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Your body has two stress responses
Threat and challenge
In the threat response, the heart pumps faster but the blood vessels don't dilate, so blood has a hard time reaching the limbs and the brain. In the challenge response, which shows up when a person believes they can take on the task, the blood vessels dilate, more blood flows out to the periphery, and the body produces anabolic hormones. The body likely makes less cortisol and relatively more testosterone in that state, and it returns to baseline quickly once the stressor is dealt with. The same person can have either response.
Jeremy Jamieson, a psychologist at the University of Rochester, noticed it as a college football player. Teammates who were really amped up before a game treated the stress response as support for their performance.
The math test study
He then tested whether people can be taught to get there. More than 300 community college students learned before a big math test that stress isn't the enemy: sweaty hands and a racing heart mean the body is pumping blood where it's needed, so the feeling is fuel. A control group was told to ignore the stress. Across a couple of studies with different groups of students, the students taught to lean into the stress were about 15 percent more likely to pass the class, fewer of them dropped the course, and their bodies made relatively more testosterone and less cortisol.
Why does challenge widen blood vessels?
Psychologists Jim Blascovich and Joe Tomaka built a model of challenge and threat in the 1990s, tying the two states to how a person weighs a task's demands against their resources. When resources seem to match the demands, the heart pumps more blood and the resistance in the blood vessels falls. When demands seem to outweigh resources, the heart rate rises while vascular resistance stays flat or climbs. Researchers track this pattern with measures of cardiac output and vascular resistance taken during tasks.
Why can high stress hormones hurt thinking?
The prefrontal cortex, which handles working memory and planning, is especially sensitive to the chemicals released in stress. Neuroscientist Amy Arnsten at Yale has reported that high levels of stress chemicals impair prefrontal circuits, while moderate levels can support them. That helps explain why a person can blank on facts they know well in the middle of an exam. Working memory is the system that holds numbers and steps in mind during a math problem.
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