Coping Under Pressure and "Choking"-Research and Solutions
Ray Williams
9-Time Published Author / Retired Executive Coach / Helping Others Live Better Lives
You're gearing up for a crucial meeting, and the pressure is intense. If things are tough now, how will you handle it when it's showtime? Will you rise to the occasion or falter?
Psychologists have extensively studied how to manage pressure, both chronic (like ongoing high demands at work) and acute (such as an important meeting, a crucial presentation, or a sports event).
The Stress Mindset
A critical concept related to handling pressure is your "stress mindset." If you believe stressful situations can sharpen your focus, boost your motivation, and provide learning opportunities, you have a "positive" stress mindset. Conversely, viewing stress as harmful and negative constitutes a "negative" stress mindset, which is detrimental.
A 2017 study by Anne Casper found that people with a positive stress mindset develop coping strategies, enhance their performance, and end their day feeling more energized when facing a challenging day. On the other hand, those with a negative stress mindset experience the opposite effects.
Alia Crum from Stanford University is a prominent advocate for the positive stress mindset. Her research shows that adults and adolescents benefit from this mindset. Adolescents who view stress as beneficial are less likely to feel overwhelmed by difficult events. "These findings suggest that changing how adolescents think about stress can help protect them from impulsive reactions to adversity," the researchers concluded.
If you have a negative stress mindset, there are ways to change it. In another study, Crum's team found that adults who watched a video highlighting the "enhancing" nature of stress felt more positive and showed greater cognitive flexibility in a stressful situation than those who watched a video portraying stress as harmful.
Practical Tips for Managing Pressure
If you're feeling anxious due to increased pressure at work or a particularly challenging upcoming event, one short-term solution might be to watch a horror movie. According to a US study by Margee Kerr, deliberately scaring ourselves can calm the brain and recalibrate our emotions. Participants who were more stressed or tired beforehand showed the greatest emotional benefits afterwards.
Additionally, research from Heidi Fritz suggests that maintaining a cheerful outlook is associated with less stress over time, while self-defeating humor is linked to more distress. Although the evidence is not strong, it supports the idea that building yourself up rather than putting yourself down can help in high-pressure situations. Sonia Kang at the University of Toronto found that MBA students who wrote about their most important negotiating skills before a negotiation performed better than those who didn't, highlighting the benefits of self-affirmation.
Time Pressure and Decision-Making
According to a recent paper in Nature Communications, when under time pressure, people tend to act more like themselves Researchers Fandong Chen and Ian Krajbich found that selfish individuals acted more selfishly, while pro-social individuals behaved more altruistically under time constraints. Time pressure can also improve decision-making, as seen in a simulation of a disaster event managed by Liverpool's Centre for Critical and Major Incident Psychology. It forces people, especially experts, to make tough decisions effectively.
Support Systems
In high-pressure situations, support from friends or partners can be beneficial. Research by Emily Hooker and colleagues found that receiving text messages from a partner can make individuals feel more supported. Interestingly, mundane texts were more effective at reducing stress than explicitly supportive ones. Visualizing a partner can also moderate the body's physiological response to stress, as shown by research at the University of Arizona led by Kyle Bourassa.
Embracing a Positive Mindset
Interestingly, not thinking about negative consequences is crucial. Research led by Vikram Chib found that reimagining a high-stakes situation as one where you've already succeeded can reduce the risk of choking. Participants who played a game imagining they already had the prize money and were trying to keep it performed better and experienced less stress.
“Choking” Under Pressure and What to Do About It
We’ve all heard of or experienced the mental or physical “brain freeze” that’s often described as “choking” under pressure.
Why did Michelle Kwan, favored to win the gold medal in the 2002 Olympics, fall on a triple jump, leaving the gold to Sarah Hughes? Why did Greg Norman lose his six stroke lead and the Masters to Nick Faldo in 1996? Why do actors, singers, musicians, and public speakers freeze or “choke” when asked to perform, even if experienced? While this is frequently described as a result of anxiety or nervousness, new research points to a type of “log jam” in the brain.
