How to Avoid Choking under Pressure

Afraid of crumbling when it counts? Try not to think so hard.

By Elizabeth Svoboda
Scientific American

You’ve practiced your big presentation a thousand times. Your last rehearsal was perfect, and you’re ready to go. You tell yourself that for the real thing, you will focus on keeping your voice up, smiling, and enunciating clearly and slowly. Suddenly, at the podium, you freeze—all your preparation is for naught as you stand there like a deer in headlights. What happened?

We all have had the experience. But why do we sometimes, without warning, inexplicably screw up just when it matters most? The answer lies in the way our brains are structured. When we have practiced something so well that we no longer need to think about it, subconscious processing systems are at work. When we then slow down to focus on these “automated” actions, we can thwart those processes, tripping ourselves up. And a raft of recent research is revealing who drops the ball and when, yielding surprising insights that could help frequent flubbers leave their self-sabotaging tendencies behind.

Don’t Concentrate

Since the early 1980s researchers have been studying in earnest the question of why we choke. In 1984 Florida State University psychologist Roy Baumeister officially defined “choking” as “performance decrements under pressure circumstances.” Ongoing research in the past 25 years has established that factors such as audience pressure and high performance expectations make us especially vulnerable to choking—just as perennial chokers might surmise.

(More here.)