Think Clearly Under Pressure: The Skill Most People Never Train

Ep 147. Everyday stress—and even minor challenges—can activate the body’s fight-or-flight response.

The stressor does not have to be life-threatening for the nervous system to react as if it is. A deadline, a difficult conversation, a test, or social pressure can all trigger hypervigilance, activating neurological programs designed for survival.

This is where the problem begins.

When the brain perceives threat, it prioritizes speed over accuracy. The rational, thinking mind begins to go offline, and the body shifts into a survival state. Heart rate increases, attention narrows, and perception becomes simplified.

In this state, we begin to think in black-and-white terms.

Nuance disappears. Complexity is reduced. The gray areas that allow for balanced thinking and good decision-making fade away. What remains is a simplified, often distorted version of reality.

This is why a non-threatening situation—like studying for an exam, preparing for a presentation, or navigating social interaction—can feel overwhelming, as if personal safety is at risk.

And in that state, what we perceive often feels absolutely true.

But it may not be accurate.

This is one of the most critical insights in understanding stress:

Under pressure, we are more likely to believe our perceptions—especially when they are least reliable.

This is not a failure of intelligence.
 It is a function of physiology.

Which is why self-regulation is a trainable skill—not a reaction we can rely on in the moment without practice.

Telling yourself, “I’ll stay calm next time,” is not enough.
 Skill must be built before the stress arrives.

By practicing breathing techniques, awareness training, and nervous system regulation during low-stakes moments, we create familiarity in the body. Over time, the nervous system learns that it can remain stable even when pressure increases.

This allows us to:

• Keep the rational mind online
 • Maintain perspective and nuance
 • Respond instead of react
 • Make better decisions under stress

When practiced consistently, self-regulation becomes automatic.

And that is where performance changes.

Not when stress disappears—but when we can function effectively within it.

Train in calm.
 Perform under pressure.