University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock’s research on this issue, published in her book, Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To, describes how a star athlete can collapse in a competition or a student fail a critical test, or a professional botch a presentation. “Choking is suboptimal performance, not just poor performance. It’s a performance that is inferior to what you can and have done in the past and occurs when you feel pressure to get everything right,” argues Beilock.
In an article in Scientific American, Dr. Ellen Hendriksen says “it’s not just objectively pressure-filled situations, it’s anytime you psych yourself out. For instance, a recent study found that people who are lonely tend to choke under self-imposed social pressure. When we feel desperate to connect, we end up spilling our drink or tripping over our feet, not in an adorable Jennifer Lawrence way.
A study which examined the film footage of 400 penalty kicks in professional soccer games noticed that players who took less than a second to place the ball down scored only 58% of the time while those players who did not rush and took longer than a second scored 80% of the time.
Smarter people also choke more. Specifically, Beilock has found that people with greater working memory (the amount of stuff you can actively hold in your mind) are more prone to choking when doing math problems in a high-pressure situation.
One reason for that? These people are used to being able to get by with their big working memories to solve these problems. But when their working memory gets clogged with worry, they have to switch to using other kinds of strategies that they’re not as accustomed to. This ends up taking away some of their natural advantages.
Can Personality Traits Predict Who Chokes Under Pressure?
When there’s a lot on the line–a big presentation or a tough negotiation–some people stay calm under pressure, while others have a meltdown. In a new study, a team of psychological scientists from Texas A&M University examined whether specific personality traits can predict who thrives and who chokes when making decisions under pressure.
One explanation for why this happens is that anxiety acts as a distractor, sapping cognitive resources such as working memory away from the task at hand and ultimately harming performance.
Based on this previous work, Kaileigh Byrne, Crina Silasi-Mansat, and Darrell Worthy hypothesized that individuals with higher levels of neuroticism would experience more significant performance anxiety, leading to worse decision-making strategies under pressure.
“This theory offers a potential mechanism by which neurotic individuals may fail when they most need to succeed,” Byrne and colleagues explain. To test this theory, they conducted two experiments.
In the first experiment, 127 college students (76 female, 51 male) completed a 44-item Big Five personality assessment, measuring the five major personality traits of openness to change, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Each student was randomly assigned to either a low-pressure or high-pressure condition and then asked to complete a decision-making task.
For the decision-making task, participants were instructed to select from one of two decks displayed on a computer screen to gain points. An “increase” deck gave a smaller immediate number of points on each trial but caused delayed points to pile up quickly throughout the game. In contrast, the “decrease” deck always gave a larger immediate reward but a much smaller number of delayed points. Ultimately, the increase option was always the best choice, leading to the highest payout. However, participants had to rely on their working memories to follow this trend.
To spur a sense of social pressure, the researchers told participants in the high-pressure group that if they reached 16,000 points on the task, both they and a (fictitious) partner would earn a small cash bonus; if they failed to reach this goal, neither partner would receive the bonus. They were also told that their partner had already achieved the goal, so winning the bonus depended solely on their performance.
As anticipated, people performed worse overall when they were under pressure. Under the low-pressure condition, no personality traits were linked to performance. Once the pressure was on, the results showed that higher levels of neuroticism were associated with lower performance.
According to the research team, these results suggest that social pressure may impair performance for people with higher levels of neuroticism compared to those with lower levels of neuroticism, which suggests that these high-neuroticism individuals “are more susceptible to pressure and, specifically, to making sub-optimal decisions while under pressure.”
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In a second experiment, the researchers repeated the same task but added another form of pressure: deadlines. The setup was identical to that in the first experiment; only this time, participants were told that if they failed to complete the experiment on time, neither they nor their partner would receive a bonus.
