Almost everyone has experienced common symptoms of stress, such as raised heart rate, excessive sweating, or dry mouth. But not everyone appreciates that these are part of the body's "fight, flight, freeze, or fawn" response - a system that has evolved to mazimize our bodies' capacity to resond to actual physical danger. We now know that, in addition to these bodily changes, stress also associates with other, more subtle, mental changes. It influences for example how we decide what to pay attention to in our environment.
Every day we get besieged with information of our environment and we are not able to process and respond to all information at once. Attention is one of the most important cognitive functions to deal with this problem. Selecting the most conspicuous or relevant information helps us to achieve our current behavioral goals. According to a 2014 study, stress makes it harder to keep our attention on a particular goal. Subjects who were placed under stress experience increased effort to solve a task and increased errors in doing that task.
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