Perform Under Pressure: Change the Way You Feel, Think and Act Under Pressure

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When you’re under pressure, you might feel overwhelmed by your feelings and notice aggressive, unforgiving language bouncing around your mind, such as ‘I’m furious’ or ‘I’m terrified’. It’s as if the passengers on your bus are using very emotive language as they try to get your attention. Interpreting your feelings in this way can trigger your automatic fight-or-flight response, which evolved to help you survive danger, but is highly unhelpful to performance in many situations in modern life.

Blascovich J, Tomaka J (1996) The biopsychosocial model of arousal regulation. Adv Exp Soc Psychol 28:1–51Another important point from this study was that many monkeys did not choke when their performance was considered overall (Sosnowski et al. 2022). Instead, these individuals seem to thrive, or perform better, on high-pressure trials over the entire duration of testing, or improved their performance in sessions beyond the first few. This improvement in performance for some individuals highlighted the range of response to pressure—some individuals failed to complete the task when the stakes were high, while others were more likely to succeed. While the success of these individuals was almost certainly related to experience with performing under pressure by the final session, it is also probably related to motivation—the high-pressure trials remained highly rewarding even after the difficulty was removed, so monkeys that were able to perform well under pressure may have been particularly motivated to do so. Indeed, in some of these individuals, the data suggested an initial decrement in performance in very early sessions, before a rebound in performance on these high-pressure trials beyond baseline in later ones. This is not unlike results from human subjects—not only do some individuals have the “clutch gene”, as it is colloquially called in sports, but in general, people are less likely to choke when they have experience performing in a high-stakes context (Oudejans and Pijpers 2010).

You may sometimes find yourself in the boreout zone if your work is repetitive, easy and mundane with little opportunity for social interaction. Even varied work that you see as having little value can lead to boreout. For hundreds of thousands of years human survival has been based upon hunting and gathering food, finding shelter, seeking a mate and raising a family. That powerful sense of purpose is hard wired into our genetics. We can’t feel good unless we have a purposeful goal. The best golfers make greater use of positive self-talk, goal-setting and relaxation skills, reporting less worry and less negative thinking. Personality characteristics such as hardiness and even narcissism can further insulate the best athletes from the ravages of anxiety. You can see from the graph that pressure runs along the x-axis horizontally from low to very high. Performance is along the y-axis from low to high. We’ve segmented the bell-shaped pressure performance curve into zones of various colours. These colours represent a traffic light warning system. Green is good; amber is caution; and red is bad.The Zone of Delusion is where we falsely believe our performance will improve if we keep working harder. Rather than getting better and better, our performance decreases with too much pressure. We lose focus; we frantically multitask; make mistakes. The quality of our work suffers as a result. Benítez ME, Sosnowski MJ, Tomeo OB, Brosnan SF (2018) Urinary oxytocin in capuchin monkeys: validation and the influence of social behavior. Am J Primatol 80:e22877 By using a broader range of emotional language and avoiding pressurised self-talk, you too can start to replace words such as ‘should’, ‘must’ and ‘have’ with more open, alternative words such as ‘notice’, ‘awareness’ and ‘opportunity’. In moving towards this gentler language, you can adjust to the demands of a situation without allowing emotion to take over. It will help you focus more on process (the way you perform) over outcome (in terms of success or failure) and allow you to look at what you can do to live in line with your values, rather than fearing or avoiding potential failure. Moving on from boreout, there’s a transition and then we are into the comfort zone. You’ll recognise this as a moderate level of pressure that feels comfortable. It’s enough to motivate you to get things done and you can function happily here.

