3 Easy tips to handle the situation
Your favorite sportsperson zooms in for a killer point. The crowd holds its breath, and in the split second of truth, he misses the ball. He has ‘choked’. He failed, despite months, if not years, of practice, right at the critical moment.
Choking is also common in sports; performing under pressure in sporting arenas is the norm, and often boils down to a few decisive moments. But despite often unfavorable odds, some choking is to be expected. Nonetheless, athletes are not the only people who feel haunted by performance anxiety — public speakers, spelling-bee contestants, theater actors and even world-renowned musicians all suffer from it. So why do nerves lead athletes to choke? Why does performance suffer because of anxiety?
These are the distraction theories. Second, we have the focus theories. These say that, in nearly all cases, choking under pressure comes down to focus. When the working brain is overwhelmed by fears, doubts, or worries, it can’t pay attention to the task at hand. If too many ideas are competing for attention — relevant, such as the shot at the basket, and irrelevant, such as that it’s halftime — something has to give. The brain can’t process everything all at once. Tasks that rely on working memory, what psychologists call our temporary storage for the phone number we just got or the list of items at the supermarket, are especially vulnerable to pressure.
An experiment in 2004 with university students had each complete math problems, one set easy and the other more complex and memory-intensive. Beforehand, half the students completed both types of problems. The others did them when calm and under duress, and everyone did great on the easier problems. Yet the stressed students did worse on the more difficult, memory-intensive tasks, all while believing that stress served, like a tiger’s tail, as an early warning signal that they hadn’t studied enough.
The second category of account as to why choking occurs is given by what I have called explicit monitoring theories. These are concerned with explaining how choking can happen through pressure leading people to think too much about what they’re actually doing. The idea here is that we eventually learn how to do many things by heart, so thinking in detail about the mechanics of doing such things can disrupt our capacity to do them. Indeed, sequenced tasks (eg, swinging a golf club) seem most prone to this sort of choking.
In one study, researchers primed competitive golfers by either being told simply to putt as accurately as possible or being made hyper-aware of the mechanics of their putting stroke. Those golfers who performed this action the rest of the time without much conscious thought were suddenly worse at putting when they tuned into the most minute aspects of their own movements.
Choking is not inevitable — some are more susceptible than others: self-conscious, anxious, or afraid of being negatively judged by others.
So what can anyone do to make sure that they don’t choke when it really counts? Practicing under stressful conditions helps: in a study on expert dart players, those who hadn’t routinely practiced under stress performed worse under pressure from anxiety than those who’d become accustomed to it.
Secondly, plenty of performers lavish praise on the merits of a pre-performance ritual — be it a final few breaths, a cue word, or a set of kinaesthetic gestures. Experimental research in golf, bowls, and water polo, for example, shows that short rituals lead to more consistent and accurate performance under pressure.
Thirdly, external focus, which asks you to think about the endpoint, tends to be more effective than internal focus — which means tuning in to the mechanisms of what you are doing. For example, researchers aiming at golfers found that studying the flight of the ball while hitting chip shots led to significantly better strokes than studying the movement of one’s arms.
So, in the end, perhaps we can tweak the cliche: practice with pressure, with focus, and with that wonderful end in sight, makes perfect.