golitsyn_nosenko

Beautifully put. As a fellow psych it’s really nice to read your answers in this AMA.

I often love drawing upon the Yerkes Dodson “law” from sport psych to help clients grasp that our in built biological response is “just add stress and arousal to increase performance”. When it comes to simple, instinctive, survival-oriented, well-rehearsed or “bang-it-out tasks”, stress and arousal help us speed up and get it done quick and aggressively.

But when we’re doing something novel or complex requiring greater prefrontal cortical input (empathy, emotional regulation, foresight, thinking through and organising thoughts, decision making, etc), anything beyond moderate stress and arousal actually has the opposite impact on performance.

But guess which function we’re built for by default? Survival tends to win out and the amygdala responds with its “just add arousal” solution to dealing with threat. Great for survival, not great for public speaking!

Love your shallow end analogy and focus on self compassion.

Great question. It's been measured different ways, with stress and arousal often used interchangeably, and physiological, emotional and psychological "arousal", Glucocorticoids have been proposed as a measure, pre-competitive stress measures, 0-10 stress measures, etc. You can think of it as mental activation, adrenaline levels, or how keyed up you are if you want to use laymen's terms. At very low levels of arousal we're likely to be sleepy, under-engaged, inattentive or we just don't care. Give us a deadline, a cup of coffee, some sense of urgency or importance however and we start to perform better until about 5 out of 10 arousal or stress level. Then we start to slide back down.

In simple terms, caring too much or too little tends to impair our performance, but a sense of safe challenge, pushing our comfort zone out a little toward the edge of our window of tolerance - we tend to perform better - not throwing us in the deep end beyond where we feel we can cope, not just staying in the shallow end where we're not experiencing any stress at all.

Thanks for your incredible catalogue, your solo on No More No More is one of the most underrated of all time. My question is about the recognition of your replacement Jimmy Crespo - while the guy was with the band for the best part of 5 years, he tends to be airbrushed out of the band's history and wasn't inducted into the rock hall of fame with the band. Given your incredible success, have you ever thought of sharing some recognition of his efforts by inviting him onstage to play alongside you? Would be amazing for fans to see (just as Pat Smear rejoining Foo Fighters was a show of class by Dave Grohl).

Might have been making a subtle point a few people seemed to have missed. Check his quals.