Perform Under Pressure: Change the Way You Feel, Think and Act Under Pressure

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If you’re more explicit in how you acquire skills, you’re potentially more likely to break down under pressure,” observed Phil Kenyon, a leading putting coach who has worked with golf major championship winners including Rory McIlroy, Justin Rose and Henrik Stenson. “I try and encourage implicit learning, giving them a better chance of being able to handle things under pressure.” To further help you start to practise and understand some of the techniques in this Guide, you could watch the ‘Passengers on the Bus’ (2013) YouTube video by Joe Oliver and ‘The Unwelcome Party Guest’ (2011) video, also by Oliver – both are great. If you add to this an ‘Emotional Wheel’ (a Google search brings up lots of nice versions), you will find some easily printable sheets listing more than 100 emotion words to help you increase your emotional vocabulary. You can see from the graph that pressure runs along the x-axis horizontally from low to very high. Performance is along the y-axis from low to high. We’ve segmented the bell-shaped pressure performance curve into zones of various colours. These colours represent a traffic light warning system. Green is good; amber is caution; and red is bad. Of course I felt pressure,” Sörenstam, now retired, recalled. “But it was a fun pressure – I wanted to see if I could handle it, just staying true to myself and believing in myself coming down the stretch.”

Failure to manage anxiety and cope with the demands at a crucial moment can lead to a catastrophic drop in performance, known as choking. As the pressure in a match rises, so can an athlete’s anxiety. The final and most fundamental step to performing well under pressure is to know why the performance matters in the first place – this is where your values come into play. Here it’s important to make a distinction between values and goals. Your goals are your long-term aims, whereas your values apply in every waking moment. For instance, you might have a goal to become the highest goal-scorer in your soccer team, but your soccer-related values might be to always try your hardest, to always strive to improve and to be a good team-mate. When you are very clear on your values, you gain two major benefits – you can spot when they could be violated (and so likely to trigger your emotionally driven threat systems), and you can also use them as a measure for how to respond when you feel under pressure, so that you stay consistent with them. When you’re under pressure, you might feel overwhelmed by your feelings and notice aggressive, unforgiving language bouncing around your mind, such as ‘I’m furious’ or ‘I’m terrified’. It’s as if the passengers on your bus are using very emotive language as they try to get your attention. Interpreting your feelings in this way can trigger your automatic fight-or-flight response, which evolved to help you survive danger, but is highly unhelpful to performance in many situations in modern life.As every England football fan scarred by penalty shootouts could attest, failure seems to beget more failure. Every choke, real or perceived, creates more of a burden the next time the team is in the same position, making the hurdle even more overwhelming.

Beran MJ, Parrish AE (2012) Sequential responding and planning in Capuchin monkeys ( Cebus apella). Anim Cogn 15:1085–1094 We don’t want people stretched all the time, though. That would be exhausting. No-one can perform at their peak all day long. That’s why chunking tasks and interspersing breaks is a smart work strategy. An ideal zone for work is one which cycles between comfort and stretch. Anderson JR, Gallup GG Jr (2011) Which primates recognize themselves in mirrors? PLoS Biol 9:e1001024

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However Peak Performance is primarily directed at the leaders and members of small teams – perhaps platoon and below – while nodding to middle management in regard to training and employee welfare and organizational culture and ethos – subjects that will interest those at the sub-unit level and above. Baumeister RF (1984) Choking under pressure: self-consciousness and paradoxical effects of incentives on skillful performance. J Pers Soc Psychol 46:610–620 The approach to coping with pressure that I teach is all about cultivating not mental toughness but mental flexibility, also known as ‘psychological flexibility’ (drawing partly on the principles of acceptance and commitment therapy or ACT, an approach in psychotherapy that has grown out of cognitive and behavioural therapy and blends it with insights from Buddhism and other perspectives). Mental flexibility is vital for coping well with pressure because, if you want to perform brilliantly, you need the skills to handle whatever is thrown at you, especially the unexpected. In sport, this might be a last-minute course change or finding out a scout will be watching your match that night. On the stage, it could be the understudy having to step in during the interval. In office work, it could be a last-minute request to join the team for a new business pitch. Cultivating your mental flexibility will allow you to better manage these kinds of moments. Not only do we not perform well with insufficient pressure, the resultant tedium can also be very stressful. The signs of boreout include:

