple of points I want to make are some caveats. People always want to take away a message from this that since I say stress is good, we should just stress people all the time. That is also not true.
Stress is itself a costly resource. To use stress is to use up something in our bodies. The best model for this is something called allostatic load—basically wear and tear on the body. It’s the wear on the cognitive and biological systems that comes with stress. If you’re going to use stress all the time, if you’re stressed all the time at a high level, you’re actually damaging your body and your mind. It’s going to lead to increasingly poor cognitive and biological outcomes. You know this—the stuff that it does to you is terrible. You should just look at the Wikipedia page on chronic stress—it’ll give you a litany of all the terrible things this can do to you.
We don’t want to be using stress all the time. If you imagine our hill, what being stressed all the time does is it squishes it. You put your hand on the top of the hill and you push it over towards the left, towards the good side of stress. You’re not gonna perform as well if you’re stressed to that optimal level—the more stressed you are over time, your capacity for performance reduces. The opportunity for good stress reduces. That side of the hill becomes steeper and shorter, harder to climb. You’re going to spend much less time good stressed, and you’re going to spend much more time possibly in this bad stress. There’s much more space for being overstressed if you’re engaging in stress all the time.
And then the very final thing is that one stress curve doesn’t characterise all things for all people. Things that you’re good at have a different stress curve than things that you’re bad at. Resurrect our hill, bring it back up to its former glory. Things you’re good at—if you swoosh it down and to the right—it makes good stress last longer. Your opportunity for good stress increases and the likelihood that you fall over that peak and fall into bad stress decreases. Equally, for stuff that you’re bad at, it’s the inverse. The chances that you’re going to be good stressed, eustressed about it, is not as high as the chances that you’re going to be distressed, badly stressed in response to whatever it is.
Different tasks for the same person have different stress curves, but also different people have different stress curves. What stresses me might not produce the same stress curve for you and what stresses you might not produce the same stress curve for me.
And that’s it. That’s the Yerkes-Dodson law. Look, it’s a simple model. You’re just picturing a hill or a bell shape or something like this. But look how much we drew out of it. We didn’t have to recourse to sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous systems. We didn’t have to talk about amygdalas, fight, flight or freeze (read more about why the amygdala doesn’t work that way here). It’s just a simple model. It gives you simple answers to simple questions. And I think it’s a good one.
Let me wrap this up.
First thing: good stress and bad stress, eustress and distress, performing and being too stressed to perform—this is a continuum. It’s the same physical mechanisms driving both of those things. You can’t talk about stress as a negative thing without also realising that that is the same mechanism involved in your doing anything at all. Stress is, in many ways, the same thing as motivation, or it’s an important ingredient in motivation.
But of course, that’s not always true. Low stress is better for creativity. You want to be down the bottom of that stress curve if you are looking to be cognitively flexible, if you want to engage in exploration behaviours, if you want to be engaging in reward-seeking behaviours. Low stress is much better for that.
More stress—one of the reasons that it produces performance is because of cognitive rigidity. It imbues you with this stereotypical thinking. You’re going to do things the way they should be done. That implies you can only really utilise that properly if you’ve been trained to do the thing. You need cognitive rigidity in the right direction. Stress goes hand in hand with training and learning.
The last point: it’s not just biological, it’s also psychological. There’s a difference between a challenge and a threat, and that’s the controllability of the thing. How much physical stress you have in your body will influence whether you perceive something as controllable or uncontrollable. But you have a little bit of wiggle room in that psychological aspect—trying to change a threat into a challenge by thinking differently about the resources you have and making it controllable.
And the caveat: you don’t want to just stress people all the time. You’re going to wear them out, burn them out. What you want is tactical deployment of stress. Stress injected at the times where you want to perform a little better, knowing that the trade-off is that allostatic load. We’ve got to be thoughtful about it. We should be a little bit concerned about stress—not fight, flight or freeze stress for the average person—but we don’t want to be stressing ourselves all the time because that leads to chronic stress.
And the last thing: individual curves are super important. Different tasks, different challenges are going to have different curves for you, and different people are going to have different curves.
That’s it. That’s the Yerkes-Dodson Law. That’s the first btrmt. Lecture. I’d be very keen to hear any feedback as to how this went, how the format was, how you found the amount of content, the length, that sort of stuff. Until next time.
