Stage Fright

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, the women's 100-meter freestyle race had a favorite: Australia's Cate Campbell. The swimmer had won 2 bronze medals at the 2008 Olympics and a gold medal at the 2012 Games. One month before Rio, she broke the world record in the 100-meter freestyle. After that race, She confessed she didn't really know how she did it.

I think the best swims you don't remember, so I don't remember a whole lot of it. I just remember getting on the blocks and being like, just get a good start. Once you got a good start, it's all downhill from there. So I think that that's pretty much what I did.

And then came Rio.

Kate Garbarku.

100 freestyle final for women. At first, it looked like she was going to win.

Kate's start was a little bit slower than everybody else. 0.8 of a second was the reaction time. But once she hit the water, look at The, the world record line on her waist. A great first 50, 24.77.

Kate had a commanding lead. But after the 50-meter turn, something happened. Her lead began to evaporate. Oh, look, there's quite a few lining up now. This is not clear-cut at all. And it's going to be— In the final sprint, other swimmers edged past her.

She ended up Wow, what a shocking result!

Later, she said, the world got to witness possibly the greatest choke in Olympic history. It turned out Kate thought she had flinched before the starting gun— a false start. As she hit the water, she was certain she was going to be disqualified. Her race plan went out the window. She panicked. She swam the first 50 meters too fast and then ran out of gas on the home stretch. As the world prepares to watch the planet's finest athletes compete in the Tokyo Olympics, versions of Kate's story are likely to be played out over and over again in different sports. The pressure, the nerves, they can get to the very best of the best.

Yeah, I mean, it's a little counterintuitive, right? You want to perform at your best. You know how to do it, and you have shown that so many times before. And then all of a sudden, you just can't pull it off.

This week on Hidden Brain, how pressure hijacks our bodies and our brains, and how to keep it from derailing us. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, This is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable online programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skill set, and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward, no matter what motivates you. Start yours at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com/hiddenbrain. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. All of us have been there. Taking the SAT. Trying out for the football team. Reciting our wedding vows. We all know what it's like to feel hundreds of eyes on us. The pressure. The expectations. The anxiety. At Barnard College in New York, psychologist Sian Beilock has spent decades studying why many of us crumble under pressure and what we can do about it. Sian Beilock, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Oh, thanks for having me.

Sian, you've accomplished a great deal in your life. Besides a stellar career as a psychologist, you've also been a prominent administrator. You're currently the president of Barnard College in New York City. But I'd like to take you back to a more humbling moment in your life, if I might. You were in high school, and you were a soccer goalie on the California State team. And you were playing a game. Things were going really well until you noticed someone standing right behind you. What happened next?

Yeah, I noticed that the national coach, the person that starts selecting for the Olympic team and playing at that national and world stage, was standing right behind me. And all of a sudden, I remember that my whole mentality changed. I sort of became hyper-aware of everything I was doing and that someone was watching me. I almost was watching myself through his eyes. And I ended up really bobbling the next ball that came to me. And then eventually I let in an easy shot that I should have been able to block in my sleep. It was almost as if it was in slow motion and I just missed. I dove over the ball. rather than at the ball.

Yeah.

It was almost like getting the ball shot through your legs when you're playing on the field. And the coach walked away. I watched him walk away and I just thought, that's it. You know, my soccer career is never gonna be the same. And I just couldn't understand it. Like, this is something I did all the time. You know, I was a really great player. I practiced so much. Like, why did this change now when he was there? Like, I just, I was confused and mad and sad.

Yeah. So we're going to explore in depth what happens inside the brain when we choke and what we can do about it. But I want to begin by clearly laying out the range of ways we can crumble under stress, what sports fans and researchers call choking under pressure. You once experienced this in the academic domain during a chemistry test you took in your freshman year of college. Can you tell me what happened, Sian?

Yeah, I choked a lot. I never tested as well as I did in practice. And this certainly happened when I got to college. I went to the University of California at San Diego. I was focused on getting a Bachelor of Science majoring in a STEM field. And when I went in to take Intro to Chemistry, which is a very hard class, at least it is for most people, and the professor looked around at the 600-person class and said, a lot of you aren't going to pass this class, I thought, oh my God, I'm in that bag. for sure. Like, there's no way. So, you know, I paid attention in class. I thought I had studied really diligently for the first test. I took the first test, I walked out, and I remember walking behind a group of students and they were talking about the answers. And my answer— I remember thinking, gosh, my answers weren't like their answers. So that was my first cue.

Always a bad sign.

It was a bad sign. So then he posted— it wasn't like now where you probably get your scores all online, but he posted in like on one of those yellow legal pieces of paper outside the front door. I think maybe even written in hand. And there were, at this point, maybe 400 kids in the class. And I got the worst grade out of anyone in the class. I mean, it's really embarrassing. There were a lot of people tied with me, but there was no one below me. And I remember calling my mom and walking back and saying, I'm gonna— I can't do college. I'm not good enough.

