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

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You could try using apps such as Headspace or Calm to get more attuned at noticing, but not responding to, your unhelpful thoughts. Managers and employees need to understand and regulate pressure to improve performance and minimise the harmful effects of stress. 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.

Athletes find themselves thinking about processes that normally come automatically. This was Boswell’s experience. The simple act of bowling a ball, on which his career had been built, suddenly seemed alien. “When your conscious mind doesn’t trust your subconscious mind, you’ve got an issue,” he explained. “When you’re in the flow and you’re not thinking about it, you just bowl and you just trust your skills.” Of that day at Lord’s, Boswell said: “I just didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust my action and I didn’t trust my skill set, and then when it was put under high pressure, it failed.” These sections have a strong resonance with the Centre for Army Leadership’s Leading Through Crisis: A Practitioner’s Guide where Army leaders are asked to communicate honestly and encourage challenge. Tools of the Trade explores the need for high performance teams to be matched with the right equipment and be proficient in operating such equipment. Pressure Testing These same principles are especially important when you feel under pressure – for instance, imagine your boss surprises you by asking you to pitch your product to an array of potential buyers, or perhaps you’re feeling nervous as you prepare to meet your partner’s parents for the first time. You might think that, in such high-pressure situations, the way to excel is to grit your teeth and toughen up. But a mentally flexible approach is arguably more beneficial, especially when you are clear on your values and know what matters to you. With values, you always have a direction, and every time you need to make a decision under pressure, you have a barometer against which to measure. A flexible, values-driven approach helps you perform well because you’ll be mentally nimble and you’re always working to meet your own metrics in life, not those driven by others, by fears or by expectations. 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. 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.The similarities in cognitive systems that are susceptible to pressure effects and the conserved biological mechanisms suggest that pressure may have a stronger impact on results in comparative cognition than is currently recognized. Indeed, we now have some direct evidence that some non-human species are susceptible to pressure. However, this evidence comes from only two samples of animals from two non-human primate species—therefore there are some obvious next steps. First, the samples from both studies are very small and come from a specific group of captive monkeys. Thus, we need a broader sample of these species to generalize more broadly to the species (the same, of course, is true for human studies!). Second, an obvious next step is to expand to other species, and in particular, beyond the primates. It makes sense to begin with those for which evidence already exists that they possess a working-memory-like system. If these primates’ responses to pressure are influencing performance in working memory tasks, we predict a correlation between working memory performance and markers of the stress response, such as hormonal changes or behavioral changes, as we have observed in capuchin monkeys. It would also be good to explore whether other systems are prone to pressure influences. For instance, we also have evidence that psychomotor function might be impacted in rhesus macaques (Smoulder et al. 2021), but what about other cognitive systems that are, like working memory, related to executive functioning (i.e., inhibition of impulse)? We have growing evidence that working memory capacity may predict general cognitive ability across a range of domains in animals (Kolata et al. 2005), so pressure effects may have explanatory value in tasks spanning multiple domains in which we see individual variation in performance or decision-making.

Chronic stress refers to a state of long-term stress over months or years, whereas acute stress is the result of a single threatening situation and occurs in-the-moment at the appearance of a threat. By this definition, pressure most likely represents an acute stressor, in which the situational stakes pose a threat to psychological well-being (and in the case of life-or-death decision-making, to physical well-being). Chronic stress has been well-studied in both humans and other animals, with the overall conclusion that chronic stress usually has negative impacts on body condition, immune response, and cognitive functioning (Sapolsky 1990). In addition, chronic stress impacts the immediate stress response. Previous work found a negative association between increased chronic stress and cortisol reactivity in-the-moment, suggesting that high levels of chronic stress downregulate the impact of any one stressor (Rich and Romero 2005), although this does not necessarily translate into behavioral differences. Therefore, long-term and immediate stress states probably interact to produce any given behavior or decision, and we should be concerned with both chronic and acute stressors when assessing an individual’s behavioral response to a threat and the underlying decision-making processes. Some athletes are gifted with psychological advantages from birth, but these are not immutable. Interventions designed to increase mental toughness can improve athletes’ performances. The more players practise, the more automated aspects of their movements become, helping athletes to manage anxiety and heighten focus. Maintaining pre-performance routines, as Sörenstam did, makes players more robust under pressure. Coaching designed to help players think independently, rather than being told what to do, helps develop implicit rather than explicit knowledge, and gives players the best chance of avoiding choking. One final avenue of future research is collaborative efforts among laboratory and field researchers to explore pressure as an explanation for suboptimal behavior. The decisions that animals make in their natural environment probably represent their most “typical” cognitive abilities (or how those typical abilities manifest behaviorally in ecologically relevant situations), but typical abilities might not represent the full extent of what animals are capable of. Laboratory settings offer invaluable opportunities to test animal cognition in a controlled way, to probe specific aspects of the decision-making process, and to use animals as a model system for understanding the effects of pressure as a part of that controlled approach. In turn, field studies can apply this understanding to explore high-stress situations that may be more comparable to evolutionarily relevant events, informing which situations are most likely to induce responses to pressure in other species. By including pressure in models of cognition in producing wild behavior, we can better understand why some individuals might be more successful when success hinges on deciding correctly, for instance when deciding whether to flee or to stand and fight, or why some individuals are able to manage complex social encounters more effectively than others. In addition, the addition of naturalistic observation in high-pressure situations would provide an ecologically relevant understanding of pressure that has the important added benefit of expanding the body of work to more samples within a species in its natural environment.Replace forms of self-talk that increase the pressure. Avoid telling yourself that you should do this or you must do that, and instead adopt more gentle and open language that is about opportunity and noticing. For example, if I’ve spent the last ten years in a job writing reports for senior management and today I have to produce an important report for the CEO, writing that report might be comfortable for me. An experienced writer used to an audience at that level should be in their comfort zone. However, if I ask a new starter to produce the same report on their first day, that would be a very high-pressure situation. 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.

Break some of your own rules. Switch things up in everyday life so that you find it easier to be flexible when you’re under pressure. Given that employees perform best when the level of pressure is just right, it makes sense to train managers so they know how to manage pressure in the right way.

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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 So, you’ve been in the stretch zone too long, the pressure’s increased and you’ve had no time to recover. What happens? You enter the strain zone.