
Isn’t cortisol brilliant?
It maintains our blood pressure, supports the immune system, and is a vital part of our anti-inflammatory processes.
It regulates our blood sugar, and manages how our bodies use carbohydrates, fats and proteins.
It keeps us safe, by managing part of our threat response system – our fight or flight.
Our core stress hormone is a wonder hormone.
How would we cope when mistakes happen and things don’t go to plan?
But it does come with a downside, which rarely gets talked about.
Cortisol is Kryptonite for your memory.
If you think you’re about to be attacked by a lion, your brain doesn’t care about the details of the lion. It doesn’t need to recall the specific colours and dappling of its coat. It just needs you to get safe. Now.
Cortisol primes many of our physiological functions but sacrifices the cognitive.
If we are to learn from mistakes and situations, we ideally need to remember what was happening. We need to be able to recall and use that data to inform our behaviour next time something isn’t going to plan.
Stress responses get in the way of that lessons learned exercise.
Our own stress responses also inform our behaviours which, in turn, can add induce further stress responses in others.
We might feel we’re helping. Afterall, someone’s got to take the bull by the horns and do something.
But this behaviour might be interpreted as being overbearing or aggressive. My response to that threat might then be to detach from the situation; to sit back and watch.
Which you might interpret as my not caring – which encourages you to aggressively question why I’m not partaking.
And the vicious cycle continues.
When the dust has settled, we remember our subjective feelings. But we don’t remember the objective details of what actually worked and what needs to be learned from.
We can’t always get what we wanted. But we can learn from the experience, if we’re mindful of the effects of stress and our reactions to it.
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