TED-Ed Lesson:
Your favorite athlete closes in for a victorious win. The crowd holds its breath, and, at the crucial moment, she misses the shot.
That competitor just experienced the phenomenon known as choking, where despite months, even years of practice, a person fails right when it matters most.
Choking is common in sports where performance often occurs under intense pressure and depends on key moments.
And yet, performance anxiety also haunts public speakers, contestants in spelling bees, and even world-famous musicians.
Most people intuitively blame it on their nerves.
But why does being nervous undermine expert performance?
There are two sets of theories, which both say that primarily, choking under pressure boils down to focus.
First, there are the distraction theories. These suggest that performance suffers when the mind is preoccupied with worries, doubts, or fears, instead of focusing its attention on performing the task at hand.
When relevant and irrelevant thoughts compete for the same attention, something has to give. The brain can only process so much information at once.
Tasks that challenge working memory, the mental “scratch pad” we use to temporarily store phone numbers and grocery lists, are especially vulnerable to pressure.
In a 2004 study, a group of university students were asked to perform math problems, some easy, others more complex and memory-intensive.
Half the students completed both problem types with nothing at stake, while the others completed them when calm and under pressure.
While everyone did well on the easy problems, those who were stressed performed worse on the more difficult, memory-intensive tasks.
Explicit monitoring theories
Explicit monitoring theories make up the second group of explanations for choking under pressure. They’re concerned with how pressure can cause people to overanalyze the task at hand.
Here, the logic goes that once a skill becomes automatic, thinking about its precise mechanics interferes with your ability to do it.
Tasks we do unconsciously seem to be most vulnerable to this kind of choking.