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.

Finding yourself in that frame of mind is something which doesn’t happen very often,” Poulter said. “And when you take yourself to that place, you’re able to deliver and turn matches around and execute shots one after another. I don’t know whether we’d have played any different if we’d have been three up in the match. The fact of the matter was, we had to be aggressive. We had to win that match. It was extremely simple. We had to birdie every hole. It is almost certain that context is an important variable in eliciting pressure effects. The work thus far in non-human species has focused on a non-social context in which the subject is playing for him- or her-self alone, and the consequences of failure affect only him or her. It would be interesting to see if group-living species are more sensitive to pressure when failure affects a conspecific groupmate as well as the subject, or if the conspecific adds additional motivation to override an initial deficit in cognitive ability. In humans, there seems to be a negative audience effect; social attention apparently increases the pressure of a situation, even if that attention is supportive (Butler and Baumeister 1998; Wallace et al. 2005). In animals, who show less evidence of possessing consciousness about their performance (i.e., no self-esteem), it is less clear how a social context might influence pressure responses. It might be that, like in humans, a social context hinders performance, or it could be that the presence of an audience simply changes the context surrounding a decision (for instance, showing a video of a high- or low-ranking conspecific’s face changes chimpanzees’ risk preferences: Proctor et al 2017). Thus, exploring how social contexts influence pressure responses in non-humans could further tease apart what exactly is happening cognitively when people choke or thrive under pressure. 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. To begin, it is essential to remember that the thoughts you might have when feeling under pressure are often not actually true. When you are standing on the tennis court, you might catch yourself thinking ‘I’m useless at tennis, this will be embarrassing’ (or in the office, you might think ‘I’m useless at presenting, this will be embarrassing’) but these are not facts, they are emotionally driven thoughts. By recognising this (in ACT, it is known as ‘defusion’), you won’t get unhelpfully caught up in these negative thoughts and any related self-talk, and instead you will have the flexibility to make better decisions that move you towards what matters, not away from whatever you find scary.The same principle applies across contexts, so for example, in the office, try switching from something like ‘I always begin my presentations poorly’ to ‘I am thinking that I begin my presentations poorly,’ and so on, to create distance from the negative thoughts. We can’t quantify what a moderate level of pressure would be. It’s not hours worked or problems solved. The levels of pressure are deliberately vague because one person’s idea of moderate can differ from another’s. In fact, this idea of internal distraction fits nicely with a model of pressure that includes the stress response, and we now have evidence from another non-human primate species that the stress response impacts responses to pressure not just in a physical task, but a cognitive one as well. Many animals show evidence of working memory or working-memory-like systems, but there is considerable variability in their ability to complete working memory-based tasks (Matzel and Kolata 2010). Although much of this variability can be attributed to individual differences in working memory capacity, or the innate ability to monitor and work with information as we are holding it in memory, the potential for pressure effects to add to that capacity load is worth exploring in animals, given that humans are known to choke on working memory tasks specifically. In addition, because we expect there to be variation in stress responses as a result of that pressure, we expect the individual variation in biomarkers of stress to interact with variation in working memory capacity. However, before exploring such an interaction, it is important to establish whether there is such variation related to how individuals perform under pressure in any species other than humans. Belletier C, Davranche K, Tellier IS et al (2015) Choking under monitoring pressure: being watched by the experimenter reduces executive attention. Psychon Bull Rev 22:1410–1416

One area in which individuals differ is in their response to stress. Pressure likely acts as an added stressor when trying to perform, so it seems logical that the stress response is involved in producing poor performance on cognitive tasks. Further, individual differences in how each individual responds to this stress in-the moment might be related to observed differences in performance. Individual responses to stress can differ both in their overall levels of stress as a result of their environment and life history and in how they cope with immediate, temporally transient stressors in the moment. Importantly, overall stress level and immediate reaction to in-the-moment stress often interact to produce observed behaviors and reactions. Therefore, when considering how individuals react to pressure, and which hormones related to stress might influence those reactions, it is important to understand both the distinction and the potential connection between the effects of chronic and acute stress. The best athletes are also more adept at brushing off disappointments during competition. The champion golfer Annika Sörenstam jokes that she never hit a bad shot in her life: “I don’t remember them.” Lesser players could be consumed by their mistakes, but Sörenstam would clinically dissect what happened, then get on with the business of trying to recover her position.You could try using apps such as Headspace or Calm to get more attuned at noticing, but not responding to, your unhelpful thoughts. 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. Blascovich J, Tomaka J (1996) The biopsychosocial model of arousal regulation. Adv Exp Soc Psychol 28:1–51 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.”

In sports psychology, the concept of mental toughness combines the traits of confidence and determination with the feeling of being in control of your own destiny. It might sound appealing, but in my work I take a completely different approach. I’ve seen the harm that can be caused by over-idolising confidence, determination and control, along with self-denial, sacrifice and fearlessness. This tough mindset might look strong and unbreakable from afar, but it actually prompts performers to bury their heads in the sand when faced by an intimidating challenge. Students of mental toughness are taught to ignore their worries and they will often self-sabotage. If you’ve fallen into this trap, you might recognise it in a speech you’ve put off practising, a paper you procrastinated over or a project sitting only half done – all with valid-sounding excuses, but also creating poor performance. When pressure is very high and sustained, we might enter the dangerous, burnout zone. In crisis, we experience exhaustion from chronic stress. Our body perpetually draws on its survival mechanisms as it believes it is in physical danger and the ‘fight or flight’ response takes over. Adrenaline and cortisol are now running the show and we have little chance of focussing on complex mental tasks or making good decisions. We need immediate rest.By using a broader range of emotional language and avoiding pressurised self-talk, you too can start to replace words such as ‘should’, ‘must’ and ‘have’ with more open, alternative words such as ‘notice’, ‘awareness’ and ‘opportunity’. In moving towards this gentler language, you can adjust to the demands of a situation without allowing emotion to take over. It will help you focus more on process (the way you perform) over outcome (in terms of success or failure) and allow you to look at what you can do to live in line with your values, rather than fearing or avoiding potential failure. This was “nearly job done”, Klusener recalled. “I said to Al that the first thing we would like to do is hit the ball for six, shake hands and walk off, but at the same time, if we can scramble a single run somewhere, that also needs to be an option for us. ‘One good ball and the game is over.’” Practise labelling your feelings more accurately. To avoid becoming overwhelmed by negative emotions, focus on improving your emotional literacy and you’ll see this opens the way to more creative solutions.