There’s a range in which stress helps us perform, on either side of that range performance suffers.
Our natural stress response only actually helps us to a point. There is an associated heart rate range where we operate best, beyond that you start to get tunnel vision, you start to not great things, your brain is completely not taking in additional information. You are “mind blind”. The author of Blink refers to this as “Temporary Autism”. Bold move.
Example
- Police officers are more likely to behave against their own training in situations where tensions are high. They fail to de-escalate or use excessive force when there is no pause inserted after a high-speed pursuit, for example.