You know, both the domains in which we've talked about, you know, playing a high-stress soccer game and doing a chemistry test, you know, you could argue that the tasks involved are actually fairly complex and complicated. But sometimes we can choke even when it comes to doing something simple if the stakes are high enough. In 2009, US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was swearing in President-elect Barack Obama. Now, both men had spent years in the public eye dealing with difficult and stressful situations. The exact words of the oath of office were not a surprise. They were familiar to both men. But here's what happened during the swearing-in ceremony. I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear— I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear— That I will execute the office of President of the United States faithfully. That I will execute— Faithfully the office of President of the United States. The office of President of the United States faithfully. And will, to the best of my ability— Can you talk a moment, Sian, about how sometimes the simplest tasks can trip us up when we're under pressure?

Yeah, I think this is why choking is so interesting, because it can happen in any sort of situation where we feel pressure to perform well, something oftentimes that's so well learned that you would be surprised that anything would go wrong. The swearing-in is a great example of that. where maybe the Chief Justice just started paying a little bit too much attention to what he was saying. Just the act of doing that can be really disruptive. One that I like to talk about a lot is parallel parking, which I'm very good at when no one is in the car with me, but when someone is watching, I choke. It's really embarrassing. No one believes me, but I'm a really good parallel parker until I'm under stress.

It's sort of— it's like one of those philosophical conundrums, right? How do we know you're a good parallel parker if you're never a good parallel parker Exactly.

It's all about the tree in the forest. Or even one I think that's really relevant right now as we come back into social situations is just like interacting with other people. Like, how many times at a party have you tried to introduce yourself and you kind of choke getting the words out, or asking— someone tells you their name and you have no idea even as they're saying it what it is? Like, we choke in the simplest situations.

Right. Yeah. And I want to bring up another example because it's along the lines of what you were just talking about. There are times when we are doing things that we have done hundreds of times before or thousands of times before, and we still can trip up. I'm thinking of US Army bugler Keith Clarke, who performed Taps at President John F. Kennedy's funeral at Arlington National Cemetery in November 1963. He'd obviously played it many times before, but something happened when he got to the 6th Note. Now, you know, people later said that the mistake, you know, sounded like the bugle was weeping. But Keith Clarke himself never got over making this mistake. I suspect that he felt a lot like you felt as you saw the the national team coach, you know, walking away from that field.

Yeah, I mean, it can be just so devastating to do something that you know how to do and do it not at your level of ability when all eyes are on you.

And this is what makes it so mysterious, isn't it? Because when, when we are going through one of these things, you know, you feel like telling everyone, I really can do it. Believe me, I know how to do this.

Yeah, I mean, it's a little counterintuitive, right? You want to perform at your best and you can't, right? It's one thing if you don't care, But choking occurs when you feel the most pressure, you feel everyone's eyes on you, you want to put your best foot forward, you know how to do it, and you have shown that so many times before. And then all of a sudden, you just can't pull it off.

There are endless examples of professional tennis players and golfers flubbing simple shots when the pressure is on. Sian's soccer story speaks to that. Or take free throws in basketball. So many close games are decided in the final minutes By a player sinking or missing free throws. Right now he's got to go 1 for 2 for a tie. You can't describe the pressure here.

I mean, I think free throw shooting is such an interesting aspect of all of my research, and it's like, I think, the epitome of a choke situation.

And— oh, he missed it!

Objectively, shooting a free throw is not that hard of a task compared to what basketball players do. It's It's the same spot. No one is guarding them. They know how to do it. But what really changes is the psychological element of it.

2 shots here. And that one's woefully off the line. But you see how he pulled back, Jim?

He's missed his last 2. He is not staying with the shot. And as I said, there's a lot of difference making them when you're up by 20. Keeps it a 1-possession game.

How big is that? But sports also shows us another domain of choking where the choke isn't over in just a moment, where you let in a goal. But the choke sort of builds on itself. It becomes bigger and bigger. In your book, Choke, you tell the story of the French golfer Jean van de Velde at the British Open in 1999. What happened to him, Sian?

He got to that 18th hole. He was just ready to win.

He's 3 shots ahead, so he can afford to take a 6 and still win, double bogey and still finish at 5 over.

You could see right when he got to the 18th hole, everything looked a little different. He sat over the ball before he took his first drive, and it did not go well.

I don't believe this. Well— His first shot on the 18th hole landed on the fairway of the 17th hole.

The second off the grandstand, the third into the water.

Hello, what is going on here?

And you can see the picture that was across newspapers the next day. He took off his socks and shoes and waded into the water and was actually gonna try and hit the ball out of the water. Now, I don't know.

