Why Can't You Think Clearly Under Stress? | Nervous System Regulation for Executives| AI for Executives

I'm Sahar Andrade, MB.BCh, a Neuroleadership Coach and Forbes Coaches Council member. 

Direct answer: yes, stress genuinely changes what your brain can access in the moment. 

Under sustained pressure, cortisol reduces activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for working memory and complex reasoning. 

That's why capable, well-prepared leaders still go blank in the meetings that matter most. 

It looks like a confidence problem. It is actually a stress hormone doing its job on the wrong timeline. 

In this episode, I break down the mechanism and the fast, practiced way back to clear thinking. 

We cover the twenty-minute cortisol curve, why high performers are hit hardest, and the specific rehearsal that shrinks a ten-minute fog down to ten seconds. Register for The Pressure Room, live Thursday, July 30, 11am Pacific: https://www.saharandrade.com/pressure-room

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●        Why can't I think clearly under stress?

●        Does stress affect memory?

●        What does cortisol do to the brain?

●        Can leaders train themselves to think clearly under pressure?

●        Why do smart people make bad decisions under pressure?

●        Is brain fog under stress permanent?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Why can't you think clearly the second it matters most? You walk into the room sharp, ten minutes in, some pushes back on the number, and your mind goes fuzzy. Not because you didn't know the material, because of what stress does to one very specific part of the brain, and it's probably not the part you would guess. My name is Sahar Andradi. I am a physician by training, MBBCH, non-practitioner, and I work as a new leadership coach. This is AI Cafe Conversations Podcast, where AI, neuroscience, and leadership meet, where our main idea is leadership under pressure, and always remember steady before strategy. Steady before strategy. So before we go further, one thing I say at the start of every episode because it matters. Everything I share comes from my experience and my opinion as a coach. It's not a diagnosis and it's not a fact about you. You decide what fits. Today we're talking about a question I hear in almost every debrief I run with executives. Why can't I think clearly under stress? Not why am I anxious, not why I am tired, but why does my actual thinking get worse right when I need it most? There is a mechanism behind that it has an aim. And once you know it, the fog stops feeling like a personal failure and starts looking like biology doing exactly what it was built to do. Just at the wrong time. I want to be specific today because vague neuroscience content doesn't actually have anyone in the room where it counts. So we're going deep on one mechanism, not five. And I'm going to give you the actual physiology, not just the metaphor. What is the crisis? So let's talk about what is actually happening. When the brain perceives a threat, real or symbolic or perceived, a boardroom challenge counts. It releases cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone. In small, short bursts, it sharpens your focus. That's useful. That's ABC anatomy and physiology. It's not something that I invented or I'm diagnosing. It's why you can suddenly perform under a deadline. But when cortisol stays elevated, when the stress doesn't resolve in minutes but stretches across a meeting, a quarter, a new organization, it starts working against the exact function a leader needs to boost. Working memory. Working memory is what lets you hold several pieces of information in mind at once. The number from the report, the objection from the board member, the three ways you might respond. Cortisol and sustained high levels measurably reduces activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for holding this working memory or those pieces working together and reasoning through them. This is not a confidence gap, it's a timing mismatch. A stress hormone doing its job on a threat timeline, not a board rule timeline. I had a call last month with a VP of sales, big account, bigger stakes. She told me she walked into the renewal meeting knowing the numbers. 20 minutes in, the client asked a question she had answered a dozen times in problem. She said the same sentence back three times, slightly differently each time, and never landed on the actual answer. She told me, I know that number. I know it. I know it. It just wasn't there. Repeating three times the question was trying to waste time or gain time till her brain comes back online, but it did not happen. This is not a confidence problem. That's a cortisol doing exactly what cortisol under sustained pressure to do. Prioritizing speed and vigilance over precision and recall. The brain was built for a threat you run from, not a client you negotiate with. But it doesn't know the difference. It reacts the same way to both. There is a specific number worth knowing here because it changes how leaders think about recovery. Under acute stress, cortisol typically picks within, let's say, 20 minutes, and if nothing new triggers it, starts declining over the following 20 to 30 minutes. So the cycle is around an hour. That's the natural curve. The problem for most executive schedules is that nothing ever waits 30 minutes. The next meeting starts in 10. The follow-up email lands in 5. So the curve never gets to complete. It gets interrupted at the peak again and again and again across a single day. Which is why the fog by 4 in the afternoon often feels heavier than the fog at 9 in the morning. It's not that the day gets harder, it's that the recovery window keeps getting cut off before it finishes. Here is what makes this worse for executives specifically. The higher you go, the more your job is tagged with stress. Not one big threat and then recovery. A meeting, then a message, then a hard conversation, then another meeting, with no gap long enough for cortisol to come back down before the next spike starts. Recovery time is not a luxury. It's the mechanism resetting itself. Without