Under stress, your brain either defaults to good habits or bad habits that you’ve developed-you may not even realize you have the bad habits. Under stress, the limbic system in the brain can go haywire and default to a feeling brain instead of a thinking brain. If you’ve ever been around kids, you may have seen this in action. When your kids are calm, you explain to them that it’s not okay to hit when someone takes their toy and they need to use their words instead. They are calm and they understand.