That it hijacks your rational mind and throws you into fight-or-flight

at the sound of an email notification. This is nonsense—the kind of

nonsense that makes every McKinsey consultant sound like a

neuroscientist and every neuroscientist cringe. The amygdala is an

emotional intensity detector, not an emotional dictator. And focusing on

it is distracting you from what actually matters: how you respond to the

world.

Further reading

Betterment article that inspired this

Good (Lecture 1) — the stress lecture that set this up

the Yerkes-Dodson Law

fight-or-flight isn’t what you think

Neuroscience is Just a Fancy Way of Saying “Calm Down” — the next

lecture in this thread

make meaning in the brain

References

Atlantic article — the management professor’s piece on stress and

the amygdala

Intelligence (1995)

hijack (Wikipedia) — note the lack of academic citations

(Wikipedia) — particularly the section on emotional learning

(2010): Emotion and cognition (PDF) — reappraisal evidence, pg

44

Tye (2015): From circuits to behaviour in the amygdala — the

complexity of amygdala function

(2015): “The unsolved problems of neuroscience” — on the amygdala

and emotional significance