Cognitive tasks become more difficult and prone to breakdown under conditions of stress or high autonomic arousal, especially when novel.

“if I give you cognitive tasks and I just ramp up your level of autonomic arousal and we do this in my lab are there any number of different ways to do this you can function up to a point but it's mainly dependent on how well you have performed that thing in the past I give you something novel I switch the contingency I give you kind of a more advanced Stroop type task everybody Cliffs I don't care if you're a Seal Team Six guy I don't care if you run three countries I don't care if you've parented 12 kids on your own your rule sets are constrained and so I throw something novel at you under conditions of even mild stress and you break down”