Too Many Rules for One Little Mouse by Mrs. D.

It’s the final play of the season, winner take all, and you’re up to bat. Intense stress can lead to a fight, flight, or freeze response.

And a moderate surge of stress is boosting your performance. It’s the rush you get before the black belt test you’ve been working toward for so long. It’s that little extra push you need when a hard deadline looms and you’re up for a promotion. You feel a sense of clarity and alertness. It’s manageable, motivational, and performance enhancing. Optimal arousalĪ moderate level of stress goes a long way. There’s no reason to put in the effort to navigate the maze. Think about mice in a maze with no electric shocks and no cheese at the end. Your work feels meaningless, so you do the bare minimum. You’re not being challenged and have no incentive to go above and beyond. There’s no stress, but there’s also no motivation. Having no stress at all isn’t necessarily a good thing in terms of performance.įor example, when your job is all about routine and nothing ever changes, boredom sets in. A simpler task requires a higher amount of arousal, while a more challenging task requires a lower level of arousal. So, what’s the optimal amount of arousal? That depends on the task. You’re too stressed and anxious to do your best. As arousal surpasses that point, your performance begins to deteriorate. It gives you sufficient motivation.īut that works only up to a certain point, known as the optimal level. Yerkes and Dodson hypothesized that as arousal increases, the ability to form a habit or perform a task well also increases. Using mild electric shocks, they were able to teach the mice to learn a task, which they called a “habit,” more quickly.īut as the shocks got stronger, the mice took longer to learn the task, maybe because they were more focused on avoiding the shock than on completing the task. Yerkes and Dodson formed their theory while performing experiments on mice. In discussing the Yerkes-Dodson law, the word “arousal” relates to stress and motivation.

Too Many Rules for One Little Mouse by Mrs. D.