Staying Calm under Pressure

“Pressure can burst a pipe, or pressure

can make a diamond”.
When an athlete, singer, musicians, public speaker, actor, professional player or in general
any competitor who misses or goes wrong during the most important moment of their life
they experience a phenomenon known as choking. Choking happens when competitors under
intense pressure try to perform their best and are suddenly hit by performance anxiety. This
circumstance can be experienced by one of the world’s best players, musicians, public
speakers and in general by anyone who are under intense pressure to show the best for what
they trained for months or even years.

Most people intuitively blame it on their nerves, but why does being nervous
undermine expert performance? There are two theories which primarily says that choking
under pressure boils down to focus. The first theory is the distraction theory it determines that
performance suffers when the mind is pre-occupied with worries, doubts or fears instead of
focusing on the main task relevant and irrelevant thoughts compete for the same attention.
Therefore something has to give way as the brain can only process one set of information at
once. Under a study of human cognitive level tests were conducted on university students
where they were given some set of math problems divided into two groups. The first group
had to perform on a competition level whereas the second group were to solve those
problems despite any pressure of competition, results were shown that the students under no
pressure performed better that the group under pressure.

Second group of explanation is the explicit monitoring theory where pressure cause
people to over analyse the task at hand. Here the logic goes like once a skill becomes
automatic thinking about its precise mechanics interferes with your ability to do it. Tasks we
do unconsciously seems to be most vulnerable to this kind of choking. Diving deep into a
task’s mechanics makes it worse to drive accurate charts, simply by focusing more on your
ability and skills makes it lot easier to perform the particular job accurately. So choking
affects everyone and anyone under pressure although the level can vary as some of us will
experience it lesser or more depending on our self-confidence, self-conscious and sensitivity.
 So how do we avoid choking when it really counts? After bunch of studies and
research experts found that in order to avoid or at least minimize the phenomenon of choking
one should practise not just under normal circumstance but to practise under stressful
conditions. Secondly a pre-performance routine as simple as taking a deep breath, repeating a
keyword or doing a rhythmic sequence of movements and finally having an external focus on
an ultimate goal works better than having an internal focus where someone is already tuned
into the mechanics of what they are doing instead on focusing on the mechanics at that
particular moment. In short, practise under pressure with focus and with the glorious end of
the goal in sight makes perfect. In conclusion, the pressure of today will make you shine
tomorrow just like if there was no pressure there won’t be any diamonds.