The stress law everyone quotes was a 1908 mouse study cited ten times in fifty years
The inverted-U curve linking pressure and performance has a shakier origin than the productivity industry lets on.
Search "pressure and performance" and you'll run into the same bell-shaped curve almost everywhere: too little stress and you're sluggish, too much and you collapse, a sweet spot in the middle where you do your best work. It gets cited as the Yerkes-Dodson law, and it sounds like settled science.
The actual 1908 paper measured something quite different from a stressed-out professional: how quickly Japanese dancing mice learned to avoid a dimly versus brightly lit compartment when given electric shocks of varying strength. Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson found that mice learned an easy discrimination fastest under strong shocks, but learned a hard discrimination fastest under milder ones — a nuanced, task-dependent finding about rodents in a box. For the next fifty years, the paper was cited only about ten times. It took later psychologists rebranding it as a general "law" of arousal and performance in humans before it became the ubiquitous curve people now draw on whiteboards.
Subsequent research has repeatedly found the human version to be real in outline but far messier in practice than the tidy curve suggests: the shape depends heavily on how hard and how familiar the task is, and the mechanism connecting stress hormones to cognitive performance is still debated.
Which doesn't mean deadlines are useless. It means the specific, confident diagram of your optimal stress zone is standing on a much smaller and stranger foundation than the slide deck implies — a handful of frightened mice, extrapolated a very long way.