We've— many of us have tried these kind of shots, but he's gonna sink deeper and deeper.

It's all silty down here, and I don't think he's— Then he thankfully decided not to do that, took the penalty, ended up in a tiebreaker round, and lost.

This is so, so, so, so sad.

But he just crumbled. Not only did his shots start going awry, but you kind of felt like it was building on each other. You had this sense that it was not going in a good direction. And it's just heartbreaking.

His golfing brain stopped about 10 minutes ago, I think. Yeah. I don't know if you feel the same way, Sian, but whenever I see something like this on television or I hear something, I feel It's, you know, I feel like, oh my God, I just want this to end. Please fix the problem. And do you feel that way, that in some ways you're with them in this moment of excruciating agony?

Oh, I'd feel it with them right there. In a way, though, I've learned not only to feel the excruciating pain, but I kind of look at it as a scientist. I'm really interested in what's going to happen next.

Yeah.

And I think that's actually one of the reasons we love watching sports, right? We know that people come into professional games often, or amateur games, with high skill levels, but you never quite know what's gonna happen when the stakes are highest. I mean, if you just knew how people were gonna play based on their past records, why would you watch, right? But what's so interesting is that at those highest levels, there's a mental aspect that you just don't know how it's gonna play out. Who's gonna choke? Who's gonna thrive? Can someone recover? And it's just so fascinating from a human perspective.

The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. I want to talk about a slightly different element of choking. Sometimes when we choke, it can produce breakdowns in communication, for example, in medicine or surgery, or when a team is working on something complex. Can you talk about this, that sometimes choking is not just about what happens to you, but what happens to you as a member of a team in terms of your interactions with other people on the team?

Yeah, I mean, I think this is a really interesting aspect of choking, right? Choking can be very individual, but we often don't work You know, often we're working as teams, and one thing that my research and others have shown is that one of the key places that there are performance breakdowns when there's stressful situations, time demands, or there's life-or-death situations, is that people stop communicating as well as they could. And this is really interesting because doctors, for example, they don't communicate all the information to another doctor as they hand off a patient, and then there's an issue. Or pilots leave something out Or even as you're working as a team on a group project, you fail to communicate in a way that's clear. And the— what I find so interesting about these situations is that we're often very confident that we've communicated what we need to communicate, 'cause we know what it is in our head. But our ability to accurately gauge whether someone else understood it is what gets diminished.

We often think that people who fail at important tasks are people who don't care or people who are simply unprepared for the big moment. When we come back, how choking is often not the product of carelessness and inexperience, but the consequence of expertise and caring too much. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds, because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on. The versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy. And that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, Or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Even the most experienced and skilled musicians, athletes, and doctors can sometimes lose it. They crumble unexpectedly And find themselves bewildered at what happened. They know how to do something really well, so why did their skills abandon them when it mattered most? Sian Beilock has studied the psychology of choking. She and other researchers have discovered that there is a complex psychology behind this all-too-common experience. In her book, she explores the role of what cognitive scientists call working memory In the phenomenon of choking.

I mean, I think about our working memory as like our cognitive horsepower, right? It allows us to get lots of things done, juggle numbers in our head, plan for the future, make decisions based on a lot of different information. And the thing that is so important to remember about working memory is that it's limited. We only have so much of it, which is why, for example, It's not a good idea to drive and talk on the cell phone because then part of your working memory is devoted to reacting to what's happening on the road, and another part of it is devoted to the cell phone conversation, and that's not great.

Psychologists have come up with a number of ways to identify and test working memory. Can you tell me how they do this, Sian?

Yeah, well, it's really getting you to work as you're thinking about something. So maybe I'll read you a list of digits and you have to repeat them back to me Just as I read them, so that's kind of how much you can hold. But what if I read you a list of digits and then you had to repeat them back in the reverse order?

Wow.

That's a lot harder, right? Because you have to hold all the digits, then you have to start counting backwards while still not getting rid of any of what you've held. And that's really the working part of working memory.

Because working memory is finite, your brain has to quickly decide how to deploy it. In a basketball game, your brain has to take in where your teammates are located, What your opponents are doing. It has to figure out how to respond to a new opportunity that suddenly develops. One reason skilled players are better than novices is because they have seen similar situations on the court before. So they don't expend a lot of working memory to process what is happening. They can focus their working memory on the elements of the situation that are truly novel.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's what really separates those extraordinary performers from us regular ones. Like, a concert pianist is not thinking about what they're fingers are doing. And because they don't have to think about that, they can then interpret the melody and think about how the tone is in particular situations and have an impact with a piece that you or I, who's having to think about our fingers, would not be able to.