Remember, everyone is unique. Personality traits, skill levels, experience and particular preferences for certain types of work mean it’s impossible to predict which situations will cause boreout in everyone. So you must look for the signs. Signs of boreout The pressure performance curve / stress curve showing the relationship between pressure and performance. We are rarely either totally stressed or completely relaxed, but often somewhere in the middle. Our position can change week-by-week, day-to-day, or even minute-by-minute. Although cortisol seems to be a key component of how an individual responds under pressure, other hormones probably impact performance as well, or interact with cortisol to do so. Although the HPA response occurs within minutes of the stressor’s onset, most of its activity still occurs after the response of the sympathetic nervous system (the sympatho-adrenal response), which is connected by its own, separate set of hormonal messengers, including norepinephrine, epinephrine, and the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. We already know that epinephrine mediates memory performance (this was first reported in rats by Gold and Van Buskirk 1975), but the effects are both dose-dependent and time-dependent (Gold 1987). Because the sympatho-adrenal response to a stressor typically occurs either simultaneously with or immediately prior to the HPA response, it is likely that observable evidence of choking is the result of the hormones in both cascades acting on receptors in the parts of the brain that influence memory, such as the aforementioned hippocampal regions and the amygdala. Indeed, activation of the sympathetic nervous system seems to be a necessary component of cortisol’s negative impact on working memory performance (Elzinga and Roelofs 2005).Although the aforementioned deficits of homogenous sampling limit our ability to generalize, the human studies from WEIRD populations have been used in developing theories to explain how pressure impacts cognition and working memory specifically to produce a deficit in performance (Yu 2015). All of these theories relate in some way to the attentional demands that acute stress places on a performing individual and how that shifted attention negatively affects the ability to complete a task or make a decision. However, the theories differ in exactly what causes this attentional shift and to where that attention is reallocated. The distraction account suggests that the experience of pressure is an uncomfortable one, and that this discomfort is distracting enough to a person that their performance in a task suffers (Wine 1971). In essence, this hypothesis posits that performance deficits are due to attention being directed away from the task that needs to be completed. When under pressure, a participant’s attention is largely focused on the uncomfortable experience of the acute stress, and this distraction may lead to slower responses or slower cognitive processing in task-relevant regions. This reallocation of attention takes resources away from the cognitive processing required to complete the task, resulting in a deficit in available attentional resources to complete the task, which causes an observed decrease in performance when under pressure. Additionally, emotional or affective regulation in the face of stressful situations may add to the cognitive effort needed to complete a task under pressure. The High Performing Team explains how structured communication, situational awareness and cooperative behaviour empowers teams to achieve peak flow. It promotes graded assertiveness which empowers junior members of a team to raise issues. Quality leaders are encouraged to use ‘Rally Points’ whereby the perspectives of the team are sort to ensure maximum situational awareness and a shared mental model. Frontline Leadership lists the qualities of a leader and applies high value to emotional intelligence and leader vulnerability. To complete this exercise, then every day for the next week, aim to do something you never normally do. It can be trivial – maybe washing up straight after dinner rather than leaving it until morning, or trying a completely different route home from work. Then the next week, aim every day to stop doing something you always do (maybe stop wearing your watch if you usually do, or avoid making the bed first thing if your usual routine is to make it each morning). The activity should not be anything dramatic or harmful, but something that makes you just a little uncomfortable. Breaking your own rules in this way will teach your brain that you are able to escape routine and that you can be agile. You will learn that, even when you don’t follow your usual routines, all is usually OK in your world. Instead of catastrophising about these feelings or trying to suppress them outright, a more mentally flexible approach is to increase your emotional vocabulary so that you can describe your feelings with more accuracy and nuance (psychologists call this ‘affect labelling’). This is important because most of us tend to be fairly lazy in our language and rely upon six to eight basic emotional descriptors (usually focused around joy, sadness, acceptance, disgust, fear, anger, surprise, and anticipation). When you use more precise words that better describe your actual feelings (there are actually hundreds of emotion words; see here for a list of 135 of the more common ones), this will help you to choose a more helpful coping mechanism for that feeling. When pressure is very high and sustained, we might enter the dangerous, burnout zone. In crisis, we experience exhaustion from chronic stress. Our body perpetually draws on its survival mechanisms as it believes it is in physical danger and the ‘fight or flight’ response takes over. Adrenaline and cortisol are now running the show and we have little chance of focussing on complex mental tasks or making good decisions. We need immediate rest.