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Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky. Sapolsky is a Stanford neuroendocrinologist, and this book is the most comprehensive single-volume account available of the biology that underlies human behaviour under stress, threat, and high-stakes conditions. The coverage of the HPA cascade — the cortisol timeline, its prefrontal consequences, and the specific cognitive functions it impairs — is rigorous and accessible simultaneously, and the chapters on the amygdala's role in threat appraisal and the temporal relationship between subcortical and cortical processing map precisely onto the LeDoux and Arnsten mechanisms this article covers. Sapolsky's particular strength is integration: he holds the neuroscience, the endocrinology, and the behavioural research together in a single account rather than treating them as separate literatures, which means the reader finishes with an understanding of why the fear physiology in high-stakes situations produces the specific cognitive and behavioural outputs it does, rather than a collection of isolated findings. For an entrepreneur who wants to understand what is actually happening in their body and brain in the situations that matter most commercially, this book is the most complete available starting point.