I'm wondering, Sian, if we can talk a moment about the paradox of working memory, because, of course, the picture that you're laying out suggests that having working memory is very effective, that it helps us in all kinds of different domains. And, of course, on the face of it, that is true, but the answer is also more complicated. Can you explain how?

Yeah, I mean, so here's really the kicker. It's really important to be able to focus. But you have to be focusing on the right things. And what often happens is that when we're performing skills or activities where it's actually, we've learned them to perfection or learned them on autopilot, it's better not to focus on all the details. So sometimes our working memory can actually get in the way. And let me just give you an example. Most of us who are fortunate enough could shuffle down the stairs really easily and not give it a second thought. We've learned walking motions and locomotion in a way that we just don't think about what we're doing. But if I ask you to pay attention to your knee and tell me what your knee is doing as you're shuffling down the stairs, there's a good chance you're going to fall down the stairs, because now I'm asking you to bring into conscious attention something that normally runs outside it. And you might, in doing so, just take a little longer in thinking how your knee is going to be placed, and that's when you fall.

I'm wondering if this is what might explain why, in many sports, the same thing that helps you in one domain of the game can actually hurt you in another domain of the game, because there actually are times when you should focusing and should be concentrating and should be conscious, and there are other times when, in fact, being conscious and deliberate can hurt you.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's right, and what I would even say is that, you know, there are certain things that you need to be conscious and focusing on and certain things that you don't, even within the same activity. So you'd want your basketball player certainly to be using working memory to read the court, think about the next play going on, how they're going to move after that play, But you certainly wouldn't want the player at that point to be thinking about how they're angling their wrist as they go to take the shot, because that's something they do so fluently, it's actually going to slow them down to have to think about it consciously to use their working memory.

You write in the book that the key is to have brainpower at your disposal, but be able to turn it off when that brainpower is a problem. And I thought that is such an interesting idea, that on the one hand, you want to have the ability, you want to have the working memory, but you also want to, in some ways, have it be like a faucet where you can turn it off and go back to autopilot.

I think that's right, and I think it gets back to this idea that more attention, concentrating more, is not always helpful. And I always cringe when I hear coaches yelling at kids from the sideline, concentrate, concentrate! I mean, it may be true for the kid on the soccer field who's watching the plane fly above them, but oftentimes, you know, in that pressure situation, you don't want to encourage the players to pay too much attention to things that they shouldn't.

Yeah. So in some ways, we can go back to your high school soccer game here. You know, when you were thinking about what the coach was thinking of you, in some ways, and you started to analyze your own behavior and analyze your own performance, you were watching yourself from outside yourself. I mean, this is what you call paralysis by analysis.

It really is. And I think when I did it at the time, I had this feeling of everything going in slow motion. I was paying attention in a way I don't normally do. And it wasn't until many years later when I started researching this where I realized this is actually a common phenomenon in these high-stakes situations. We care so much about what we're doing that we try and control it in order to ensure an optimal performance. And unfortunately, that control can backfire and actually disrupt our ability to play fluently on autopilot, to do the thing we've practiced so hard to do.

I want to talk about some research studies that you and others have conducted where you can actually induce choking or something that looks like choking You've conducted studies where you ask college soccer players, for example, to dribble a ball around cones while noticing which side of their feet they are using to control the ball. Tell me about the study and what you found.

Yeah, I've done a lot of studies designed to try and make people perform worse, but in this situation, we had soccer players who were either new to soccer, novices, or just very inexperienced. Dribble around cones, and we also had college-level players, or really expert players, do the same thing. And we told them both to pay attention to the side of the foot that just touched the ball. And what we found is that for the experts, doing that actually slowed down their ability to dribble through the cones accurately. But for the novices, if anything, it helped a little bit. And it goes back to this idea that for the most part, when we're just learning a skill, we do have to pay attention to it a lot. But once we know it really well and it's on autopilot, if you pay too much attention to aspects of it that you wouldn't normally focus on— there's no soccer player in college soccer running down the field thinking about left, right, left, right— then you actually disrupt it.

So this is the great paradox of working memory. It plays an essential role as we're learning a new skill. Being deliberate and conscious when you're a beginner is an excellent way to master something. But as you get better and better, it becomes more and more automatic. Instead of working memory, you now need to rely on something called procedural memory. All the things you know how to do really well are saved in your brain in procedural memory. If you take a skill that has been encoded in procedural memory, and start to think about it deliberately using working memory, you go back to thinking like a beginner. This is when you choke.

Yeah, I mean, I think one important take-home is that we have different kinds of memory, or we talk about remembering in different ways. And procedural memory characterizes more our memory for different procedures, right? And so we don't think about every step as we get really good at it. We can do the whole procedure together, and we just sort of get at the end. It's kind of like the route you take to go to work every day when we did at one point commute to work. You don't think about every turn you make. All of a sudden, you end up at work and you're there. That's sort of a procedure you have memorized to do something. It's the same in athletics as well as you get much better and better at doing a particular task. The memory is— we talk about it as this procedural memory. It's sort of you remember the procedures to do it and you can start at the beginning and end at the end. You don't have to think about the steps in between.

