Stay in the Present When Performing Under Pressure

We are all pretty familiar with the idea that sometimes folks flourish and sometimes they fail "or choke" when performing under extreme pressure. No one wants to produce a subpar performance when it really matters most on a test, in a game, in the boardroom or on the street. But are there any ways to avoid having this happen? It starts by understanding what actually does the choking within our brains.

Monkeys want to win too

Researchers Adam Smoulder, Patrick Marino. Emily Oby, Sam Snyder, Hiroo Miyata, Nick Pavlovsky, William Bishop, Byron Yu, Steven Chase and Aaron Batista at Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute studied electrical activity of collections of neurons related to motor preparation in Rhesus monkeys.

In their study published in the journal "Neuron", monkeys were trained to do a visually-triggered reaching task under conditions with varying levels of reward for successful completion. The main performance result was that when potential rewards were extremely high, performance paradoxically dropped to low levels. In other words, the monkeys "choked under pressure".

Next the scientists wanted to know why that happened. What were the mechanisms in the brain that might be related to performance decrements?

Failure to prepare properly

Voluntary movements are coded by the motor cortex and relayed to the spinal cord and then onto our muscles. But the actual patterning and planning of movements occurs "upstream" in so-called premotor areas. This planning activity can be measured a few 100 milliseconds before movement occurs.

Lead author Adam Smoulder noted that they "found that rewards interact with target preparation signals to drive neural activity toward a region associated with improved reach execution, and then, at the highest rewards, spread away from this region". This suggests that extremely high motivation and drive can actually lead to "a collapse in neural information, and that’s tightly correlated with when the animals choke under pressure.”

The scientists suggest that, with potential for increasing future rewards, behaviors "become overcautious, self-monitoring to their detriment when the jackpots were offered". The authors suggest to overcome this issue folks need to find "the right balance between self-awareness and self-control, and just generally keeping it loose when the stakes go up, even if there is a natural tendency to clamp down.”

Cultivate your cool to avoid future failure

But how do you actually do this? For me this suggests staying in the present moment and focusing on process. Rewards are in the future, now is the only thing that's real. The rewards we think are at hand will never arrive if we don't get through what we are actually doing. So in addition to cultivating your cool, do it in the now.

The results described above provide a mechanistic understanding of the classic "inverted U" relationship between arousal and performance. As arousal, intention, desire to perform increase, so does performance. Until it doesn't. At a certain point we reach a performance plateau followed by a decrease even when effort increases.

When I read this study I immediately wished I had access to this back when I was writing Becoming Batman. In that book I argued that a key part of Batman's ability to perform under pressure was his training and his focus on the present and dealing with what he was doing now, not what might happen later. At the time I did not have access to these new and exciting neurobiological data.

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This also reminds me of the distinction between practice vs performance mindset. During practice we are more open to changes in movement control that's part of the learning to refine what we are doing. As a result motor behavior is more variable and also quite sensitive to our motivations and how we are feeling. When we have a set of skills and just perform the action, movement performance is less variable and of higher quality. We are not trying to think about things, we are just doing.

Although his book was about leadership based on his experiences leading the NFL San Francisco 49ers to multiple Super Bowl Championships, Bill Walsh's "The Score Takes Care of Itself" is a great summary. To be successful and avoid pitfalls in performance, we need to stay in the present, focus on process, and let the outcomes arise naturally from our efforts.

(c) E. Paul Zehr (2024)