Again, the results showed that individuals higher in neuroticism are likelier to make poor decisions, favoring the more impulsive short-term benefits over smarter long-term ones. Consequently, neurotic individuals may benefit from finding ways to reduce stress and anxiety during high-pressure decisions.
“These results support distraction theory, whereby pressure taxes highly neurotic individuals’ cognitive resources, leading to sub-optimal performance,” the researchers concluded.
Even though not choking involves not thinking, clearing your mind often, paradoxically, involves a deliberate routine. Before a pitch, pitchers may check the bases, regardless of whether any players are on them. Basketball players may dribble a certain way or throw the ball up before taking a free throw.
When you rush into any of these scenarios, you hamper your body’s ability to go into auto-pilot and thus increase your chances of choking.
It turns out that being too attached to winning can be an explanation, according to some new research from neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins University. Whether you choke under pressure might have more to do with your motivation: specifically, to what extent you are driven by a desire to win or by a desire to avoid losing. If you’re very loss-averse — meaning that you hate losing more than you love winning — your chances of choking will be lower. But for those who value the rush of winning over the pain of losing, the likelihood of choking is often higher.
The Johns Hopkins study found that those who hated losing the most choked when told they stood to win the most, while those who cared more about winning choked when they stood to lose something significant. In other words, it’s all about how you frame the incentive: as a loss or as a gain.
“We can measure someone’s loss aversion and then frame the task in a way that might help them avoid choking under pressure,” Vikram Chib, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said.
The researchers explain this phenomenon by looking at the ventral striatum, a brain region that may connect incentive-driven motivation and the execution of physical performance. The activity of this brain region suggests that an individual’s attachment to winning is key to how they perform under pressure.
“We found that the way we framed an incentive — as a potential gain or loss — profoundly affected participants’ behavior as they performed the skilled task,” Chib said. “But the effect was different for those with high versus low aversion to loss.”
High loss aversion helped participants when they faced increasing losses — they didn’t choke, even when the loss was significant. The opposite happened to those with low loss aversion: their performance improved by increasing prospective gains and losses, but they choked when threatened with a significant loss.
While all this was happening, MRI images were being taken of the participants’ brains, focusing on the ventral striatum, that small area of the brain associated with reward processing and movement control. They saw that when both loss and gain incentives were presented, ventral striatum activity increased with the magnitude of the stakes.
More loss-averse participants had lower striatal activity (and thus performed worse) when playing for large potential wins. In contrast, more winning-attached participants had less striatal activity (and worse performance) when attempting to avoid losing.
“We have known from previous studies that the ventral striatum is responsible for representing information about incentives and motor performance, but this study shows how it mediates the relationship between incentives and performance,” Chib explained: “We show that in the situations when people choke under pressure, there is a break down in the connectivity between ventral striatum and the motor cortex (they are responsible for coordinating our movements). This breakdown in communication between these areas could be causing individuals to choke under pressure.”
So, how can we apply this information to improve our performance? One way would be to use cognitive strategies to reframe high-stakes situations to help minimize your chances of poor performance. So, if you play to win, try to avoid framing the situation more about what you could stand to lose. “From this study, it seems that knowing an individual’s loss aversion could be used to determine the best way to frame incentives in the workplace,” Chib added.
What to Do About Choking
By studying how the brain works when we do our best and when we choke, Beilock has formulated practical ideas about overcoming performance lapses at critical moments. Overthinking about what you are doing because you are worried about losing a competition or failing, in general, can lead to overanalyzing the situation. This paralysis by analysis occurs when people try to control every aspect of what they are doing to guarantee success. However, this increased attempt at control can backfire, disrupting what was once a fluid or flawless performance.
“My research team and I have found that highly skilled golfers are more likely to hole a simple 3-foot putt when we give them the tools to stop analyzing their shot, to stop thinking,” Beilock said. “Highly practiced putts run better when you don’t try to control every aspect of performance.” Even a simple trick of singing helps prevent portions of the brain that might interfere with performance from taking over, Beilock’s research shows.