Researchers have also found that when we are under pressure, other cognitive skills get disrupted. In one study, scientists scanned the brains of Cornell medical students experiencing the stress of preparing for their board exams. The students underperformed in a simple test of cognitive ability. The researchers tracked what was happening inside their brains.

And what they found is that, you know, different areas of their brain were not communicating as well with each other as they should. It was almost as if being under that constant stress had disrupted the fluent flow of information neurally, and it led these students, the ones who were getting ready for the boards, to be less creative, less able to think outside the box, less able to solve interesting problems.

Yeah. So much of what we're talking about, Sian, comes down to the role that anxiety is playing in our lives. You once conducted a study into math anxiety and looked at the changes happening in people's brains as they were about to embark on a, on a math test?

Yeah, so we've done a lot of work lately looking at math anxiety, because unfortunately, math anxiety is really prevalent. And we've been really interested in where math anxiety comes from, and what's actually happening when someone who's math anxious has to do math. And our argument has been that it's not just that people who are anxious about math are bad at it, That something about the anxiety itself changes how the brain functions. And so we looked at that by inviting people who are really worried about math and people who weren't to our lab to have their brains scanned using an MRI. And what was so interesting about this study and about using a neuroscience technique here is that we could really separate out what was happening in the brain about being anxious from actually what was going on in the brain when they were doing the math. And you can actually get a picture of which areas of the brain are changing when someone just knows they're about to do math versus when they're actually doing it. And so what we did is we told them they would get a cue, like maybe a yellow square, and they knew the math was about to come, or they'd get another cue, a red square, and they knew they were going to do a reading task. And what we found, which was really interesting, was when the people who were really worried about math just knew the math was coming, areas of the brain involved in our neural pain matrix, the same areas of the brain that are involved when we pick our finger with a needle or stub our toe, were activated when they just knew the math was coming. They weren't doing any math, they just knew it was coming. But even more interesting was that when these areas of the brain were active, when they just knew the math was coming, when they actually had to do the math, they did worse.

Hmm. I mean, it's almost as if the pain is now sort of— or the anticipation of pain is sort of crowding out their ability to actually focus on the problem. So at some point now, they're not actually looking at the math problem anymore because their brain is so filled with the pain or the fear of the impending pain.

And that's really been our argument, that people who are anxious about math are not anxious because they're bad at it. They're bad at math because they're anxious about it. And that's a very, very different story about how to help people get better at it.

These feelings of anxiety often come from a desire to do well. The solution to choking cannot be to stop caring. When we come back, techniques we can all learn to keep caring but stop choking. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens. the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

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Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with Priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel, elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Psychologist Sian Beilock has found that in high-stakes settings, many of us start to focus on the wrong things. Instead of simply executing what we know how to do, we second-guess ourselves and behave in highly scripted and stilted ways. Unsurprisingly, we make mistakes. And when we do mess up, our mistakes can then make us even more anxious. To choke might be human, but there are some people who perform remarkably well under pressure. When the stakes are highest, they don't crumble. They actually seem to thrive. Sian, is performing well under pressure a matter of temperament or a skill that we can all learn?

Yeah, well, I really fall strongly on the these are skills that can be learned side. Of course, there are a I think there are many individual differences across people, and one is, you know, maybe how susceptible they are to what other people think about them, or how much they care about a particular domain or area. But I don't think there's very much evidence at all that people are chokers or thrivers, and I think anyone can learn to perform better at what makes them most nervous when the pressure is on.

We talked earlier about that chemistry test in college that you did really badly at. You came in last in a class of 400. After the test was over, you had a conversation with your mom where you expressed to her concerns about whether you were the right fit for college, and she suggested a number of things to you that turned out to actually be quite relevant in actually turning you from a choker to a thriver. What was that conversation like, and what did she tell you, Siya?

Yeah, so I remember calling her as I was walking back to my dorm after getting the score, and I was just devastated. And I thought I'd done everything right, but she asked just the right questions. She said, did you study? I said, of course I studied. She said, did you do the practice problems in the book? I said, no, I just read over the chapters. Then she said, did you have a study group? Did you see if you knew things like other people knew them? I said, no, I just did it all by myself. She said, did you go to office hours? I said, no, no, I just read the book like I did in high school, and I did really well in high school. She said, well, Well, maybe you just didn't study in the right way. I took her advice to heart. I realized that I had to do something that I didn't like to do, which were the practice problems, which were not fun. I found a study group, which was helpful to understand what I knew and what I didn't. When I really figured out how to do this in the right way was that I would go to the study sessions having already studied on my own, and we'd quiz each other. Like trying to get to the answers as quickly as possible. And it was like we were mimicking taking the test in that group. And that's when I really mastered the problems. And it turns out that that's a really great technique to do well under pressure is to practice doing well under pressure. And when we took the second test, I got the highest grade in the class.