it, you're not operating from a calm baseline that occasionally spikes. You're operating from an elevated baseline that never fully drops. And every new stressor lands on top of the last one instead of starting a fresh one. And this is the crisis, my friend. Not that you're bad under pressure, that your brain is running a very old, very effective survival mechanism or system on a modern schedule. It was never built to survive. I have seen the same pattern in a CFO who ran board decks for 15 years without missing a beat. And then two years into a company turnaround, started stumbling on numbers. He had built himself. He told me the strange part wasn't forgetting the number. It was that he could see it almost like it was one word away and it would not arrive. That specific description, the number being one word away, is one of the most common things I hear from executives once they trust me enough to say it out loud. Here is something worth naming directly because it changes how you interpret what you see in a room. A leader can look completely composed on the outside, voice steady, posture solid, and still be running significantly, reduced across to working memory on the inside. Composure and cognitive access are not the same system. That's actually part of why this gets missed for so long. Executives are often excellent at managing the outward performance of calm, which means the fog can run four months before anyone, including the leader themselves, names what's actually happening underneath it. And here is the part almost nobody explains. This is not rare, and it's not a sign you are on the wrong seat or in the wrong seat. I have sat across from CFOs, hospital administrators, and university deans who all describe the identical experience in different languages. One calls it losing the thread. One calls it going blank for 30 seconds. One just calls it a fog. Some mechanism, different vocabulary, same complaint. I know this material inside out, and in the moment it matters most, I can't access it. There is a reason this hits high performance hardest, and it's almost cruel in its logic. The more capable you are, the more you have been rewarded for pushing through instead of recovering. The more you push through instead of recovering, the longer cortisol stays elevated. The longer it stays elevated, the more the exact skill that got you promoted, clear thinking under complexity starts to erode in the moments you need it to show up. It's not that success causes this, it's that the behaviors that produce success often remove the one thing that protects the brain from this. This shows up identically whether the pressure is a whole question, a live client negotiation, or a hard conversation with a direct report. The trigger changes, the mechanism does not. And this is multiplied by 100 now that we have AI in our life. Because we depend on it so much that even the training of our brain and the cognitive part of our brain don't get exercised all the time like it used to be. Because we depend on AI more than anything else now. And AI at the same time is causing pressure because the board is waiting for results to be within 90 minutes when we know the results are not gonna show up in 90 minutes. When people that our teams that work are already scared of AI, is it gonna be my demise? Is it gonna take my job? And because they are in the same stress circle that you're in right now and they don't get a recovery period, now it's all over the place, it's all over the organization. And no one can remember any number, no one can remember any fact, and it goes from bad to worse. And it also is not limited to speech. The same mechanism shows up in writing, just lower. A leader drafting a hard email under sustained pressure will often produce something longer and less clear than they would on a calm day. More hedges, more caveats, less of the direct line that actually defines their communication. Colleagues read that ship as change in confidence. It is more accurately a change in what the brain can hold into long enough to organize into a clean sentence. Physically, it shows up small, a path that runs a beat too long. Reaching for a word that was there five minutes ago, reading the same line of an email twice because none of it is landing. None of these are dramatic. That's exactly why they get dismissed by the leader experiencing them and by everyone watching. Nobody names it in the room. It just gets absorbed as a bad day until it happens enough times that a leader starts whitely wondering why it keeps happening. So, what does this actually cause beyond the bad 30 seconds in the meeting? First, the decision made from a fog state tend to be worse decisions. Not because the leader is less capable, but because fewer options are available to a brain running on threat priority instead of on access. And if you're using AI in that mental state, whatever you enter in AI is garbage in, garbage out. Leaders in this state default to whatever felt safe the last time, not necessarily whatever is right this time. That's not a discipline problem. That's a cortisol narrowing in the field of options the brain will even consider. Second, teams notice not the mechanism. They don't know about cortisol and working memory. They notice the pattern. The leader who used to be sharp in these meetings now seems to hesitate or overcorrect by talking longer to cover the gap or delegate the hard question to someone else in the room without explaining why. Teams read inconsistency as instability, even when the underlying cause is completely explainable. Trust is built on predictability. A leader who is sometimes sharp and sometimes foggy with no visible pattern to when reads as unpredictable, even when the real pattern is entirely about recovery time between stressors. Predictability isn't a soft skill on a performance review. It's the input teams use, consciously or not, to decide how much risk to bring to a leader directly instead of managing around them. Every time that calculation tips towards routing around instead of routing through, a leader's actual influence in the organization shrinks by exactly that much. Whether or not anyone ever