Take care. Walk well.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Welcome back, folks, to episode 147 of the Running Man Self-Regulation Skills Project Podcast with me, your host, Dr. Armando Dominguez, PhD in health psychology, licensed professional counselor, and an adjunct professor at a local community college. What we're going to be discussing today has to do with avoidance, avoidance of tasks. Also, whenever we tend to be stuck in the trap of perfection, seeking perfection, and how that prevents us from launching and doing things and motivation being fleeting as it is, often we get motivated away from things. And I've used that term in quotes motivation away because it's actually resembling some of the symptomology of post-traumatic stress reactivity. Not PTSD diagnosable level, but it's definitely something that is observable as far as a pattern of behavior whenever we try to deal with things that are stressful. And we will tie that to the fight-flight complex. So we'll start the discussion with that. Now to lay some foundation for this discussion, what we're going to talk about first has to do with the fight-flight response. Now, fight-flight is generally speaking what people speak about generally, and it is a biologically founded uh phenomenon that occurs not only in animals but in humans too. But whenever we stress out, whenever we go into the fight-flight mode, generally that indicates that our external environment has become dangerous to some degree, and also that it's made us go into uh hyper-arousal or hypervigilance, that means that our heart rate is going up, our breathing has changed, so we can start sucking more wind, so to speak, so we can prepare to run and fight and climb if that's what we must do. But whenever the elevation of heart rate goes up and the breathing changes, temperature goes up in the body, it lubricates the joints. We got all kinds of stuff going on, having to do with make safe first, and that is what occurs whenever the fight-flight symptomology starts occurring at the physiological level. And yes, it does impact the way we think, and we'll talk a little more about that as we go. But the next thing we're going to use as foundation for this discussion is not only recognition of the symptomology of stress going up whenever stress hits acutely at that moment versus very gradual and chronic over time. And um, that is that whenever we start experiencing the physiology of stress, specifically fight-flight, wherever we have environmental threat, environment external, something's going on that may make us feel threatened or unsafe. So therefore, our assumption of safety is not being met. And that means things are feeling unknown. They feel ambiguous, and ambiguity and unknown are things that make us feel really uncomfortable. I'm not trying to sound as if this is a comfy state that uh only people that have anxiety issues or PTSD issues suffer from. No, this is everyone. I'm just laying an emphasis on the fact that we tend to feel very unsafe. It's just that we don't call it that because we don't see somebody maybe wielding a knife or an animal growling at us ready to pounce. It is still the same system. We have to recognize that the system, regardless of what the context is, was made for simpler times. And it can override our best attempts at doing whatever it is that I need to do, let's say our jobs, but we feel symptoms of what could sound like anxiety. But uh what we have to look at is that the fight-flight response or hyper-vigilant response is one that has to do with environmental safety. And whenever I say environment, external, I also am implying that there's an environmental internal that could be potentially threatening too. And sometimes how we hold our beliefs or thoughts or how we assume things to be very quickly as a result of that stress, tend to stress us out more and can cause us to have that fight-flight reaction. Think about uh post-traumatic stress reactivity. That just has to do with whenever I've been stressed, but not PTSD, once again. Um, we have sensitivities to certain things, certain sounds, maybe abrupt motions. Now, most of us, some of us, I'll say specifically some of us, tend to be a little more sensitive to things just naturally. That's just part of our our our genetic load whenever we came into this earth. Um, we just may be a little more apt to respond to motion, sound, this sort of thing. And then we have those that get conditioned to become hypersensitive to certain things, to where little things that may sound similar to something that may have traumatized or frightened somebody is enough to get somebody to go into a startled response. So these are things we have to pay attention to, but more importantly, external environment seems threatening. Internal environment, just thoughts, ideas that seem threatening to us. If they're delivered to us in a way that they sound scary we're hearing from somebody, or if we're delivering it to ourselves in the sense that we believe things to be because we haven't had anything to to fight or counter that belief, then we may get very reactive whenever we see, for instance, a dog after we've been frightened by a dog when we're small. Now every dog generalized is potentially dangerous. We know they bark, they have all these things that go on to uh classify them as dogs, but not all of them are aggressive. But do they all have a limit to where they will bite? Yep, sure do. And uh can't predict those things. Now we can largely expect that if things are not stressful to a dog, for instance, they're not going to respond in those, more correctly, react in those more dangerous ways that they could bite or worse. So we have to think about context is very important, but we also have very similar limits too. We can get to that edge that is below the level of our societal norm, that uh we start reacting in a way that's ugly, that is not sociable, not socially acceptable. And it's certainly asocial in the sense that maybe it doesn't follow the rules, or could be completely uh one of those things that it's predatory, where we may be doing things that we don't even play by the rules at all. We'll just take out what we need to because it benefits me, and that's process