Wow. I understand you've, you've helped your own children internalize the same lesson that, in other words, you can actually try and mimic pressure situations before you're actually under pressure in order to help you deal with the situation when it actually arises.

Yeah, I mean, I do this a lot with my 10-year-old in terms of if she has to give a presentation in class, I make her give it to me and, you know, sometimes I make funny comments or I distract her a little bit. I get her used to what it's going to be like in class and nothing's more pressure-filled than having your mom embarrass and bother you, so she's ready for it. When she gets in front of the group.

So in some ways, it seems to me that this is in line with the ideas around how to combat anxiety in general, which is the exposure to the anxiety-inducing trigger is often the best way to reduce our responses to anxiety. How much of this work is connected to the idea of exposure therapy?

I think there's a common theme that runs right through it, and the idea is that you have to close this gap between training and competition. That's the sports analogy. And you can take that to any skill that you do, any domain. You want to get used to what it's going to be like in the real situation. And so that means, for example, if your child is playing high-level tennis, the first time to show up to watch them is not at their big match. They need to get used to you watching them if you're going to show up at practice, right? It means that if you're going to It means if you're going to take an SAT or an ACT, you've got to practice taking SATs and ACTs. It means if you're going to speak in public, you've got to practice speaking with other people watching you. You have to get used to what it feels like and get used to reminding yourself that those physiological responses are not a bad thing.

You, you talk about how there are ways to also reframe those physiological responses. In other words, if you're experiencing sweaty palms or a palpitating heart, the normal way to interpret those signals is to tell yourself, oh my God, I am overmatched for the situation that I'm in. But there's a different way to also think about the very same symptoms.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to think about that we'd have the same symptoms whether we were worried or excited, right? And that's really very liberating because then it's about reinterpreting them. And myself and other colleagues have done a lot of work showing that when you can get people to reinterpret those symptoms as a sign they're going to thrive, that beating heart is shunting blood to my brain so I can think, rather than a sign they're going to fail, they actually perform better. And we've shown this for students taking tests, especially students who are really nervous and anxious about how they're going to do on the test. We've shown that actually just getting them to reinterpret what they're feeling leads to better performance.

Sian, you once won an award from the National Academy of Sciences, and you had to give a presentation at the Academy. You were very tense about it. Can you tell me how you employed some of these techniques to deal with your own anxiety?

Right. My family was there. My mom had flown out from California. It was like I knew people were watching online, and I was like petrified.

Yeah.

My mom and dad used to come watch me talk when I was a young academic. And I hated it. It was like I was under so much stress. I'd have to physically turn away from my dad because every frown or any mouth movement, I was like, oh my God, I'm sounding like an idiot. Oftentimes we actually see ironically that friendly faces, having your family and friends all there can create more pressure than if you didn't know anyone.

Yeah.

I reminded myself that that my sweaty palms and beating heart were not a bad sign. I also focused on something else, which I think is really important, is that actually reminding yourself why you should succeed. I know the material better than anyone else. Even if everyone in that room is way smarter than me, I know my own material. I'm the master of this. And actually focusing on why you should succeed can lead to better performance.

Sian and other researchers have also identified other techniques to keep athletes and performers in a state of flow where they are relying on their procedural memory rather than their working memory to carry out tasks they have already mastered. One way to keep your working memory from interfering is to give it unimportant things to do just to keep it occupied.

Well, remember we talked about sometimes we perform poorly under stress because we start paying too much attention to things that we shouldn't. And one of the ways to stop ourselves from paying attention is to do something else. So counting backwards, singing a song, focusing on one key thought— in golf, people have a swing thought— or if you're giving a talk, focusing on the 3 take-home points you want people to get. Anything that takes your mind off of overanalyzing every aspect of what you're doing can be really important.

Another technique is to focus on your breathing. Breathing slowly and deeply can calm you down, but focusing on your breath can also redirect your working memory to something other than what you are doing.

Yeah, I mean, the breathing is another, I think, really important technique. It can take your mind off of what you're doing in a way that can be really good, and it can also, again, as you said, calm down your whole body in a way that can be really important. But I tend to think of of breathing techniques as a great sort of crutch, just like singing a song or focusing on your pinky toe, anything to take your mind off of what you shouldn't be focusing on in that moment.

Do you do this at all, Sienna, in your own life? Do you actually try and sing a song in your head or focus on your breathing before you give an important presentation?