says so out loud. I think of a marketing senior VP who told me her team had started quietly rewriting the agenda before her Monday meetings, moving anything generally difficult to a written pre-read instead of raising it live. Nobody told her that's what was happening. She found out by accident, months later, when a peer mentioned it in passing. Her team hasn't lost confidence in her judgment. They had learned through repeated small moments and live, difficult conversation with her landed better in writing than in the wrong. That is not a team problem to solve with a better meeting agenda. That's Portisol shaping a pattern that had nothing to do with anyone's actual judgment, hers or theirs. Third, and this is the one that compounds quietest, the leader starts avoiding situations that triggered it. Fewer live questions and answer sessions, more written responses where there is time to think, delegating the highest pressure conversations instead of leading them. On paper, that can look like good delegation. Often, it's avoidance dressed as strategy. And it slowly shrinks the leader's own range. Right at the organization needs the range the most. Exactly the function Cortisol was working against in that room. He caught it only because a colleague later asked him gently why he had said yes to something that didn't sound like him. I think about the CEO turnover numbers here. 2,221 CEOs left the roles in 2024. A record according to Challenger, Gray, and Christmas. Wards are not patient anymore. Perception forms in the room in real time faster than a portal of results can correct it. If the moments that form perception are exactly the moments cortisol has taken the most from a leader's cognitive bandwidth. And that's not a coincidence worth ignoring. That's the actual mechanism behind a lot of leadership failures that get blamed on strategy. When the real failure point was 30 seconds of fog in the room where it counted. Multiply this across a week instead of a day, and the pattern gets clearer. A Monday spike that never fully resolves becomes the baseline of a Tuesday spike that lands on top of by Thursday. A leader is not recovering to a calm Monday morning baseline between stressors. They are recovering, if at all, to an already elevated Wednesday baseline. The fog by the end of the week isn't a new problem. It's the same unresolved problem compounding. There is an organizal cost too, and it's less visible than any single bad meeting. When a leader operates from sustained elevated cortisol, the team below them tends to mirror the state, not because of anything mystical, but because people take behavioral cues from whoever is running room. A leader who is short, distracted, or inconsistent under pressure sets the emotional temperature for everyone downstream. Meetings get tighter. People stop bringing hard news early because the room doesn't feel like it can hold it. By the time the leader hears the real problem, it's later and bigger than it needed to be. And who knows if it's going to be taken care of or can be taken care of. None of this shows up on a performance review as a stress or one problem. It shows up as communication issues, or this leader seems checked out lately, or worse, nothing at all until the resignation letter or the bold conversation nobody saw coming. Here is the shift that actually changes this, and it's not what most executives try first. Most leaders, when they notice the fog, try to think their way out of it. More prep, more notes, rehearsing the answer one more time, that doesn't work. Because the problem was never information. You already knew the number, like in my VP of sales story. The problem is access. Access is a state, not a knowledgeable gap. What actually works is treating recovery as part of the job, not a reward for finishing the job. That means building in real gaps between high-stakes movement, even five minutes, long enough for cortisol to start coming back down before the next spike lands on top of it. It means noticing the early signal, the path that runs long, the word that is not there, and treating it as data instead of embarrassment. The leaders who recover fastest are the ones who never spike. Everyone spikes. They are the ones who catch it early and have a fast way back to baseline instead of pushing through and stacking spike on top of spike until the fog becomes the whole afternoon. This is the same territory as my brain framework, building the pattern of catching the state before it runs the room instead of only making sense of it afterwards. B is for behavior. A is for awareness. I want to be specific about what a fast way back actually looks like because vague advice like take a breath undersells what's happening biologically. A slow controlled exhale activates a shift in the nervous system that works against the same threat priority state cortisol creates. It's not a trick. Physiological level and it's available in the same 30 seconds where the five shoes out. If a leader has practiced using it before the high stakes moment, not during it. That's the part people skip. Nobody tries a new tool for the first time in the world room. The leaders who use this well have run it enough times in low stakes moment that's already automatic by the time high stakes once arrive. That's rehearsal. The same as knowing your number code, except this rehearsal is for state, not content. Noticing is trainable too. Most leaders don't catch the early signals because they are never being taught what to look for. It's really dramatic. It's the extra half second before a word arrives. Or reaching for a familiar phrase instead of the specific one the moment actually possible. Once a leader knows those are the tells, not something to hide from, but a signal that the recovery window is open right now, the whole pattern becomes something to catch instead of something to survive. Let me give you the version of this that works because it's just as concrete as the problem. A hospital administrator I worked with started using this before every executive committee meeting where she knew a hard number was coming. Now during the meeting, before, in the elevator, 30 seconds, every single