predation versus one where somebody takes pleasure in hurting it or this sort of thing, and there's payoff. But uh, these are all quite related within the continuum of this idea. Now, what we're gonna go to next is understand that um internal, external environment, yes, they can be cons considered threatening, perceived or conceived, enough that our stress goes up. But also, whenever we're in that this state, our mind shifts in the sense that we tend to be more apt to hold on to an idea like a steel trap, and it's generally just one idea, one belief, or what we see right in front of us, to the detriment of all the other options. It seems like all it's not that the options fall away, is that we can't conceive of them as being potential options. Sometimes it helps to have somebody there to kind of talk to us about it. But if we're ramped up enough, our high heart rate is high enough, and we start feeling that pressure, that pounding heart rate, and the blood pressure within in the body heating up, and we start curling because our soul has muscle is curling our body downward, and we start breathing rapidly for an exchange for run, fight, flee, this sort of thing, then we're probably not gonna be listening to what other people say, and probably the blood flow leaving our ears is making it hard for us to hear anyway. So we don't have to hear with clarity when we're needing to make safe. When we have to make egress when we have to run, you have to be fast, you gotta fight, you gotta climb, you gotta be strong, you gotta get away from where it is that's most uncomfortable. You don't have to make math sense, you don't have to make reason nor rational sense. You certainly don't have to understand what somebody's saying, and you certainly don't have to be eloquent in the way that you're speaking to somebody. The message is being given by virtue of body language and tonals, and it's not what you're saying, but rather what you're doing, or more correctly, the way you're being, and it's not a choice that you're being that way whenever things take you by surprise and your physiology overrides. Your best reasoning is overtaken by the lower brain. It doesn't matter what anyone says, and they are there are a lot of people out there that consider themselves expert in dealing with stress, and many of them give cognitive process issues type of solutions for things that physiologically you have to address the physiology first. Uh, you can't access it because the physiology is blocking the capacity to deal with the thinking process that would occur as, for instance, under stress. So whatever thinking errors I have, we don't want to correct them. Not during stress. Whenever things are dangerous, where there might be people coming close to blows and uh wherever the the noise is getting loud and people are getting agitated, for instance, and maybe even the compression at distance for people getting close enough to where they may be able to strike each other, that's not the time to try to do a religious conversion or even to make a rational discussion happen because rational's gone by the wayside. We've defaulted to perceptual level and we have to pay attention to this. Now, the next thing I want to point out is that often whenever we're doing let's get away from the really peak level of stress to let's say an average everyday stress, wherever maybe we have a long uh day and we're tired and we don't have a whole lot of cognitive bandwidth, a lot of times whenever we stress, energy is required to do thinking. And whenever we're on basically life support mode, in the sense that if you think about Star Trek, whenever they would do just basic life support systems, whenever they're floating through space quietly, and everyone's just kind of sitting there but not doing much, and just it's just the air that's being pumped through there and also making sure that minimal propulsion that's happening for the ship, so that way they can save what they need to for preserving life versus running the ship, then this is kind of what we look at whenever we're looking at a good analogy for what the body does when we're under stress. We to tend to go into life support mode when we're tired. We might get yawning, we might start getting tired and sleepy, might be looking to just drop our eyelids for a moment and we start taking big deep sonorous inhales and breaths, and maybe even yawn a little bit because we're trying to get more oxygen to our brain to do what we have to do, especially when it's just six o'clock in the in the evening. Day's not even close to over yet. We still got to cook, take care of kids, got to study for a test, and all these sorts of things, and those are a lot of heavy cognitive load, heavy rational uh required to be able to do that. So there's a a lot of demand for the frontal cortex, and if we don't have it there because our body is in demand of oxygen because it's tired, then we may have some issues. Now, whenever we don't have enough physical energy because we've not eaten, that'll affect us as well. If you've gone a long day and you've eaten, but you've burned through your fuel, it can happen then too. If you have a stress day where you have an acute stress at the end of the day, you're gonna have adrenaline. Yes, you may even feel a little disconnected. It might even feel like when you talk to people, your your radar does not blip. You do you have kind of like a numb or even a very low signature that would indicate it feels like I'm not connecting. And it's not so much that you're not trying to connect authentically, it's just that we can't read people's emotions and we're not getting that oxytocin bump. But we have to think to our behaviors are that of a mirror in that we reflect what people see in us outward, and they may also start responding back with the reflection of what they see in us back to us, and we may mistake that as them being angry when in actuality they just may be miming what they're seeing, because we tend to be vicarious learners, but we also tend to mirror behaviors unconsciously, and we may be seeing a reflection of what it is or how it is that we are, and think that they're mad at us, and that makes it feel even worse sometimes, so we don't feel any kind of bond