Cortisol, the body's natural stress and survival hormone, can significantly impair cognitive functions like memory, confidence, and learning when chronically elevated due to daily life stressors, particularly within educational and work environments.
Mind Map
Click to expand
Click to explore the full interactive mind map • Zoom, pan, and navigate
Standing here, I can feel my heart
racing and my palms sweating.
This feeling isn't just stage fright.
It's biology.
A single hormone in my body is deciding
whether I can stand here with courage or
freeze with fear.
That hormone is called cortisol. It's
also known as the fear hormone or the
stress hormone.
It's it regulates glucose metabolism and
is released in response to stress. In
short, it's your built-in survival tool.
And if a tiger walked in here right now,
cortisol would save your life.
But if you're using it for daily life,
such as school and work, then there's a
problem. Fear may work in the short
term, but cortisol was never supposed to
For me, this story starts with math. I
used to be very good at it but over time
This wasn't because of the numbers. It
wasn't because of because they got
harder. It was because of the fear that
was attached to them. The fear of
failure. The fear of disapproval. the
fear that was stitched into me the way
And it wasn't all in my head the way I
thought it was.
This feeling, this fear was biological.
Cortisol doesn't just make you feel
stressed. It makes you lose your
confidence, your memory, motivation, and
even your willingness to try in the
But something changed with me
when I after my 11th grade exams, my
aunt invited me to stay with her as part
of my summer holidays. And this was the
first time I went there without my
parents or even my sister.
To me, she is an idol and I
she's a sec she's like a second mother
for me. And in at her space in her
space, I felt really happy and I finally
loosened up. And
when I finally came back from that
break, I realized I was a different
person. I realized that I was more
And looking back now, I think my
cortisol levels must have finally
tipped. Which brings me back to math.
Because shortly after that break, I came
back to give an assessment and for the
first time in a very long time, I
finally pulled myself back up and I got
This wasn't magic. It wasn't even hard
work because I know I didn't work any I
didn't work any much harder.
It was because of biology.
A calmer body gave me the ability to
learn, to focus, and to perform.
A metaanalysis in Frontiers in Psychology
Psychology
found out that cortisol levels increase
by 50 to 100% during exams.
This impairs the students emotional
regulation and their mental stability and
this causes the students performance
Cortisol is a sur isn't is a survival
hormone. It's not a learning hormone in
times of stress.
it in times of stress it sharpens your
focus but when it's the baseline way you
Now there's different doses of cortisol
that you should know about and one of
the first one is high cortisol. High cortisol
cortisol
high cortisol interferes with your
memory consolidation and suppresses your
neural plasticity. Now, this complicated
word means that it alters your brain's
ability to adapt, grow, and form new
connections in your brain. And this can
lead to burnout twice as faster as
usual. The second type of type of
cortisol um is short-term cortisol. And
this one happens, I'm sure this this one
happens much more often because um
you'll feel it when you're studying for
an exam and you're taking in all the
information and when you to give the
exam, you suddenly blank. There's
nothing in your brain. That's the work
of short-term cortisol. Now, there's
ways to fix both. While high cortisol
levels are harder to fix in your control
because for me, I had to take a
vacation. your parents can handle that.
But short-term cortisol is in your
control. Although it does need some dedication
dedication
to avoid the feeling in exams,
you need to revise. I know this is very
uh cliche, but you need to revise days
before consistently to
to
to eliminate the negative impacts um
um
of short-term cortisol.
Finally, the third and the boss is
chronic cortisol. The word chronic
A psychonuroendocrinology
study showed that chronic cortisol
um when accumulated
leads to allostatic
load in your body. This means that
there's a wear and tear of stress going
on in your body. And um a a neuroscience
article from 2018 also states that
chronic cortisol can lead to a reduction
in the size of the hippo hippocampus by 14%.
14%.
Now this word hypocampus is really funny
and it's also very important. Um it is
the part of your brain that is connected
to memory and learning. And once these
two things happen, once uh your hypoc
campus is small and and
um you have alostatic load, you will
have problems with avoidance, burnout
Now fear is very manipulative and fear
is often used in our daily lives even if
we do not you even if we do not realize it
it
it's embedded into our systems and one
system that's impacted ed me for my
entire life maybe for like 13 years of
my life is education systems.
Now this isn't a personal attack to that
system but um education systems use
deadlines, exams and um schedules to
help to help learning. It's not against
it but sometimes the outcomes can be the opposite.
opposite.
Education systems that have realized
that there are negative impacts to
um overwhelming their students have
created counseling sessions, have
started um have
have started counseling sessions for
their students to reduce their cortisol
levels. Short short-term high cortisol
levels and maybe even chronic.
This is common with workplaces and
sports teams where they practice mental
recovery techniques as well.
Now another system that induces cortisol is
is
parenting styles. Parenting styles and
cultures that glorify struggle
struggle
I saw this I saw the I saw the impact of
cortisol levels on myself from my math
story. I my grades were declining from
six from six out of seven to five to
four and right after the break I came
back a changed person. Now I actually
didn't change. Whatever I did didn't did
change. All my habits were the same.
What changed was I put I took a step
back from the system that I was in. I
took a step back from work. I took a
step back from my usual life.
And that helped me.
Now, we can't just wake up one day and
decide that, oh, I want a change in the
system. I should go talk to some people,
some people in charge.
It's not possible. It's very
unrealistic. It's unreasonable to the
people in charge.
But we're very flexible, aren't we?
We're all flexible people here. We can
make changes in our own lives. So, we
can make changes in our own lives so
that cortisol doesn't impact us in
important times such as this and your exams.
What I do, what you what usually I
struggle with is meeting the deadlines.
And what I usually do is my is I plan my
day in the day itself.
Doing this, taking all the check boxes
of just that day, not the entire week,
just that day helps you feel motivated
because you you have just tiny bit of
task to do in that one day. And when
it's all ticked off, you feel the
motivation that, oh, I could do more. I
have time. I have the energy.
Another thing that I recommend is the
change of scenery. Just like how I did.
This is for high cortisol levels.
I went out, I came back, I was fine. I
did well. Maths predictives are pretty
good right now. And the last thing I
would recommend, and I know a lot of
people might not do this, but it's
really helpful. have a log book, a diary
of some sorts, a journal. I use this
frequently. I write down what I'm
stressed, what I'm stressed by. I write
down why I'm scared. And I write down
why it doesn't have to impact me. I
write down why it doesn't affect me. I
write down why I'm much bigger than that.
There is a fine line between fear
shaping you and fear shattering you.
understand that that line is very
important because cortisol is absolutely
Click on any text or timestamp to jump to that moment in the video
Share:
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
One-Click Copy125+ LanguagesSearch ContentJump to Timestamps
Paste YouTube URL
Enter any YouTube video link to get the full transcript
Transcript Extraction Form
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
Get Our Chrome Extension
Get transcripts instantly without leaving YouTube. Install our Chrome extension for one-click access to any video's transcript directly on the watch page.
