Why Athletes Choke and what you can learn from it

As the 2024 Olympics came to a close, we saw many great performances. We also saw lots of athletes who were expected to perform well but didn’t

Sian Beilock, in her book Choke, shares some insights into why it happens and how to prevent it

What is choking and why it happens:?

Choking under pressure is poor performance that occurs in response to the perceived stress of a situation.The phrase choking under pressure has been used to describe what happens when people perform at a lower level than what they? are capable of in high-stakes situations

Choking is not simply poor performance, however. Choking is sub optimal performance. It's when you or an individual athlete, actor, musician, or student-perform worse than expected given what you are capable of doing, and worse than what you have done in the past.

Choking can occur when people think too much about activities that are usually automatic. This is called "paralysis by analysis.

People choke under pressure because they worry. They worry about the situation, its consequences, what others will think. They worry about what they will lose if they fail to succeed and whether they have the tools to make it. They may even conjure images in their head of the unwanted outcomethe flubbed performance, the missed shot, the fall on the ice.

Understanding why performance fails:

As we get better at performing a skill, our conscious memory for how we do it gets worse and worse.

Dr. Richard Masters and his colleagues who run the Institute of Human Performance at the University of Hong Kong believe that an athlete's tendency to overthink their performance is one big predictor of whether they will choke in important games or matches.

Procedural memory is implicit or unconscious. You can think of procedural memory as your cognitive toolbox that contains a recipe that, if followed, will produce a successful bike ride, golf putt, baseball swing, or fully operating cell phone. Interestingly, these recipes operate largely outside of your conscious awareness. Your own facility is because, when you are good at performing a skill, you do it too quickly to monitor it consciously. This makes it hard for you to articulate what is in your procedural memory. If you don't think about the specific steps you go through while performing a task, reporting these steps to someone else (or using these steps to estimate the time it might take others to perform the same task) can be difficult.

We become more expert and our procedural memory grows, but we may not be able to communicate our understanding or help others learn that skill

The different types of tasks:

Our memory (and the tasks we engage in) can roughly be divided into explicit and procedural forms. In the former case you have activities such as adding numbers in your head, reasoning through a difficult issue with your client, or recalling what was said in a heated argument you had last week with a coworker. In the latter case, it's taking a golf swing, landing a double axel on skates, or operating a cell phone. Because different skills rely on different types of memories, the answer to questions about why people fail to per form at their best and what can be done to prevent it is not "one size fits all.

Steps to not choke

When people practice in a casual environment with nothing on the line and are then put under stress to perform well (let's say because a good chunk of money is now in play or their friends and colleagues will be watching their every move), they often choke under the pressure. But if people practice shooting a gun or shooting hoops or even problem solving on the fly with some mild stressors to begin with (say, a small amount of money for good performance or a few people watching a dress rehearsal), their performance doesn't suffer when the big pressures come around. Simulating low levels of stress helps prevent cracking under increased pressure, because people who practice this way learn to stay calm, cool, and collected in the face of whatever comes their way

Practicing answering on-the-spot questions before they actually have to face them in a real do-or-die situation may be just what the VPs and their team members need in order to get ready for the high-stakes meetings

New research out of my Human Performance Laboratory shows that disclosing does more than just make you feel better: it may actually change the workings of brain when the pressure is on. The end result is better test performance under stress.

Those students given the opportunity to write about their worries before the pressure-filled math test aced it, while those who didn't write choked under the pressure. Writing about your worries before a test or presentation prevents choking.

When a person repeatedly confronts, describes, and relives thoughts and feelings about his or her negative experiences, the very act of disclosure lessens these thoughts.

Essentially, meditation training allows people to develop means to engage and disengage from what they experience something that is extremely useful for battling self-doubt in pressure-filled situations.

Getting people to think about aspects of themselves that are conducive to success can be enough to propel them to a top performance and prevent choking.

Seeing yourself from multiple perspectives, not just as a girl in a situation where women don't usually excel, can help thwart the spiral of self-doubt and worries that interfere with people's ability to perform at their best.

How worry prevents us from being at our best

When worries flood the brain, whatever these worries may be, they deplete working memory resources that would otherwise be available and your performance can suffer.

Working-memory is housed in the prefrontal cortex, which works with all different kinds of information, but certain parts of the prefrontal cortex are devoted to supporting particular types of information. Tasks that are more verbal in nature, for example, tend to activate areas of the left prefrontal cortex. This is because doing something verbal, like remembering a phone number, involves talking in your head and in most adults the brain areas supporting language are largely constrained to the left side of the brain

Worrying (and trying to suppress your worries) uses up workingmemory that could otherwise be used to maintain several pieces of information in mind at once so that you can make a reasoned pitch to a client or argue effectively with your spouse when you are pushing for a new kitchen remodel.Worries alone can't explain failure in sport because stellar performances in this arena don't rely heavily on the prefrontal cortex brain resources that worries co-opt.?

The answer lies in what worrying catalyzes. When people are concerned about themselves and their performance, they tend to try to control their movements in order to ensure an optimal outcome. What results is that fluid performances-performances that run best largely outside of conscious awareness are messed up. Now, if you are just learning the basics-first I step up to the ball, position my club head, my feet, etc.-this type of attention to detail can be a good thing. But if you are executing a skill you have done a thousand times in the past, the overattention that ensues when you are trying to perform at your best is exactly what makes you fall flat on your face.

Under pressure, people start worrying, which leads them to try to control their performance. Tasks that rely heavily on working-memory suffer from worrying. But sports skills and other activities that run? largely outside working-memory are hurt, not because of worrying, but because of the attention and control that worrying produce.

If you happen to be performing a complex thinking or reasoning problem that drains working-memory, then worries alone can lead choke. If you are performing a highly practiced motor skill, then worries in themselves do not lead to choking. But your attempts to consciously control your performance will trip you up.

Other notes:

• Stepping outside your own point of view and relating to people who have less knowledge and skill is not such an easy task.
• When you have to teach someone who knows less than you, you end up learning the material better yourself. Poorer students can also help the stronger students to think about a problem differently or "outside the box," which facilitates the type of creativity that is often needed to solve atypical problems in new, intuitive ways.
• Merely being aware of a stereotype can bring down your performance
• If she constantly walks around with fears about her ability to succeed in a male-dominated field, her stress may never subside
• If you constantly walk around with a cloud of self-doubt over your head brought on by the mere awareness of stereotypes about your intelligence-then writing about your self-worth might very well shrink that cloud.
• When athletes think about themselves screwing up, they are more likely to do so.
• Heightened attention to detail can actually mess you up.
• THINK ABOUT WHAT TO SAY, NOT WHAT TO AVOID SAYING