or come home. If the other person, for instance, is stressed too, it tends to make things really kind of uncomfortable. But if you have one person that's kind of rooted and safe and knows what to expect and how to redirect, it can make the space a little safer, but we don't always have the luxury of that. So the next point I want to make is that whenever we do have stress, it's not just that we're running out of energy that we get to get more snappy and tired, even though we do, but we tend to have very little energy left in the evenings if we have a lot of stress during the day. So it makes things harder. So one plus one equals two becomes a chore, even though we learned it in second grade. Now it requires more fuel to uh basically execute that process. It's harder to do, takes more effort. And if you're trying to learn something new, synapsing makes your mind tired. Neurological training, just like physiological neurological training, where you're learning how to jump and skip and hop and get the muscles to fire differently, it tires your mind as much as as much as it does your neurological system. It's a different type of attention. So we become inefficient and we use more than we need to to learn something new, so to speak. So then overcoming ambiguity and the unknown becomes almost threatening. Now, here's a very specific, for instance, whenever you have a test that's coming up and you know that a lot rests on it for you to be able to pass it. A lot of people that do like the MCAT and uh also take uh other exams to get into uh programs that they're wanting to pursue, there's a lot of pressure that a person puts on themselves by studying and preparing, but once the day comes that you have to take it, they take mock tests, they think they're doing okay, they don't know. There's a lot of ambiguity, a lot of unknown after the fact because you're studying for it and you're trained for it, but until you get that answer, you don't know. And that's a really difficult space to occupy. And there are many that feel threatened whenever they're studying, especially if they feel like they're getting everything wrong. They feel like failures in the moment. They start believing that there's something wrong. If there's an issue with, let's say, reading or mathematics, and I was never a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination, but uh taking a class with a teacher, uh, I say a teacher and instructor, uh uh, and he was an amazing instructor at the university I went to, and that was my first semester back going to college, and I told myself that if I can't pass mathematics, then maybe college isn't for me. I got it, got an A. And since then I've taken graduate level statistics courses using higher levels of uh math than I ever thought I ever would, and I was actually pretty good with it. So that was really surprising to me, but also there was an understanding that I had to get past this idea I had of myself. Ideas that I've heard a lot of people speak and repeat, and this ties into what we're talking about, and that is that whenever we hear the colloquial, oh, I have a math, I'm a block against math, I have a mental block, and there's no such thing as a mental block. Now there's a belief that goes with that, can I or can't I? And do I believe it? And what if I hear more people saying the same thing? Well, I don't like math, man, it's just not easy for me. And then we start hearing it because we have difficulty, we may be more apt to jump on that bandwagon because we have that bandwagon suggestion quality wherever, hey, someone else is doing it, so I'm gonna jump in too. We're social creatures. We will suggest ourselves what other people are doing just because other people are doing it, and it sounds like it makes sense, and we don't like to sound dumb, and I don't like to feel like I'm dumb. And here's the thing we can either be ignorant, I'd rather be that, or stupid. One is where I choose not to learn. Whereas if we're ignorant, we can educate, we can help people learn. If we realize that I am not aware of this, ignorant is thrown around as a pejorative, you're ignorant. Well, you know what? I'd rather be that because that means I can still learn versus being incapable of learning or choosing not to learn. So that's a mental block that I would say if you choose not to, I'm not gonna learn that, I don't want to. And um, whenever we're looking at the idea of stress, it's like we develop maybe not a mental block, but more correctly an incapacity, because I have the ability, but I'm incapable in the moment if I don't have the fuel, the requisite fuel to do the thinking I need to do, especially when it's under stress. So whenever we practice something, this is where we're leaning on the term skill building. And the learning models that we're aware of, all of them point at learning not only physical skills, but even cognitive skills by repetition and repeat. Rinse, repeat, and you get skill. You don't develop math ability, you gain it by conditioning. You train to it just like you would learning how to jump over hurdles or learning how to turn left whenever you're running on a track, this sort of thing. Those are things that are conditioned in practice, and we get that by familiarity. The longer you are in the environment, the more familiar you get. And that's when you realize that the map is not the territory. We often will see what I would call a mental loop whenever people start trying to figure stuff out in their minds because they're embarrassed and they don't want to show on the outside by doing work on paper or even a whiteboard because somebody else is gonna learn, because maybe uh look rather and see, and and they'll be embarrassed. And we have to get past that. Not knowing isn't embarrassing. Not knowing is meaning this is a teachable situation, but often depending on if someone had rough teaching, rough parenting, or situations where people made fun and school can be a very brutal time, that can put the quietest on somebody's desire to learn, and people will get hung up on the word school. I don't want to go to anything that sounds like school because I hated school so much when I was in school, heard a podcaster doing that, and I love his uh content. It's