Cortisol Makes You Stupid.

Cortisol is the feel-bad brain chemical that triggers the “Fight or Flight” response in your body.

When you feel any threat (real or imagined), your body gives you a hit of Cortisol to activate the “Fight or Flight” response.

What that does is literally drain oxygen and blood from your Pre-Frontal Cortex to your arms and legs—so you can…Fight or Flight.

Running your Pre-Frontal Cortex (your Rational Brain ) on less oxygen and blood makes you, quite literally, stupid. It can’t think as clearly and do as effective problem solving.

Deal is, though, we aren’t being chased by tigers any more. We need a fully oxygenated Rational Brain to come up with most of the solutions we need today.

If you try to come up with those solutions while your brain is running on Cortisol, you aren’t likely to come up with the best solutions.

On top of that, one of Cortisol’s jobs is to make you more vigilant for threats. To look everywhere for more of them.

And since today we’re looking for different kinds of threats than a raging tiger, the Brain On Cortisol tends to imagine and create more threats than are actually there.

Which causes more Cortisol Hits.

Which drains more oxygen and blood from our Rational Brain.

And our rational problem solving effectiveness gets worse and worse.

That’s why the best thing you can do when you get that hit of Cortisol is to get your brain and body to switch to running on the feel-good chemical, Dopamine, ASAP.

One of the most interesting things I discovered in my neuroscience research over the last few years is your Rational Brain works exponentially better on the feel-good chemical, Dopamine, than on Cortisol.

That makes sense because Dopamine doesn’t drain your Rational brain of oxygen and blood the way Cortisol does.

All the FocusCatalyst techniques I’ve developed are designed to easily help you to switch your brain from running on Cortisol to running on Dopamine really fast.

You can do the same with techniques like meditation. But if you’re anything like me, when faced with a sudden problem that needs solving RIGHT NOW, it’s really difficult for me to get into a meditative state.

So I created techniques that would work fast without that.

There’s even one that literally gets you to describe your problem in the most catastrophically negative terms possible. (It’s really satisfying to do that—and even in some ways…fun.).

It’s in my FOCUS. The Catalyst for Innovation book. And I’ll also be posting how to do that technique it on a future blog post here. The name of the technique is “Burn Baby Burn.”