How Stress Kills Motivation

Erman Misirlisoy, PhD
4 min readNov 15, 2021
Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash

Everyone knows that stress is harmful, but there’s serious scientific debate around exactly how it affects cognitive ability. Some argue it directly damages your ability to control your actions, others argue it has no impact, and still others argue that it damages particular types of cognitive control but not others. The data tell a confusing story to say the least.

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Erman Misirlisoy, PhD

Research Leader (Ex-Instagram / Chief Scientist at multiple startups). Author of the User Insight Newsletter: https://userinsight.substack.com/