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
点击展开
点击探索完整互动思维导图
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.
