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

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Overly rigid thinking and routines can all increase feelings of pressure. Increasing your mental flexibility is the antidote, and one way to do that is by deliberately challenging your usual way of doing things. This sounds super-simple, but if you like rigid routines and have come to rely upon them, you will find it difficult. Great things happen in those moments. There were a lot of good shots executed all within a period of six holes, and it [produced] a level of motivation for the team. There was a big wave of momentum.” Aravind R, Gupta S, Ghayathri Swetha Kumari RA (2022) A pilot study on emotional intelligence & its impact on pre-competitive anxiety: How does it operate in the non-WEIRD Indian sport context? Int J Physiol Nutr Phys Educ. 7:8–16

As a result he is current, competent, credible and connected. These are important credentials to professionals who place high value on being taught by people with authentic experiences that reinforce their teaching. Owning the Pressure Delphis offers workshops, webinars and self-paced online courses delivered and developed by highly qualified and experienced business managers, academics and teachers. We help guide companies along the path to creating healthy and rewarding working environments for their people. According to a study by the RAND Center for the Study of Aging, nearly 50% of all retirees in the US continue to work part time, or return to work fully, after they have retired. Blascovich J, Tomaka J (1996) The biopsychosocial model of arousal regulation. Adv Exp Soc Psychol 28:1–51 Given the similarities in biological and cognitive systems that are implicated in choking, there is clearly reason to believe that other species experience effects of pressure, and that there is a need for explicit focus on their responses to pressure. While pressure certainly may be implicitly involved in many comparative cognition studies (indeed, reward- and time-pressure are often present when testing other species), almost no research has isolated how that pressure influences cognitive performance and decision-making in a way that effectively isolates it from difficulty. This might be because pressure is an intensely experience-based phenomenon, and some past research in human subjects has relied heavily on self-report measures of pressure. Animals, of course, are unable to self-report internal experiences of pressure, making it challenging to consider pressure in non-human subjects. However, pressure has been correlated with physiological measures as well. Because animals show similar physiological responses to stress and similar cognitive abilities as humans, it follows that high-pressure situations may affect their cognitive systems in similar ways as they do in humans, and that biological correlates of the stress response might covary with performance in these high-pressure situations. However, to test this, we must design cognitive studies that manipulate pressure experimentally, to explore how pressure alone influences performance.Boswell wants to prevent others going through what he did. “My mental and physical side just basically crumbled in front of God knows how many people watching live on television … I’ve only watched it once – and then not all the way through. But I watched about five or six balls and just thought: ‘That’s a car crash.’”

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. When pressure is too high, performance decreases. For a while it will exceed that of the comfort zone but soon the effects of stress take over, fatigue sets in and errors are made. Stress symptoms will begin to develop. Frustration, anxiety, poor concentration and shame about not being able to cope take over. Performance begins to plummet. Burnout The pressure performance curve / stress curve showing the relationship between pressure and performance.Comparative cognition research often studies a particular sample (or in some cases, several samples), which can make it difficult to make broad generalizations at a species level, due to the range of responses (Thornton and Lukas 2012), or determine what is due to individual differences. Indeed, as in humans, context and history can strongly influence responses, thus specific animal populations may have different responses to the same stimuli or contexts (for instance, STRANGE samples: Farrar and Ostojić 2021; Webster and Rutz 2020), making it important to consider results not just at a species-level, but at a population or individual level. Of course, the goal is to begin to expand our research samples to a variety of samples that live across ecological contexts, so that we can start to make generalizations about the species as well as those individual differences and contextual variables that influence individual’s outcomes. One challenge, however, is determining which of these factors influencing individual variability are theoretically interesting and usefully predict variation. What we know about choking from the human samples that have been studied suggests that individual reactions to pressure might be one such factor. Failure to manage anxiety and cope with the demands at a crucial moment can lead to a catastrophic drop in performance, known as choking. As the pressure in a match rises, so can an athlete’s anxiety. 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). This is an edited extract from The Best: How Elite Athletes Are Made by A Mark Williams and Tim Wigmore, published by Nicholas Brealey and available at guardianbookshop.co.uk

Another 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). Early in his match on Sunday, Poulter struggled, going two shots down after four holes. Yet Poulter still “knew I’d win my point”, he said later. “It’s a weird feeling when you’re in the zone and all that mayhem is going on around you, and you find that you are entirely focused on the shot. All this adrenaline was flowing and I was thinking to myself: ‘There’s no way I’m losing this.’” Dr Hearns then explains how absence of pressure can cause ‘Disengagement’ but as pressure increases an individual or team can enter an optimal phase of ‘Flow’ where performance is at its highest. However, as the pressure continues to increase a state of ‘Frazzle’ can be entered where performance then decreases. Harris’s book The Happiness Trap (2007) is the one I see most often recommended by psychologists to understand how to incorporate more acceptance, commitment and flexibility into your life. However Peak Performance is primarily directed at the leaders and members of small teams – perhaps platoon and below – while nodding to middle management in regard to training and employee welfare and organizational culture and ethos – subjects that will interest those at the sub-unit level and above.Elite athletes are like the rest of us: they get anxious and it hampers their performance. In the last 30 seconds of tight basketball games, WNBA and NBA players are 5.8% and 3.1% respectively less likely to score from a free throw – an uncontested shot awarded to players who have been fouled – than at other moments in the game. When players take free throws in home matches, they are more likely to miss when the crowd is bigger. Stereotype threat” is the idea that when a negative image becomes associated with a group, it takes on a life of its own, and the outcome and behaviours are more likely to be repeated. In a classic study on this subject from 1999, scientists asked men and women to take an arithmetic test. Some students were told that men and women performed equally well on the test; the others were told that men performed better. When the scientists told the women that women performed just as well as men, they subsequently performed as well as the men on the test. When women were told that women tended to perform worse, they performed worse than men on the test. Being made aware of the stereotype seemed to affect whether participants would adhere to it or not. LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers scoring a free throw earlier this year. NBA players are about 3% less likely to score in the final moments of tight contests than at other points in the game. Photograph: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

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