I do. So I played lacrosse in college and I was center, so I started the game with the draw, and that was always really nerve-wracking, and I sang Take It Easy by the Eagles. I tried not to do it out loud because people would look at me weird, and the song pops into my head now when I get nervous in situations where I have to perform. It comes in there automatically.

Take it easy, take it easy. The next time I see you giving a public talk somewhere, I'll know what song is going through your head right before the talk begins.

Exactly. Another thing I do right before a big event is I distract myself, which seems a little bit counterintuitive, but I'd argue that 10 minutes before is not the time to cram or to think about exactly, you know, how you're gonna shoot the shot. It's to do something totally different. And I know a lot of professional athletes do this. Some listen to music, some do crossword puzzles. I like to read, you know, something like People magazine. online, something that just takes my mind off completely of where I'm going.

We've talked about how highly trained musicians and athletes can choke. One conclusion you might draw from this is that practice and experience are not very useful in preventing choking. That would be a mistake.

I think practice is so important. Practice is really important for developing fluent, automated processes in what you're doing. And what the practice does often is allow you not to have to focus on every step and every detail of what you're doing. And if you can do that when you're playing a game, for example, then you are more likely to perform well. And ironically, you're less likely to remember what you just did. I always make a joke that when athletes are interviewed after a great and fantastic game, all they can do is thank their moms. They do that all the time because they don't remember what they did. They don't know what to say.

I mean, I don't know what to say.

And it's because they were performing so automatically, it was actually almost outside of conscious awareness. And when you don't pay attention to something, you don't remember it.

When you learn a skill can also matter. Sian once conducted a study where she analyzed the age at which golfers started to play the game.

So my research and others have shown that when people learn actually really early, they often are protected from choking in these sorts of, especially motor skills. It's almost as if they learn it differently, and they're less likely to flub when it matters most.

What do you think is happening in the brain that causes this to happen?

Well, we know that oftentimes when children learn activities, they learn them more in a more automatic fashion. They're not thinking about every step of what they're doing. Think about how a kid learns a language.

Mm-hmm.

It's just sort of seeping in. And sometimes when you learn it in that way, you're sort of protected from essentially being able to unpack it in a way that disrupts your performance.

I'm wondering, Sian, if you can talk a moment about when you did badly on that chemistry test in college. The thought that went through your mind was not, you know, I prepared for this the wrong way. The thought that went through your mind was, I don't really belong in college. And you have to wonder how often that's happening to other people, people who feel like the pressure has gotten to them and they feel like they're out of place in a situation. Can we talk about the idea that choking can also be shaped by our families, organizations, and cultures? I mean, are there some environments that are more likely to produce choking than others?

You know, I think this is really a great question because it hits on an important point that even though we're talking a lot about what's happening inside our head, what's happening inside our head is really affected by the environment that we're in, right? So if we walk into a situation and we feel like we shouldn't perform well because we've been historically excluded, or we're the only woman in the room, or people don't feel like we should do well, that can have an impact on how we perform. But if we walk into the same situation and feel like even if we don't do so well, people know that we can learn and get better, that there are examples of people not doing well in the past and being okay, that there there's avenues for us to ask questions and not be judged, it all of a sudden can change people's attitude about what they can do. The environment has a big effect on how we feel about ourselves, and in essence then, how likely we are to choke.

We interviewed Claude Steele on Hidden Brain some months ago, and a lot of his work focuses on the idea of stereotype threat, which is that when you have have stereotypes about you or your group, in some ways you become more likely to prove those stereotypes true because you're so worried about the stereotypes or worried about showing that the stereotype is true that your performance ends up becoming impeded. In some ways, it's not quite choking, I suppose, but it's sort of a related phenomenon. Yeah.

I mean, I've always argued to Claude that stereotype threat is just a form of choking. I think it is. I don't know if he agrees with me, but it It is, in my mind at least, because the environment is essentially having an effect on how you think about yourself in that moment. You want to essentially live down some expectation that someone else has. You're worried about being evaluated based on whatever group you come from, and that can affect how you interpret the situation. It can affect what you focus on. It can also affect how you interpret your bodily reactions. If I have sweaty palms and beating heart, and I am excited to do something, and I'm ready to go, that will actually lead to better performance. But if I have sweaty palms and beating heart, and I'm worried about confirming this stereotype, my performance might actually get worse.

I'm wondering how we should think about what individuals should do. I think one of the things that I was picking up as you were talking is that, in some ways, the deck is stacked unfairly against some people. If you're a first-generation college student, for example, you might be experiencing more pressure being in college than, you know, if multiple members of your family have been to college over several generations. And so you're more likely to choke, but it's clear that it's partly the result of structural and environmental factors over which you have no control. But of course, we are relying on individuals in some ways to address those problems, because we're locating the problem of choking in individuals. There is some tension there, is there not, between sort of thinking about choking as an individual phenomenon and the problem of choking as a structural phenomenon?

