August 25, 2026
Yesterday I wasted most of the day, panicked at 6pm, and had a finished proposal on the table ninety minutes later. That is not just procrastination, that is ancient biology doing exactly what it was built to do.
You have probably heard of hysterical strength. Stories of the mother who lifts a car off her trapped child, the soldier who carries a wounded colleague across ground that should have been impossible, the ordinary person who does something in a moment of crisis that they could never replicate in a gym or a training session. These stories get filed away as extraordinary, as anomalies, as things that happen to other people in extreme circumstances, and most of us move on without ever asking the more useful question, which is not whether it is real, but whether it is available to us to use every day.
My research suggests it is, and most of us are already using it without knowing what it is.
Yesterday I had a communications training proposal I needed to write and submit for a session I am delivering tomorrow. I knew it needed doing, I had the whole day available, and I spent most of it doing everything except what mattered. I spent time on LinkedIn doing outreach, cleared my emails, even did a mastermind with a fellow professional speaker. At 6pm the reality hit me, with a real hay baler, and for a moment the thought that followed was a familiar one: there is absolutely no chance of getting this done; I’ve lost my chance.
Sitting at the keyboard, realising it was lost, something shifted. Within ninety minutes the proposal was finished, structured, thought through and ready. Not a rough draft but done. The kind of focused, clear, professional work that the entire eight hours before had somehow disappeared and failed to produce anything, but the all at once focus delivered what I needed in the moment because of the pressure became real enough for it to matter.
I have covered the science behind this in The Caveman Principles, but the short version is this. What happened at 6pm was not a miracle of willpower or a sudden improvement in my abilities. It was fifty thousand years of survival biology doing exactly what it was designed to do.
The fight or flight response exists because the caveman needed to survive moments of genuine crisis: a predator, a rival tribe, a threat that required an immediate physical response with no thinking time. When that threat arrives, the brain does something remarkable: it stops doing everything that is not relevant to survival and redirects every available resource toward the single task in front of it. Adrenaline floods the system, cortisol sharpens the senses, and the cognitive noise (the distraction, the doubt, the wandering thoughts) gets cleared almost entirely, because in a genuine crisis the brain cannot afford the luxury of being unfocused.
This is hysterical strength in its physical form, the reason an ordinary person can lift a car in a moment of crisis that they could not move a millimetre under normal conditions. The brain removes every limiter and redirects every resource to the one thing that matters right now.
But the same mechanism fires for cognitive threats as well as physical ones, and this is the part that almost nobody talks about because a deadline that has just become real, a presentation that is suddenly tomorrow, a proposal that absolutely must be finished tonight, registers in the caveman brain as a threat in exactly the same way a predator does (we all have to eat, it just different on how we get the food). The adrenaline arrives, the noise clears, and the focus that has been unavailable all day becomes suddenly and completely present, because the brain has decided that right now this is what determines survival.
That is not procrastination followed by a lucky burst of productivity. That is an ancient and extraordinarily powerful cognitive tool that most of us stumble into by accident rather than ever learning to use intentionally.
The question worth asking, and the one I find myself thinking about ahead of tomorrow’s training session, is whether it is possible to access that state without waiting for the panic to arrive naturally.
The honest answer is that the full force of the response requires a genuine threat, which is why nothing quite replicates the clarity of a real deadline in the way that an artificial one does. The caveman brain is not easily fooled by a manufactured emergency when it knows, somewhere beneath the surface, that the consequences are not real.
But some things move the process along, narrowing it to a single task, removing everything else from sight, setting a time constraint short enough to create genuine pressure, and raising the perceived stakes by attaching a real consequence to the outcome. These are not tricks so much as deliberate attempts to give the caveman brain the signal, the one that it needs to clear the noise and engage fully, and done enough times, they become a skill rather than an accident.
For those preparing for an exam, or trying to write something worth reading, or attempting to produce a piece of work that requires genuine clarity of thought, the principle is the same. The brain at its sharpest is not the brain that is comfortable. It is the brain that believes something is at stake and has to decide to act accordingly.
The caveman did not save his best performance for a quiet Tuesday morning with a good cup of tea and a biscuit, while he thinks about a newsletter. No, he saved it, involuntarily and completely, for the moment when it mattered the most. The biology has not changed. What has changed is that very few of us ever learn to work with it deliberately.
I am going into tomorrow’s communications training with a proposal that wouldn’t exist without this mechanism firing at exactly the right moment, which feels like an appropriate way to spend a day talking about how human beings communicate under pressure.
If you want to explore this further, The Caveman Principles covers the science and the application in considerably more depth, and if you want to bring this conversation into your organisation, I would love to talk to you about it.
Book me as your next keynote speaker: www.carljones.org
Caveman Thought
The caveman did not find his greatest strength in moments of comfort and calm. He found it in the moment the threat became real — and so do you, whether you realise it or not.
Parting Question
Think about the last time you produced something remarkable under pressure, the piece of work that arrived in an hour when hours of gentle effort had produced nothing. What would it look like if you could access that state of intention rather than waiting for the panic to bring it to you?
As always, be the tribal member you are meant to be. It makes for a much easier and simpler life.
Your friend,
Carl – The Caveman.
P.S. When you are ready, here are a few things that might help you;
- You can book me to attend your next event as a Keynote Speaker.
- Want to take a FREE personality test? Check out The Caveman Principles Tribal Sorter.
- Check out my theories – The Caveman Principles and The SLAP Technique
- Grab a copy of my book The Caveman Principles, directly from my printing agent.
- You might want to book yourself onto one of my eLearning courses to help you master a new skill.
- Or, if you have time and want to schedule a Caveman chat (with virtual coffee) for a discovery call, do it here.