amazing. But he was saying that that that was one of the reasons that you know he didn't sign up for something because it was called school, even though it was spelled with a SK probably. But the idea is that whenever we have such beliefs and then we follow through them, they limit us. And we get limited by the stressors that we experience because we develop beliefs that we somehow believe at some level protect us. From what? From the ambiguity, from the unknown. And honestly, what it is, it's our fight-flight reaction that is meant to protect us against danger and threat to our organism, not necessarily threat to our ignorance, but we tend to tie it to a threat to ego, our idea of who it is that we are. And it's that idea of who it is that we are that makes us suffer because we're attached to that. We like who it is that we think we are. Nothing wrong with that. We have to have that to go out and interact and to get along to get along, and that's not being inauthentic once again. We need that to be able to get our food and whatever it is we get at the marketplace that we need to do to interact in a healthy sense because we require each other to be healthy. We're we're wired to the group. But whenever we have things like this get in the way that tend to keep us from learning or doing the best we can. I'm going to point out a couple of details. Motivation uh is one of the things that moves us in the direction. That is one of those things that's kind of like one day you wake up, hey, I feel motivated, let's do this. Next day it's gone. And part of that is emotional, part of it is the newness of something or the excitement of the idea. But when the work starts, then the motivation goes, and that's where discipline takes over. And whenever we have a traumatic response such that we get anxious and worried, and we start getting mad at a cognitive task, let's say doing reading or math, because I don't understand. And I will say that, but we're getting physically angry. That means our body's taking it as if it's a physical threat. And this is where we have to differentiate and be able to talk to ourselves and condition and practice. So we get familiar with that and we realize, okay, it's just a piece of paper, there's a numbers and letters, and yes, there's something tied to it, but at the at the same time, it's not threatening my being. It's not choking me out. I'm not losing air or or or blood as a result of doing these things. We tend to believe that it's stressful because we pressure ourselves into thinking somehow it's the end of the world, and it's not. The problem is there's a belief that it is, so that's where it becomes problematic. What to me makes it even more acutely problematic is if the stress comes on incredibly fast and our reasoning gets set aside and it's there, but our lower brain's going to overcome and it always wins the race. Our lower brain drives it's just let us think lets us think whenever things are safe, that we're really in charge and making all these these decisions. Whenever stuff like that happens, our free will goes out the window and we become program responsive, reactive more correctly, because it's not a thought-out process, it's not a thoughtful process, it's a reactive neurological program to protect your safety and keep your backside alive. So keeping that in mind, so what does all of this have to do with self-regulation a lot? Because these are the things where our self-regulation skills become incredibly important to help derail the beginnings of that fight flight response so that way we can have a higher quality of life with fewer of those incidents where they derail us, and then we wind up having guilt and shame and embarrassment, or worse yet, acting out, maybe even getting violent or destructive of things or people. Whenever things get This series that fast, we have to have self-regulation skills on board. And it's something that we have to be familiar with. And we have to practice them every day, not just when the stress happens, but when things aren't happening. So we get so skilled at it that it's easy to pull up with the least amount of effort. And it's just a matter of intent. And then you start changing that. So that way when you go into situations that may seem like they're going to be uncomfortable, one, you can read it and avoid it. Or two, if you must be there or catch 22, I got to go to uh a meeting because my children have uh have to have me there at school and there's something going on and I need to maintain a cool head. This is where your self-regulation skills in an everyday format become incredibly effective. But what about at home? Whenever you have everybody being comfortable and a little more unbridled and just kind of letting go and allowing themselves to be who they are, this is where danger can happen very quickly because we tend to also feel like somehow we're safe by default, not realizing that some of the worst things happen at home with family. And even then, if we practice these self-regulation skills often enough and we have everyone else in the house doing the same, the levels of stress not only go down, the way we interact become smoother, and also there's a greater degree of respect and deference with each other versus the judgmental, what are they up to, what are they doing. And if that's happening in the home, it can make home very uncomfortable for raising children, for growing a relationship, and also just living with roommates for that matter. So these are some things that work really well at work. Uh, these are some things that work really well at home as far as like the double sniff technique and the forecast breath, but also knowing whenever you feel stressed that it's okay to say, hey, I'm feeling a little emotional. Can we come back and talk about this in let's say 10 minutes? But make sure you go back and do that. Get the calm down and get there and be disciplined. Do it, do the breathing. And not all breathing is the same. Don't be doing deep breathing if you're stressed. Do the fore count and the double sniff. That'll get you parasympathetically uh awake in the sense that it will cool you, but it won't put you to sleep. But it'll also give you that lowered sense of pressuredness