Unless you have never faced difficulty, each of us has experienced stress in one form or another. Stress is typically associated with a negative connotation, but is it all bad, or is there some good to it? This article will explore how stress affects our memory, attention, and decision-making capabilities.
What is stress?
Before discussing stress's effects, we should first understand what stress is. According to the World Health Organization, stress is a state of worry or mental tension caused by a problematic situation. It is a natural human response that prompts us to address challenges and threats. It is also the trigger for activating our fight-or-flight response when we face danger.
How does stress affect our memory?
Our memory is like a storage space where we store information and experiences. When we learn new things, the information goes through a series of steps before it gets put into a part of our brain. When moderately stressed, we can remember things better and take in more information in our short-term memory. However, with too much stress, creating these short-term memories and turning them into long-term ones is more challenging. This also impacts our learning capabilities as we cannot take in a lot of information at a time. (Watch this video to learn more about how short-term stress affects memory and remembering facts!)
In addition to stress affecting how our memories get formed, stress can also affect the type of memories formed. When we experience something stressful, such as experiencing a murder case happening in front of us, our stress hinders us from remembering the details of the experience accurately. Furthermore, suppose someone were to ask us about what we had experienced and provide us with new information while asking. In that case, we are more likely to be influenced by this new information as it is more recent than the experience, thus causing us to create ‘false memories.’
How does stress affect our attention span?
Attention span is our ability to focus on something, such as reading this article, before getting distracted. As our attention span has limits, we ought to be more aware of what can hinder our attention, and one of these factors would be stress… in a large amount.
Similar to the above part about how stress affects our memory, some can benefit us. The right amount of stress will motivate us to do the task and increase our productivity and efficiency. Too little stress would make us bored with the task, and too much would overwhelm us. This is illustrated by the Yerkes-Dodson Law, as seen from the graph below:
In the graph above, the x-axis (arousal) refers to stress and motivation, while the y-axis (performance) refers to the ability to focus on the task.
How does stress affect our decision-making?
When we make decisions with a clear mind, we can consider the pros and cons before making the choice. Stress influences our decision-making by activating our fight-or-flight response. For decisions that need to be made quickly (as it could be the difference between life and death), stress does not hinder as much. It could be beneficial, as we can make quick decisions to escape danger.
However, in modern times, most of us do not come face to face with life-or-death situations. As such, stress - especially in the extreme - can hinder our decision-making skills. When we are chronically stressed, we want to pursue immediate stress relief, which could be in the form of making a more risky decision with a higher reward. Even though this could be a better option in some cases, risky decision-making could become a habit, leading to more risky choices, which can increase stress levels, thus creating a vicious cycle.
On the flip side, if we are already highly anxious and feeling stressed, we could make decisions with a lower risk but a lower reward or not even decide. This is because when we are stressed, our ability to reason and evaluate the choices given falls, and this leads to us choosing a ‘safer’ path and relying on what we know instead of what we do not (which could be the case for high-risk choices where we do not want to navigate through the risks).
Making important decisions over prolonged periods can affect our decision-making and our choices. Suppose we were to make complicated decisions under stress for an extended period (like how a judge would have to decide on a sentence based on a criminal’s charges). In that case, this can affect our decisions and cause us to make different choices than if we were to make the decision earlier. This is known as decision fatigue, and you can watch this video to understand better what it is!
Conclusion
To conclude, a little stress in short intervals can help us be more productive and increase our efficiency in our work. However, more stress over a long period will prevent this efficiency from falling, causing it to be counterproductive. When we face such situations, we should take a step back and take a breather away from the source of the stress before jumping back into the task. After all, when we approach something with a clear mind, we can do things with more ease than when we are all stressed out about it.
Reference List
Pietrangelo, A. (2020). Yerkes-Dodson Law: How It Correlates to Stress, Anxiety, Performance. [online] Healthline. Available at: https://www.healthline.com/health/yerkes-dodson-law#stress-performance-bell-curve.
TED-Ed (2018). Does stress affect your memory? - Elizabeth Cox. [online] www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyg7lcU4g8E.
TED-Ed (2023). How to make smart decisions more easily. [online] www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7j8F16eSqs.
Scott, E. (2018). How Stress Works With and Against Your Memory. [online] Verywell Mind. Available at: https://www.verywellmind.com/stress-and-your-memory-4158323.
Tufvesson, A. (2022). How stress affects decision making. [online] Law Society Journal. Available at: https://lsj.com.au/articles/how-stress-affects-decision-making/.
Trafton, A. (2017). Stress can lead to risky decisions. [online] MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Available at: https://news.mit.edu/2017/stress-can-lead-risky-decisions-1116.
World Health Organization (2023). Stress. [online] www.who.int. Available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/stress.
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