Dr. Mario's 2nd šŸ§ 

146. How Do You Avoid Freezing Under Pressure

3 min read

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Writing is thinking

Writing for emotion regulation Transcript: Speaker 2 Thereā€™s a research study by Sian Bailak, whoā€™s a scientist, as well known as any scientist whoā€™s studied choking and wrote a book called Choke on the science of high pressure performance. In the intervention that she did with a group of colleagues, this was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a few years ago, it was called Reducing Socioeconomic Disparities in the STEM pipeline through student emotion regulation. So this was a random assignment study, and part of the intervention was expressive writing, kind of what I was doing, even though nobody told me to do it like in my journal, right? Like writing about what was going on with me in that class in those test situations. And in the study, Sian is the senior author, but the first author is Christopher Rosieck. The intervention has multiple components, but the expressive writing component, writing down like your thoughts and your concerns for several minutes. Itā€™s been suggested by these authors that quote, expressive writing may help individuals develop insights that can aid emotion regulation and perceive control of stressful situations, thereby offloading worries and freeing cognitive resources that can be used to optimize performance. (TimeĀ 0:30:33)

New highlights added 2023-05-16

Handling higher levels of arousal Transcript: Speaker 2 Preparation is a terrific, again, not antidote, but itā€™s a helpful aid against choking because you can handle much higher levels of arousal. So I guess practice, practice, practice would be one answer to like, what can you do to perform better under pressure? Speaker 1 Yeah, I would say not just practice, but also trying to envision everything that can go wrong. You need to prepare yourself for non-optimal performance and be okay with that. Give yourself permission to make mistakes. Thatā€™s actually something that has helped me immensely at the poker tables and probably would have helped my perfectionist kid self at piano, but it was just completely inconceivable to me that you could be okay after making a mistake. Just giving yourself permission to not be perfect and to say, okay, you know what, I might make a mistake. I might make the wrong decision. If I do that, then this is how Iā€™m going to recover. Iā€™m going to be resilient. Iā€™m going to move on. And Iā€™m going to keep playing because thatā€™s not the end of the game, because I need to look at the long term. (TimeĀ 0:34:23)

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