Stop Thinking – and Avoid Crumbling Under Pressure!

Have you ever frozen under pressure?

Have you inexplicably screwed up just when it mattered the most?

 

Maybe you were about to give a presentation and suddenly you couldn’t remember your words. Or you went into an exam and your mind went blank. Or maybe you play a musical instrument and suddenly your fingers no longer knew what they were supposed to do.

All these examples can happen when we choke under pressure. But did you know that this happens when you actually think too much…? A surge of recent research can help us to leave these self-sabotaging tendencies behind.

 

The answer lies in the way our brains are structured. When we have practiced something so well that we no longer need to think about it, subconscious processing systems are at work. When we then slow down to focus on these ‘automated’ actions, we can screw up those processes and trip ourselves up – big time.

Since the early 1980s researchers have been studying the question of why we freeze under pressure. The ‘more logical’ aspects such as audience pressure and high performance expectations have been well-researched and found to be true.  The advice that arose out of these studies was to slow down and take your time in order to calm your nervousness. But recent investigations have found that it is actually better to just get on with things if it is something that you have rehearsed well. In the words of Nike: Just Do It.

 

In a study published in 2008, Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock divided novice and skilled golfers into two groups and instructed them to perform a series of golf putts. The researchers encouraged the members of the first group to take their time, whereas they urged the members of the second group to swing as quickly as they could. Novice golfers performed less accurately when speed was emphasized, but skilled golfers showed exactly the opposite pattern: they performed best when told to execute quickly and faltered when advised to take their time.

 

Beilock speculates that this pattern occurs because taking extra time to perform when you have already practiced ad infinitum can encourage too much conscious thought. When that happens we get stressed, start worrying and in response to that we start to monitor our performance too carefully.

 

The idea that too much self-monitoring hinders performance aligns with the well-established theory of how the brain learns to perform complex motor skills – anything from speaking to typing to playing golf. The part of our brain that is most involved in learning a new task is the cerebral cortex, which controls higher-order, conscious thought and is adaptable to novel situations. But as we play a piece of music or practice a speech over and over again, we gradually transfer the control of that activity from the cerebral cortex to another area of the brain, the cerebellum, which orchestrates the lightning fast motor activation needed to perform complex actions. The cerebral cortex is very good at general purpose tasks but not at intricately timed things. Thus, when people are learning something new they show high levels of activity in the cerebral cortex, whereas when they perform a task they already know well they show more activity in the cerebellum.

 

The fly in the ointment with this setup is that the cerebellum, unlike the cerebral cortex, is not consciously accessible. As a result, when you try to check your progress as you are performing your rehearsed piece, you run into trouble.

 

Obsessing over every little detail may not be a good plan, but neither is getting too laid back. This can leave you without sufficient focus to complete a task at all. To find a ‘happy monitoring medium’ 20 expert golfers were recruited for a study published in 2008 and instructed to perform putts in three circumstances. Players in the first group focused on three words that stood for their physical technique (such as head, weight and arms); the second group focused on three words that had nothing to do with the putt (for example, red, blue and green); the third group focused on a single word that encapsulated the putting motion (such as smooth). Initially, the golfers putted in a low-pressure situation, and most of them did well. During a second trial, the tension was amped up by offering the top performers cash prizes.

 

The players sailed through the second trial – except the ones who focused on multiple aspects of their putt. When they focused on the multiple aspects of their putt, their performance dropped. This confirmed similar findings from 10 years before (1999) that when performers think about a concrete, detailed set of rules during their moment in the spotlight (for a ski jumper: keep skis high in the air, and keep body streamlined) are more likely to crumble under pressure than those who do not have such a specific set of rules in mind.

 

In the 2008 golf study, the golfers who focused on holistic single-word cues actually performed best in the pressure-packed putting round. This ‘not too much, not too little’ approach appears to work because it prevents you from regressing into too much conscious control, but yet it is still enough to activate the more automatic cerebellum-controlled motor program.

 

To summarise: if you scrutinize your performance too much – trying to control the natural inflections in your voice as you give an important presentation – you are setting yourself up for your cerebral cortex to trip over your cerebellum, leaving you at a loss for words. However, if you focus on a single word or idea that sums up your entire presentation (for example, smooth or forceful or dynamic), you will be best equipped to prevent your brain from getting in its own way.

 

Now that you know how to not trip over yourself, how can you make sure you keep your focus in front of an audience or a board of important committee members? According to research done on Dutch policemen, the answer is to make the actual performance feel like rehearsal: subject yourself to the same anxiety-packed conditions during practice that you expect to encounter during your moment in the spotlight.

 

The study carried out on Dutch policeman asked half of them to practice their shooting skills by shooting at a cardboard target; the other half trained by firing shots directly at one another (with soap cartridges not bullets: Dutch policeman aren’t that crazy!). After three one-hour training sessions, the ‘performance’ was on: an officer-on-officer shoot out using the soap cartridges. The officers who had practiced on the cardboard targets crumbled under this new tension-filled situation, whereas the group that has trained under the same stressful conditions thrived, scoring much higher accuracy ratings than the cardboard group did.

 

These results indicate that the heat from the very first day of practice may be one of the most effective ways to immunise yourself against blowing it. Training under the conditions of performance pressure minimises the pressure of freezing up because your brain gradually adapts, so that circumstances that once would have made you feel uneasy no longer feel novel or threatening. The more you exposure you get to these high-pressure situations, and the more you succeed despite them, the less likely you are going to be to screw up. In other words, the more comfortable you feel, the less likely you are to be affected by pressure.

 

Since most of us can’t go around shooting each other, how can we create tension and pressure during a rehearsal to mimic the stress of the real performance? For example, if you are going to give a presentation, have someone film you as you practice. Your self-awareness will immediately increase and you get confronted with yourself in the same way you would during the presentation. If you are practicing for an importance sports’ match or a musical concert, try enlisting a few friends or family to be the audience/spectators during your practice session(s).

 

Good luck!

 

References:

 

A.B. Markman, W.T. Maddox and D.A. Worthy (2006). Choking and Excelling Under Pressure. Psychological Science, volume 17, number 11, pages 944-948.

 

S.L. Beilock and S. Gonso (2008). Putting in the Mind versus Putting on the Green: Expertise, Performance Time, and the Linking of Imagery and Action. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, volume 6, number 6, pages 920-932.

 

R.R.D. Oudejans (2008). Reality-Based Practice Under Pressure Improves Handgun Shooting Performance of Police Officers. Ergonomics, volume 51, number 3, pages 261-273.

 

E. Svoboda (2009). Avoiding the Big Choke. Scientific American Mind, volume 20, number 1, pages 36-41.

 

L. Hardy and N. Callow (1999). Efficacy of External and Internal Visual Imagery Perspectives for the Enhancement of Performance on Tasks in Which Form Is Important. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology. Volume 21, Issue 2, pages 95-112.

 

D. Gucciardi and J. Dimmock (2008). Choking Under Pressure in Sensorimotor Skills: Conscious Processing or Depleted Attentional Resources? Psychology of Sport & Exercise, volume 9, Issue 1, pages 45-59.