Why You Choke Under Pressure

Think about a time you crumbled under pressure. Maybe you froze during a wedding speech, hit the wrong note on stage, or stumbled through a job interview. We all have a story like that. I want you to keep yours in mind while you watch this video, because today we're going to share a few strategies on how to handle those moments better, how to perform well even when the stakes are high. But before we get there, we need to understand why we fall apart in the first place. What's happening in the brain when you're doing something you've practiced 1,000 times And everything suddenly goes sideways? To answer that, I want to introduce you to someone. Her name is Cate Campbell. In 2008, Cate was a young Australian swimmer who made her debut at the Beijing Olympics. Here she is coming in 3rd in the 50-meter freestyle with a time of 24.17 seconds. She was one of the youngest swimmers there. Her career was off to a swimmingly good start. In 2012, Kate competed in the Summer Olympics in London, where she won a gold medal with her team. She was crushing it. Then it was the Australian Swimming Championships. Kate won the 100-meter freestyle. Here she is weighing in on her performance.

And I'm very pleased that that's what I did. I feel like I'm fighting fit again, which is really nice. That's as close to my personal best as I've been in 3 years, which is very encouraging.

Her next stop? The 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. Kate came in with sky-high expectations. Now, I'm not a gambler, but if I was, I would have put my money on her winning the 100-meter freestyle. She reached the finals. She was placed in lane 4. The best swimmers are usually placed in the middle of the group. Here's the starting lineup. Pay close attention to what happens next, because nearly everything important in this race Kate is here in the yellow swim cap. Okay, they're off. Kate shoots off like a rocket. By the time she hits the 50-meter mark, it looks like Olympic gold medal predictions were too conservative. She's on pace for a world record. But then— Kate didn't come in first, or second, or third. She didn't even end up in fourth or fifth place. Place? She came in 6th. Kate herself calls this the greatest choke in Olympic history. So what happened? How did a skilled athlete poised to take home the gold bungle something that looked like it was in the bag? The question is, why? It turns out there's a complex psychology behind this all-too-common experience. A few key factors come into play. The first, working memory.

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.

That's Sian Beilock. She's a cognitive scientist. She has spent years studying the phenomenon of choking under pressure. Working memory is all the stuff you keep in your head as you're doing a task. Sian and her colleagues have a fun experiment to show how this aspect of our memory works. Let's give it a try. I'm going to briefly show you a list of digits on your screen. Your job? Repeat them back to me. Ready? Here we go. 7, 6, 2, 4. Got it? In just a moment, these numbers will disappear. Bye-bye, numbers. Okay, now say the numbers back to me. 7, 6, 2, 4. Let's see how you did. You probably got it, right? So let's make it a little more complicated. Same experiment, but this time we'll bump it up to 6 numbers. Ready? 5, 8, 9, 7, 4, 3. Take a moment, memorize them. They're about to disappear.

Okay.

Now is your time to shine. Say the numbers back to me. Here they are again. How'd you do this time? A little more challenging? Now we're really going to go nuts. It's still 6 numbers: 9, 1, 0, 4, 8, 2. I'll even give you a little more time to memorize them this time. Okay, numbers go poof. Now I want you to repeat the numbers back to me, but in reverse order. How'd that go? Much harder, right? Here's how I'm doing it in my head. I think of the whole series, and then I ask myself what the last number is. Then I try and remember the whole series from start to finish again, and pick out. The second last number, and so on. It's tough. Your ability to hold the numbers in your head as you're coming up with the answers is the product of your working memory. As you can see, we don't have vast reserves of working memory. What happens when our limited working memory is occupied with something we shouldn't be focused on? We choke. That's what happened to Cate Campbell. The Olympic swimmer with the quote, Greatest choke in Olympic history. Let's take a closer look at that race again. We're back on the starting blocks. Kate is in lane 4, yellow cap. The referee tells the athletes to take their marks. This is the moment Kate lost the race. Did you see it? No? Let's take another look, slower this time. Pay attention. The referee tells the athletes to take their mark. And right there, if you zoom in closely, you might notice Kate made a slight movement. One small flinch. It was barely perceptible. Barely perceptible, that is, to everyone except Kate. Kate worried that this tiny flinch would be considered a false start. At this moment, her attention shifted. Instead of focusing her working memory on swimming the race the way she had She started thinking, "Oh no, I made a mistake. They're going to disqualify me." The race started. She dove into the water. She started swimming. But her mind was still on that flinch. She actually swam the first 50 meters too fast. That's why by the time she made the turn, she was way ahead of world record pace. But she was also running out of gas. Instead of being able to accelerate on the way home. She lost steam. Soon, other swimmers were passing her. It can also be helpful to see how deploying your working memory effectively can help you in a stressful situation. We're on the basketball court. It's a game between the Golden State Warriors and the Los Angeles Lakers. Here's Steph Curry, number 30, crushing it as usual. He effortlessly passes it to Jonathan Kuminga, almost as if he knew exactly where his teammate was behind him. Kuminga snakes his way through the other players like Moses parting the sea. I don't know about you, but if it was me on the court, I would have a hard time even dribbling the ball, much less figuring out who to pass it to, much less passing it to someone I can't even see. How did Steph do it? Okay, fine. He's a basketball genius. I'm not. But this is also about working memory in action. Skilled players have seen so many similar situations on the court, they don't need to expend a lot of working memory trying to remember where everyone is. They can process the game faster. They can focus their working memory on the elements of the situation that are truly novel— an opposing player unexpectedly stealing the ball, for instance. Steph has played so much basketball that he's able to take in lots of things that you and I would need to process more slowly. We're thinking through everything. It's slow. It's time-consuming. He's using muscle memory. It's fast, quick. The same thing happens to you when you do something you've done 1,000 times before, like drive to work. You're listening to music or chatting on the phone. You're not even thinking about navigating the traffic. And then, bam, you're in your parking spot at work. There's another dimension to choking. It has to do with anxiety. Sian and her colleagues ran another experiment. They brought people into the lab to have their brains scanned. Some of the people were anxious about doing math. Others, not so much. Then they had people look at a screen and told them that a math problem would occasionally pop up. Before it did, they'd give a little advance warning. A yellow square would pop up. Let's give it a try. I'm going to show you a series of questions on your screen. Occasionally, a math problem will show up. You'll see a little yellow square before it does. How did you feel when you saw the square? In Sian's study, people who liked math were fine. But the people who worried about their math skills, when they saw the yellow square, certain areas of the brain lit up— areas associated with pain. This was true even before they were doing any actual math. They simply knew it was coming, and the pain part of the brain was activated.

