What happens when you know you are capable of thinking, but thinking suddenly feels harder?

In this episode of Becoming: An Evidence-Based Guide to Being Human, a question from my own life becomes the question behind my graduate psychology capstone. We explore executive functioning, prolonged psychological stress, cortisol, allostatic load, the prefrontal cortex, and neuroplasticity and then follow the research somewhere I did not expect.

I began believing the evidence would confirm a simple idea: prolonged stress makes it harder to think. Instead, I found supporting evidence, conflicting findings, individual differences, and an unexpected role for resilience.

This lesson is about what prolonged stress may do to the way we think, but it is also about something fundamental to science: we do not ask research to prove the story we already believe. We allow the evidence to change the story

When profound stress hits, the body can react with terrifying intensity: a racing heart, chest pain, dizziness, shaking, shortness of breath, and the very real belief that something is medically wrong.

In this lesson of Becoming: An Evidence-Based Guide to Being Human, we examine why psychological distress can feel so overwhelmingly physical. We explore the autonomic nervous system, adrenaline, interoception, the brain’s interpretation of bodily signals, hyperventilation, and the science behind why a stress response can resemble a medical emergency.

Along the way, we meet researchers including Eduardo Benarroch, Walter Cannon, Robert Sapolsky, A. D. “Bud” Craig, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and David Clark, whose work helps explain a frightening question:

Why did I genuinely believe I was dying?

This lesson also begins the transition into the next chapter of the curriculum: what happens when the emergency ends, but the stress response does not. In Lesson 5, I’ll take you into the research that eventually became my graduate thesis on prolonged psychological stress and executive functioning.

Why do our bodies sometimes react before our minds fully understand what has happened? In this lesson, we explore how the brain rapidly detects significant change and why our bodies can begin responding before we are consciously aware of it. Through the work of Walter Cannon and Joseph LeDoux, we begin answering one of the most unsettling questions many people ask after profound loss: "Why did my body react before I did?"