For instance, many decision-making tasks are based on the assumption that individuals will maximize their outcomes by choosing the “best” response, something that animals and humans fail to do consistently (Waksberg et al. 2009; Zentall 2016). There are many possible reasons for this. It could be that animals are making a mistake, or do not understand the task, although that seems unlikely given many species’ expertise at these tasks. It also may be that they are showing some of the same decision-making biases seen in humans (De Petrillo and Rosati 2019; Williamson et al. 2019) or that rules of thumb are good enough most of the time (Watzek and Brosnan 2018), and of course animals show individual differences based on demographic factors, personality (Hopper et al. 2014) and differences in various cognitive abilities. Another possibility, inherent in these decision-making tasks, is that each individual’s outcome depends on their own decision-making performance—in other words, there is pressure within these tasks for animals to maximize their outcome. As we know that some humans (and monkeys) are more prone to choking under pressure than others (and indeed, that increasing that pressure can lead to suboptimal choices: (Jones et al. 2011), it follows that some animal subjects would also be better at coping with pressure than others when completing decision-making tasks. Thus, at least some of the differences in how individuals respond to pressure could be related to individual variation in the HPA stress response or their interaction with other sources of individual variation, especially if biological responses to pressure cause a breakdown in cognitive abilities such as working memory that are needed to make the correct choice. Boreout can occur when someone is without motivating forces and has no reason to do anything. Imagine just drifting aimlessly, completely bored. It can be fun doing nothing for a while. But sitting watching TV in your pyjamas all day every day is not good for your performance and not good for your health. Very relevant and informative… engaging and inclusive style. Worth spending a whole day on… need to roll out to whole company… loved the takeaway workbook… pretty much perfect.” Overly rigid thinking and routines can all increase feelings of pressure. Increasing your mental flexibility is the antidote, and one way to do that is by deliberately challenging your usual way of doing things. This sounds super-simple, but if you like rigid routines and have come to rely upon them, you will find it difficult. Elite athletes are like the rest of us: they get anxious and it hampers their performance. In the last 30 seconds of tight basketball games, WNBA and NBA players are 5.8% and 3.1% respectively less likely to score from a free throw – an uncontested shot awarded to players who have been fouled – than at other moments in the game. When players take free throws in home matches, they are more likely to miss when the crowd is bigger.

Theory and Hypotheses

Given the similarities in biological and cognitive systems that are implicated in choking, there is clearly reason to believe that other species experience effects of pressure, and that there is a need for explicit focus on their responses to pressure. While pressure certainly may be implicitly involved in many comparative cognition studies (indeed, reward- and time-pressure are often present when testing other species), almost no research has isolated how that pressure influences cognitive performance and decision-making in a way that effectively isolates it from difficulty. This might be because pressure is an intensely experience-based phenomenon, and some past research in human subjects has relied heavily on self-report measures of pressure. Animals, of course, are unable to self-report internal experiences of pressure, making it challenging to consider pressure in non-human subjects. However, pressure has been correlated with physiological measures as well. Because animals show similar physiological responses to stress and similar cognitive abilities as humans, it follows that high-pressure situations may affect their cognitive systems in similar ways as they do in humans, and that biological correlates of the stress response might covary with performance in these high-pressure situations. However, to test this, we must design cognitive studies that manipulate pressure experimentally, to explore how pressure alone influences performance. The ball before, Donald had run when he shouldn’t. This time, he didn’t run at all, remaining motionless as Klusener hurtled towards him. By the time Klusener hared past him, all Donald had managed to do was drop his bat and look around forlornly. His legs wouldn’t move. “I looked up at Lance, saw him rushing to my end, and so I started to run,” Donald wrote. “My legs felt like jelly, as if I wasn’t making any headway at all down to the other end. I tried to get my legs moving properly. It was a dreamlike sequence, almost in slow motion.” I recommend the Pomodoro Technique of chunking up work into 25 minutes of stretch and then 5 minutes of rest. After four stretches I have a complete half-hour break. That way, over an 8 hour day, I get a mid-morning break, a lunch break, mid-afternoon break and five minute micro breaks every 25 minutes throughout.