The Yerkes-Dodson law shows that pressure only helps up to a point. After that, stress narrows your thinking, makes risks feel inconvenient, and pushes teams toward the fastest answer instead of the right one.

pretty much

your brain hates blank space, so it fills it with the nearest sample: you

When Robert Yerkes and John Dodson ran their 1908 experiments on learning and stress, they found something uncomfortable.

it’s like grocery shopping hungry. you still have values, you just stop making beautiful decisions

annoyingly, no

asking helps, but the chapter is warning you about the gap between what feels true and what survives contact

You have launched under pressure. You know the feeling. The deadline is fixed, the client is waiting, and someone flags a problem at the worst possible moment…

yep. stress narrows your view is the trap door

then it shows up as nasa knew it was not ready

His 1981 research found that when teams feel threatened, they pull decisions upward, share less information, and fall back on what worked before.

shrink the decision surface before the deadline starts chewing on you

write down the tradeoff while you’re still calm

and if a choice only works for informed, patient, caffeinated people, treat that as a bug

that’s the series tbh

design psychology is mostly noticing the human nonsense before it ships

deal. hydrate first