And we've shown this for students taking tests, especially students who are really nervous and anxious about how they're gonna do on the test. We've shown that actually just getting them to reinterpret what they're feeling leads to better performance.

Instead of focusing on the problem, they were now focused on the fact that they didn't think they would be able to solve the problem. The volunteers were not using their working memory to solve the math problem. They were using their working memories to remind themselves that they were not good at math. There's another way that anxiety can make us choke. Let's say you had to read something out. It's a simple line of text, and you get to practice as much as you like beforehand. Should be easy, right? Well, take a look at what happened back in 2009. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was swearing in President-elect Barack Obama. Both men had spent years in the public eye dealing with difficult situations. They had ample time to practice. The words were not complicated. I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States. Instead, here's how it went.

I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear. I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will execute the office of President to the United States faithfully. That I will execute faithfully the office of President of the United States faithfully, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help you God. So help me God. Congratulations, Mr. President.

What happened? It wasn't a difficult challenge, but the stakes were Were very, very high. When that internal pressure gauge inside your head gets into the red zone, things that you can do in your sleep become very difficult. In front of all of the people who were watching, the Chief Justice and the president-elect started to focus on the audience and not on the sentence in front of them. And once things started to go wrong, I bet there was a voice inside their heads that said, You're screwing up. In front of millions of people. Think about the last time you tried to parallel park. Was anyone watching? If so, chances are it was much harder to do. The stakes are just higher when you're performing before a crowd. Sometimes the people around us can make us choke because we believe that they believe we're going to mess up. There's a word for this in the world of psychology, stereotype threat. Researchers find that if you believe that others hold a negative stereotype about you, you are more likely to behave in ways that make that stereotype come true. Put another way, the views that other people have of you can become prophecies that come true. There was even a movie about this idea some years ago. It was titled White Men Can't Jump. It was about the stereotype that white players are not as good at basketball as black players. Have you been in a situation where you are aware that others expect you to fail? If so, you know how easy it becomes for you to choke. So what are the solutions to choking? What can you do to keep yourself from freezing up the next time you have a presentation, or a job interview, or a big game? The first thing to do is practice. Remember Steph Curry on the basketball court? Practice helps you become so fluent in the task that it becomes nearly automatic. Now your working memory is free to focus on what's important. But what if you feel really nervous? The next time jitters set in, instead of thinking of nervousness as an emotional state, try to think of it as a physiological state. If you get sweaty palms or feel your heart is pounding, instead of telling yourself, I'm in over my head, focus on the symptoms and then reframe them. Say, my palms are sweaty, my heart is racing. That means I must be excited. My body is getting ready for a challenge.

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.

Breathing is also an underrated trick. Not only does it take your mind off the thing you're worried about, it can calm your body in the process. Here's one final tip for acing your next performance. Try a ritual. If you start to pay too much attention to things that you shouldn't be focused on, a ritual can help. You can come up with your own rituals— count backwards, sing a song, or focus on one important thought. In moments of pressure, it can sometimes feel like our minds are working against us. But these blocks are not signs of weakness. They're clues into how our brains operate. And how we might learn to work with our hidden brains for a better outcome. If you want to learn more about how your mind works, please tune into the Hidden Brain audio podcast. You can find it on Apple, Spotify, or at hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you next time. Thank you.