time, whether she felt like needed it or not. Six weeks in, she told me the strangest part wasn't the fog disappeared. It hadn't. It was that when it showed up now. It lasted 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes. She has built the recovery levers so consistently in low stakes moment where she was not in survival mode that her body reached for it automatically the first time a real spike happened in a real meeting. Notice shift. Anchor. Remember the three steps. That's the actual target, not eliminating the spike, but shrinking the recovery window from minutes to seconds through repetition. The same way any other skill gets built. The mechanism doesn't care whether you are rehearsing a presentation or rehearsing a physiological reset. Repetition is repetition. The only question is whether we have chosen what gets rehearsed or whether you're leaving it to whatever happens by accident under pressure. This works outside the boardroom too. I have had leaders use the same 30-second reset before a difficult performance conversation, before walking into a room to deliver a layoff decision, even before opening an inbox, they held bad news. The context changes. The mechanism they are working with does not, anywhere the brain needs a moment of threatening enough to spike cortisol, the same recovery level applies. And the same rule holds practiced in advance in the low stakes version, and it will not be there when the high stakes version arrives. In a very short way, you take two inhales from your nose, like and you exhale from your mouth totally. Why you do two? So the intake will actually open up the little cells or anules on into the lung so it can take more air, so you can exhale more of it. Try it two or three times. This is your 30 seconds. This is as simple as that. There is a single, there is a second piece, and in surprises most of the executives I work with, the goal was never to eliminate the stress response. A leader with zero activation in a high stakes moment isn't calm. They're checked out. And a rule can tell the difference immediately. The goal is a fast return to this line, not a flat line. Steadiness is not the absence of a spike, it's the speed of the recovery after one. Steady before strategy. I have watched this shift happen in real time with leaders who commit to practicing it. It doesn't take months, it takes noticing. Notice shift anchor. Early and often, and one small physical level used consistently until it stops requiring conscious effort. The fog doesn't disappear from the word. Stress does not disappear from the job. What changes is how long the fog lasts when it shows up. And that gap between a 30-second dip and a stacked day-long haze is often the entire difference between an either when he covers in the room and one whose team watches them lose the threat in front of the woman. Now, I can hear some of you already. You might be thinking, this sounds soft. I don't have time to manage my nervous system. I have PL to run. Here is the thing: you are already managing it. Every leader is. The only question is whether you're managing it on purpose with a fast practice way to baseline or by accident, by pushing through and hoping the fog clears before anyone notices. Pushing through doesn't make the cortisol draft faster. It just delays when you deal with it, usually until it's so compounded across the three more meetings and you're making real decisions from a state that's worked against you for six hours straight. The PL doesn't care why a decision was made from a fog state instead of a clear one. It only sees the decision. So the choice isn't between managing your state and managing your business. It's between managing your state on purpose in five minutes you control or managing it by accident in the middle of the meeting when you can at least afford it. There is a second version of this pushback, I hear it just as often. I have made it so far without worrying about my cortisol levels. True. That's true. And worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. But this far and the next five years are different questions. The behaviors that got a leader promoted, pushing through, absorbing stress without visible cracks, AI that wasn't here two years ago, are frequently the exact behaviors that erod the mechanism protecting clear thinking under pressure. What worked to get you in the room is not automatically what keeps you sharp once you are in it. If any part of this landed, it is where I headpoint you. Tomorrow, Thursday, July 30th at 11 a.m. Pacific, I'm running a free live session called the Pressure Room. It's 45 minutes on Zoom, and it's the one place I teach a full model live instead of just naming it in a podcast. Tomorrow's model is called Thermostat versus Thermometer. And it's built for exactly this: the difference between a leader who reacts to the temperature in the room and a leader who sits in it. We will go through the model in full and I will run the whole one protocol live with everyone in the room. So you leave with something you can use in your very next high stakes point. Not just something you heard about. You will leave with the model's name, the two-word handle, and the live protocol in your own body, not just Windows. It's free, it's recorded if you can make it live, but the live protocol is the part that actually transfers. So I had rather have you in the room if your schedule allows. And I'm inviting only and I'm accepting only like 10 people. So sign up. Register in the link below. And if none of this lands for you today, that's fine too. Come back next week. I'll be here. Leadership does not fail. Nervous system do. Steady before strategy. Learn with me the neuroscience of pressure. Till we meet again. Show me some love, share, like, comment, subscribe to our podcast. You can email me at sohar at soharconsulting.com. I'd love to see you on the Zoom tomorrow for the pressure, uh, the rule pressure or the pressure rule. And I'm gonna have it every last Thursday of every week live on Zoom. You can register if you can make it live. I can send you the recording. Till we meet on Friday, the short Forbes article like episode. Peace out.