The brain can also work to sabotage performance. Pressure-filled situations can deplete a part of the brain’s processing power known as working memory, which is critical to many everyday activities. Based on her research, Beilock contends that working memory helps people perform at their best in physical, intellectual, and applied situations, including business.
This working memory is located in the prefrontal cortex, which is a limited temporary storage for information needed to complete immediate tasks. Very talented and able people have larger working memories, but the problem arises here. When anxiety or fear creeps in, the working memory becomes overtaxed, and you lose the brain power to succeed.
Choking can also result from what is termed “stereotype threat,” when otherwise talented people don’t perform up to their abilities because they are worried about confirming popular cultural myths. Examples are that boys and girls naturally perform differently in math or that a person’s race determines his or her test performance. Another example is when a racial group or gender they belong to is widely believed to be inferior at tasks. These worries deplete the working memory necessary for success. The perceptions take hold early in schooling and can be reinforced or abolished by powerful role models.
In one study, researchers gave standardized tests to black and white students before and after President Obama was elected. Black test takers performed worse than white test takers before the election. Immediately after Obama’s election, blacks’ performance improved so much that their scores were nearly equal to whites. When black students can overcome the worries brought on by stereotypes because they see someone like President Obama who directly counters myths about racial variation in intelligence, their performance improves.
Beilock and her colleagues have also shown that when first-grade girls believe boys are better than girls at math, they perform more poorly on math tests. One big source of this belief? The girls’ female teachers. It turns out that elementary school teachers are often highly anxious about their own math abilities, and this anxiety is modelled from teacher to student. When the teachers are positive role models in math, their male and female students perform equally well.
Even when a student is not a member of a stereotyped group, tests can be challenging for the brightest people, who can clutch if anxiety taps out their mental resources. Meditation, widely researched for its benefits, can help significantly in these circumstances. In tests in her lab, Beilock and her research team gave people with no meditation experience 10 minutes of meditation training before they took a high-stakes test. Students with meditation preparation scored 87, or B+, versus the 82 or B- score of those without meditation training. This difference in performance occurred even though all students were of equal ability.
Stress can lead to choking and undermine performance in the world of business. Competition for sales, giving high-stakes presentations, or even meeting your boss in the elevator are occasions when choking can squander opportunities.
Paying too much attention to well-learned skill execution may be detrimental to performance. As shown in these experiments, understanding the cognitive mechanisms leading to poor performance under pressure can lead to prevention, says Beilock, in “real-world tasks in which serious consequences depend on good or poor performance in relatively public or consequential circumstances.”
For example, many aspects of public speaking may ordinarily be automatic. However, lawyers giving a closing argument to a jury may feel pressure to perform and, as a result, overthink what they are doing –and stutter or lose their train of thought. Training under conditions that have individuals attend to their performance, or, conversely, purposely taking one’s mind off well-learned skill performance under pressure. For example, repeating a keyword, singing a song, seeing a favourite image, or recalling a pleasurable event can help prevent choking.
Research on mastering skills or tasks shows that practice—and a lot of it—is necessary. But practicing under stress—even a moderate amount—helps a person feel comfortable when they find themselves standing in the line of fire, Beilock said. The experience of having dealt with stress makes those situations seem familiar and not so daunting. The goal is to close the gap between practice and performance.
“Think about the journey, not the outcome,” Beilock advised. “Remind yourself that you have the background to succeed and that you are in control of the situation. This can be the confidence boost you need to ace your pitch or to succeed in other ways when facing life’s challenges.”
Henriksen recommends “Play like you don’t care. I often tell athletes to separate the process from the outcome. The more we fixate on the outcome, whether or not a play was executed properly, and whether the other team is ahead, the more likely we are to choke up. Athletes need to play as if they don’t care about the outcome while giving the game their all.”
Strategies to Help You Deal with Choking