The comfort zone results in a good level of performance, but staying in the comfort zone all the time is not to be encouraged. Everyone needs to stretch. Stretch Other types of working memory tasks (and tasks that involve fluid intelligence, a process related to working memory) beyond mathematical problem-solving are also affected by pressure. For instance, the Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) task involves visual completion problems that require participants to select the final image to complete an array. Notably, the matrices vary in working memory demands, which could make some trials in the task particularly prone to deficits under pressure. Indeed, participants were influenced negatively by pressure only on high-working-memory demand trials. High-working memory capacity participants also showed a greater accuracy deficit under high pressure (Gimmig et al. 2006), supporting that working memory processes are susceptible to pressure in areas beyond mathematical reasoning. As another example, the Simon task (Simon 1990) requires participants to ignore irrelevant location cues to respond correctly to a visual color cue by pressing one of two buttons, a procedure that involves controlling processing in working memory by directing attention. When participants were tasked with completing trials in the Simon task while in the presence of an experimenter (a situation that might increase pressure through monitoring), they were significantly more likely to show an effect of the interference of the irrelevant cues (Belletier et al. 2015). This effect was heightened in high working memory capacity participants (Belletier et al. 2015). Working memory (and processes that are related to it, such as executive attention or more general fluid intelligence) has been admittedly the most well-studied process in terms of purely cognitive performance, but it also has been particularly well-supported by those studies. 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

The pressure performance curve / stress curve showing the relationship between pressure and performance. How you think about your feelings and emotions is one aspect of self-talk, but there’s another kind that can also be highly counterproductive when you’re under pressure. One word that particularly raises a red flag is ‘should’, as in ‘I should be able to give this presentation easily’ or ‘I should be able to finish this project tonight.’ This word is loaded with expectations and pressure, and it prevents you from being open to all the options in front of you. 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. He does not believe there is anything inevitable about choking – and that everyone can practise in a way that makes them less likely to choke. “Could I have dealt with that differently? Could I have had methods to slow myself down? I think I could.”

Data Availability Statement

Boreout can occur when someone is without motivating forces and has no reason to do anything. Imagine just drifting aimlessly, completely bored. It can be fun doing nothing for a while. But sitting watching TV in your pyjamas all day every day is not good for your performance and not good for your health. If thinking this way feels unnatural, you can make it easier through practice. Try writing down a few of examples of the kind of pressurised self-talk that goes through your head, such as ‘I should be the best,’ and then cross out the ‘should’ and replace it with something less restrictive, such as ‘I have an opportunity to do better than last time.’ 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.” 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.

The approach to coping with pressure that I teach is all about cultivating not mental toughness but mental flexibility, also known as ‘psychological flexibility’ (drawing partly on the principles of acceptance and commitment therapy or ACT, an approach in psychotherapy that has grown out of cognitive and behavioural therapy and blends it with insights from Buddhism and other perspectives). Mental flexibility is vital for coping well with pressure because, if you want to perform brilliantly, you need the skills to handle whatever is thrown at you, especially the unexpected. In sport, this might be a last-minute course change or finding out a scout will be watching your match that night. On the stage, it could be the understudy having to step in during the interval. In office work, it could be a last-minute request to join the team for a new business pitch. Cultivating your mental flexibility will allow you to better manage these kinds of moments. 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. The author, Dr Stephen Hearns, is a consultant in emergency medicine and leading member of Scotland’s EMRS – the Emergency Medical Retrieval Service. The EMRS, created in 2004, provides pre-hospital care in remote and austere locations. Dr Hearns has also been a member of the Arrochar Mountain Rescue Team for 20 years, has provided medical support to expeditions in challenging environments worldwide, as well as visiting sister retrieval services all over the world to learn and develop techniques for extreme emergency medicine. 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.When you’re under pressure, you might feel overwhelmed by your feelings and notice aggressive, unforgiving language bouncing around your mind, such as ‘I’m furious’ or ‘I’m terrified’. It’s as if the passengers on your bus are using very emotive language as they try to get your attention. Interpreting your feelings in this way can trigger your automatic fight-or-flight response, which evolved to help you survive danger, but is highly unhelpful to performance in many situations in modern life. Benítez ME, Sosnowski MJ, Tomeo OB, Brosnan SF (2018) Urinary oxytocin in capuchin monkeys: validation and the influence of social behavior. Am J Primatol 80:e22877 To learn many more of the ACT skills included in this Guide, I recommend the book ACTivate Your Life (2015) by the clinical psychologists and trainers Joe Oliver, Jon Hill and Eric Morris. Despite this limitation in our ability to generalize across all humans, there are some predictable patterns in the studies from WEIRD samples that have been conducted. For instance, focusing a person’s attention on their actions during a task seems to increase the likelihood of failure under pressure. In a task where participants had to skillfully manipulate a ball through an apparatus under pressure, the instruction to be acutely aware of what their hands were doing as they completed the task increased the likelihood of participants failing under the pressure (Baumeister and Showers 1986). Post-task, self-reports of self-consciousness were also associated with higher likelihood of failing (Baumeister and Showers 1986). Similarly, basketball players who reported self-consciousness along with trait anxiety were more likely to miss free throws when put into high-pressure conditions (Wang et al. 2004). Therefore, adding conscious attention to a practiced procedure seems to change the way that human participants are completing the task. In an interesting and promising intervention approach, targeted self-consciousness training seems to improve performance under pressure. Soccer players that practiced being aware of their own performance during penalty shots performed better in true high-pressure situations (Reeves et al. 2007). 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

Not only do we not perform well with insufficient pressure, the resultant tedium can also be very stressful. The signs of boreout include: 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.Whatever sphere you inhabit, whether you’re a pro or amateur athlete, businessperson, teacher, full-time parent or something else entirely, you’re bound to have felt the pressure of your own expectations and the expectations of others. Almost everyone must cope with daunting situations, in which they don’t feel they have the skills needed to succeed and meet the weight of those expectations. I’m a sports psychologist and I help teach my clients mental techniques to deal with this kind of pressure. I’ve found the same practical techniques and principles that I teach to athletes are also invaluable to my clients from many walks of life, including business and theatre. Remember: Understanding and managing the relationship between pressure and performance is crucial for your productivity and your health. Learn more A few hours earlier, Europe feared they had lost the Ryder Cup. Now, Europe could “go to sleep on a high after winning the last two matches,” Poulter recalled, and the team felt “energised to go out to have an opportunity to win”. 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. You can see from the graph that pressure runs along the x-axis horizontally from low to very high. Performance is along the y-axis from low to high. We’ve segmented the bell-shaped pressure performance curve into zones of various colours. These colours represent a traffic light warning system. Green is good; amber is caution; and red is bad.