that often comes along with being stressed. So some things that I want to point out is that avoidance, whenever we tend to avoid tasks, and if we're trying to do, let's say, study for a test, and then you're at home, and then all of a sudden the dog starts barking, and it we start taking issue with the dogs, or we have to go out and focus on that. That is a form of running. That is a form of what we see in PTSD where there's avoidance, where we see with people that are avoiding to have anxiety, panic, they want to get away from doing things, and often they will redirect themselves. But what we have to point out is that there's nothing wrong with that, but it's a symptom that maybe I should have taken a break when I was doing the stress the this testing over this practice for testing, and I push myself too hard because I have this unrealistic expectation. Breaks are necessary if you're gonna learn. You want to derail learning? Go ahead and plow through it and you'll see what happens. You won't learn as well, you won't remember as well, and it's gonna be a really uncomfortable, painful situation versus showing up and demonstrating what you know. Learning gets derailed whenever your stress goes up. We're we're better learners when we're happy campers, and that's a very important detail. The calmer you are, the safer we are. Do this breathing, do the double sniff technique, the double sniff in and the extended exhale several times before you start your study. Do it whenever you start feeling yourself stressed during the time you're doing the study. It'll slow you down for a moment, but it'll give you greater clarity. But it's something that'll give you uh an incredible turnaround within the time you're doing it, even if you do it before and even a little after. Shorten your study sessions if you're gonna do that, because whenever you're dealing with situations, it can become very much treated as a threat, even though it's not physically threatening you, because that part of you that responds to threat in the fight-flight way, that just responds to threat. It doesn't matter whether or not it's a real threat or conceived threat or believed that or an expected threat or an actual threat, it will still raise your heart rate and make you feel like crap in the process. So that's really the take-home message. Pay attention to these things, and we have to learn how to use them regularly. Now, uh that's going to be it for what I'm discussing, but I want to share with you something I'm really proud of. Um, my little book, uh Poco Chico, The Heavenly Child, came out uh a few days back. It's available on Amazon, and uh it's not expensive at all, it's only like 31 pages, but it's actually kind of around um the idea of the of the inner child, and it's not all psychology-minded, it's a little picture book for kiddos, and it's not for the just the youngest. They can look at the pictures, they're cute, but it's more so something you want to read to your kids and also let them read if they're old enough to read. But also as an adult, this is an adult reader with some pictures that kind of points out that we forget how it is to love ourselves and to be kind with ourselves and remember that we still have that childlike self within, and we don't lose that. I shared some of this with my employer and he was talking to me about how sad it was because there's been there was a murder here locally, and um it was between two, uh one about and then they're late teens, that's all I'll say. I won't give names or anything, but um he was saying, Why why weren't they playing ball? Why weren't they outside? Why didn't they have the opportunity to do something else versus taking a life where things are so serious that it's the it's the end of it all for both of them. And i it's a problem, and I see it. But part of it has to do that we've lost that sense of raising young men and getting them to be inculcated into becoming men versus letting uh other highly emotional young men, gangsters in particular, uh guide people into what they consider being men. And that's not only broken families, but also broken lives and people getting hurt left and right. But this book that I'm sharing is about remembering that little heavenly self that that is within us, and try to reiterate that we never lose that. That's the part of us that is always going to be innocent, that's always going to like the play. And um, what I'd like to read is gonna be one of the pages from my book, and I I love sharing this, but just as an idea I want to share with y'all is that deep in the heart of every person there lives a tiny magical being called the heavenly child, or Poco Chico. Poco Chico means a little small in Spanish. Um the little this little figure is always joyful and pure, representing our truest unblemished self. And this is something that no matter what, that's the one that's always observing us do in our lives, but also that's the part of us that comes out when we smile, when we have joy, when we play, when we do art, when we discover and just have adventure and a sense of wonder. And I encourage y'all to seek that within yourselves and also to encourage it in others and do the best we can to preserve it in other people as we do in ourselves, because that's one of the most loving things that we can do. And that's something that I hope this podcast helped with, and this little book helps, and hopefully my running back book that's going to be out soon will help with as well. So for now, I want to tell you thank you for visiting with me, listening this Monday night. And I want to tell you thank you. One for listening, two, for sharing this podcast. And if you want to find this podcast, you can find it on YouTube, and you can like and subscribe and share there. I'd like to see that grow a little more. But you can also find it on iTunes, Spotify, and also iHeartMusic and Amazon Music and other uh platforms where you consume your podcast. And I want to tell you thank you. Go look for that little book, Poco Chico, just a little small. We're always a little small within, but it's also that little part of us that has that little funsy quality that likes to do things just like a kid with new eyes. So take care, be safe, walk well.