Let's pick up with the cognitive effects of stress — Page 139, Lesson 217

Let's pick up with the cognitive effects of stress. I want to walk you through what happens to your thinking when stress builds up. One of the first things that can happen is something called regression. Under stress, people may fall back on older, less mature behaviours or ways of thinking that they had previously outgrown. The excerpt says that past behaviours "are substituted" — so instead of using your current, well-practised coping strategies, you revert to something more primitive. That is regression. Another symptom is fixation, also called a "mental block." This is when you get stuck. It becomes impossible to review what you have already done or to consider other solutions. You just lock onto one track and cannot step back to see the bigger picture. Then there is confirmation bias. The excerpt tells us this is discussed further in Chapter 8, but here it defines it clearly: it is a compulsive and repeated search for information to confirm a decision you have already reached. Instead of looking for evidence that might prove you wrong, you only seek out things that support your existing choice. That is a dangerous trap in the cockpit. Now, here is a broader effect: stress causes the mind to limit its attention to only those factors it feels it can cope with. It ignores additional inputs that may be vital for assessing a situation accurately. The excerpt calls this a loss of situational awareness. It describes it as "not being able to see the wood for the trees" — you get so focused on one detail that you miss the whole picture. The text states that this has been the root cause of many accidents. Let me give you the example from the excerpt. In one case, after escaping successfully from a burning aircraft, passengers reported how quiet everything around them seemed to be. Stress caused them to concentrate only on their escape. The screams around them were never registered. Their brains simply filtered out that auditory information. And the excerpt makes a general point here: it is commonly accepted that auditory information is the first to be discarded under extreme stress. So your ears are the first sense to shut down when the pressure is on. Now, let's move to the next part: Coping with Stress. The first step is stress awareness. The excerpt says it is fundamental that there is an awareness that the problem exists. An individual who recognizes that he or she is suffering from stress is already a long way along the road to identifying the sources and overcoming the problem. Once recognized, the object is to change our attitudes or our environment in order to re-establish harmony between the two. So the core idea here is: you cannot fix what you do not acknowledge. Recognising the stress is the first step, and then you work to change either your internal attitude or your external environment to restore balance.