Yeah, I mean, I think you're really right, and I think it's an individual phenomenon in how it's mostly been studied, but it is also a structural phenomenon. And there, in the example you gave, I would argue that it is the organization's responsibility, the college or university, to recognize that that might be the case and to start putting structures in place to help ensure that those students who come in, say first-generation, who might feel as if they shouldn't perform as well, have supports so that they can. At Barnard, we just started a whole new office and initiative called Access Barnard that is for first-generation, low-income, and international students designed to do exactly what you're talking about, which is essentially take some of the extra cognitive load or burden, I would argue, that they shoulder about not necessarily being as familiar with American higher education. And I would say that, you know, ability is way more widespread than opportunity. And as we think about how to make sure that everyone with that ability is able to be at the table and thrive, we have to, as organizations, leaders and as organizations think about the structures. It can't just be an individual responsibility.

I'm wondering, Sian, if we can talk a moment about some of the work that's looked at airline cockpits, for example. Compared to 50 or 60 years ago, airline cockpits today are designed to assume that pilots are going to make mistakes. And the goal of the cockpit is not to say, unless you're perfect, Something bad is going to happen to you. The goal of the cockpit now is to say, we know that things are going to fail from time to time. We know that pilots are going to make mistakes. The goal of the cockpit now is to minimize those mistakes. And secondly, when the mistakes happen, to minimize the consequences of those mistakes. Is there a sort of societal implication for this body of work, which is talking about the ways in which we can generally reduce pressure overall?

Yeah, I mean, I love this line of thinking. I mean, it's sort of like the goal of life shouldn't be that we're not going to make mistakes. It should be that we are going to make mistakes, and how do we recover, reduce the impact? And I think that's true in so many situations. So I think the cockpit is a great example. I also think it's true in how people lead organizations. So leaders, for example, talking about the mistakes they've made, any way that sort of makes it okay for people to make mistakes and learn and grow. And what you want to be talking about is how can you make it so we're educating people about how to minimize when an accident happens or minimize injury and how to learn from it and how to speak up and know that one mistake is not the end of the world.

Do you think that, as a society, we also glorify pressure to some extent, Sian, that in some ways we credit people who are able to do well under pressure as being exceptional? I mean, there are clearly situations where you want people who are very good at dealing with pressure. If you're a firefighter, you definitely want firefighters to be able to respond well under pressure because presumably that's when the firefighters are doing their most important work. But there are many situations in life where I feel like we use pressure to test people into professions, and those professions actually don't call for a lot of functioning under pressure, which begs the question of why we're using pressure situations to evaluate people.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really fair point. What I would argue is that we shouldn't be using any one situation to decide whether people succeed Or whether they can go on or whether they're fit for the job. In classrooms, many of our professors at Barnard have stepped away from just having a midterm and a final to multiple assessments throughout the quarter or the semester. It turns out that when you assess people multiple times, they actually learn more because taking a test is also a place to learn what you know and what you don't know. But it also gives a wholer picture and a more holistic picture. I think I think that's true across the board. I mean, I think one reason that job interviews or these assessment situations are just one-shots is because it's easier to do it that way. But the question is, does easier lead you essentially to the best outcome? And I think oftentimes the answer is no.

Psychologist Sian Beilock is president of Barnard College. She's also the author of Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To. Sian Beilock, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Oh, it was so fun. Thank you.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Laura Querelle, Kristin Wong, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero this week is Sendhil Mullainathan. He's a researcher at the University of Chicago and a friend of the show. He told me some time ago about how cockpits were redesigned to take pilot error into account and how we should think of designing other systems like our schools and hospitals, with the same insight. I've always found Sendhil to be a great source of ideas and inspiration. Thanks, Sendhil. If you like this episode, please be sure to share it with 3 friends. If they're new to podcasting, please show them how to subscribe to our show. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you next week.

I make a point to, to not focus I don't focus on medals or times because that's very outcome dependent. But if I can hit the wall and I can say that is the best performance that I could have given on this day, and I did it under pressure, under the lights, in a final of a race, then I can walk away happy whatever the result.

Hey everyone, it's Stavros Halkis, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast, Stavie's World. Each week we're joined by great guests like Josh Safdie, Eric Andre, Caleb Herron, and more. It's sort of an interview show, but really we're just messing around, making each other laugh, and hopefully making you laugh while you're washing the dishes or grocery shopping or on a long drive. Plus, I take listener calls where we have honest conversations about dating life and everything in between. Imagine if your therapist was a vulgar degenerate whose office was in a Greek diner. No scripts, no polish, and absolutely no holding back. Listen to Stavi's World wherever you get your podcasts.

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