Why you choke under pressure
And how to instantly reprogram your mind to stop doing it
Oh, the phenomenon of choking under pressure.
It happened to me when I was a nine-year-old figure skater and fell twice during my first competition. It happened again when I was starting out as a public speaker - I used to feel as if my whole personality would freeze up onstage. And it sometimes happens now, as a 58-year-old tennis player, even though there are zero stakes to the matches I play.
Mostly, I’ve written this off as anxiety, an emotion that I’m quite familiar with.
But it turns out that there’s way more to choking than simple anxiety - and that understanding the mechanics of choking gives you the tools you need to stop doing it so much.
My friend David Epstein is the wildly thoughtful (now there are two words that may never have been strung together before, not even by AI, ha) author of the #1 New York Times best seller Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, and of the bestseller The Sports Gene. He also writes a fantastic Substack, Range Widely. And he has a new book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, coming out soon!
Today, David is with us, to tell us what exactly happens in your brain when you choke under pressure - and how to make it stop. I found this information to be nothing short of revelatory, and if you, or a loved one, is an athlete, performer, or test-taker who chokes under pressure, I think you will too: