Ideas53:59Excessive sweating: why we choke when it matters most
*Originally published November 23, 2022.
** This documentary won second place at the International Association of Sports Media Awards.
Football offers moments of pure, distilled drama, and is one of the most tension-filled sports: a player places the ball on a white spot painted on the turf and attempts a penalty with a crucial match on the line – perhaps even the championship itself.
He will be standing 12 yards from goal, aiming at an eight-yard-wide net, with very little to stop him except the goalkeeper’s guesses and his own nervousness.
And yet even the best professional players sometimes choke under the weight of that moment. Just ask England fans about the 1990 World Cup semi-final, or Italy fans about the 1994 final. Both watched in shock as their players fired penalties over the goal.
Sian Beilock, cognitive scientist and author of Choke: What the Brain’s Secrets Reveal to Succeed When You Need toclaims that these players probably fell into a common trap.
“In these high-stress situations, we worry. We worry about the situation, what the consequences are, what other people are going to think of us,” says Beilock, who is also president of Barnard College at Columbia University. “And one of the ways we try to control that is to try to control what we do.”
When we master skills like taking a penalty shot or playing golf, we tend not to think about every step, Beilock told CBC Radio. IDEASBut when we consciously try to control an action we’ve learned to do without thinking, things can fall apart.
“It’s a little strange to think that paying attention to something could hurt it. But we’ve all had that experience. Imagine if I asked you to shuffle down the stairs and think about your knee. As you did that, you’d fall on your face.”
“Paralysis by analysis”
Beilock calls this phenomenon “paralysis by analysis” — and it’s a phenomenon that can affect musicians, like Carolyn Christie, as well.
“I never had to think about how a finger would move, or the air pressure or anything like that, because I had practiced it and I knew it by heart. And by thinking I had to move my pinky to the right and then down, I had already missed the note (by) thinking too much,” said Christie, a former flutist with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.
For much of Christie’s early career with the symphony, musicians didn’t have many tools at their disposal to manage anxiety or stage fright, Christie said.
But she said her eyes were opened when she invited her niece, who was studying sports psychology, to speak to faculty and students at McGill University, where Christie is also an associate professor. The topic? Performance under pressure.
“It was the first time I realized that I wasn’t the only one who was afraid of stage fright.”
Christie went on to earn a degree in sports psychology and now trains musicians in the mental skills needed for performance.
How to combat choking
According to experts, there are several common techniques to combat choking, including breathing, meditation and visualization.
Beyond that, when nerves flare, we can choose to interpret our pounding heart and sweaty palms in a way that enhances our performance. Studies showed that when people tell themselves they are excited rather than nervous, they perform better.
Choking doesn’t just affect athletes and musicians, but can also occur in other high-pressure situations, such as job interviews or math tests. In these cases, worry takes up space in our working memory, which impairs our performance.
“It’s very difficult to count and do multiplication when I’m worrying in my head because I’m using the same language and memory systems,” Beilock said.
“The only thing that’s important not to think about, of course, is whether we’re successful or not,” said Noa Kageyama, a performance psychologist at the Juilliard School in New York who also runs the Bulletproof Musician blog and podcast.
“Instead of monitoring and evaluating ourselves what is actually coming out of our instrument, it is more helpful to focus on the sound we want to get out of our instrument.”
Another key, Beilock says, is to introduce some pressure into your workouts, to bridge the gap between training and reality.
“Training under stress is one of the best ways to prepare for a stressful situation,” she said.
VIDEO | How Ryan Reynolds Overcomes Stage Fright:
Actor Ryan Reynolds talks to Ian Hanomansing, host of CBC’s The National, about how he overcomes stage fright with the help of his inner alter ego.
Practice makes perfect
As students enter a small room at the Royal College of Music in London, England, they are struck by the spotlight and the view of the audience right in front of them, projected onto the screen.
Thanks to a performance simulator set up by Aaron Williamon and his colleagues at the Centre for Performance Science in London, the virtual audience is interactive, life-size and sometimes entertaining.
“They do things like cough, they sneeze, sometimes their phone rings. And we can monitor all of those reactions from backstage while the student is on stage,” Williamon said, adding that they can also monitor how enthusiastically the audience applauds at the end.
“The goal is to develop preparation, presentation and revision skills that can be systematically studied, reviewed and improved,” he said.
It’s about controlling your brain. It’s about understanding your own mental processes.– Niklas Häusler, neuoscientist
About 220 miles north of London, Liverpool Football Club, one of England’s top soccer teams, is harnessing the power of neuroscience to improve its performance. The club has hired a German company called Neuro 11 to provide cutting-edge training for penalty kicks and other stressful situations.
Niklas Häusler, the company’s founder and CEO, attends Liverpool’s training sessions. He and his colleagues attach electrodes to the players’ heads and ask them to take penalties. Häusler then shows the players their brain scans and helps them determine what constitutes a distraction and what mental routines can help them.
“And then, step by step, session by session, we improve that. It’s about controlling your brain. It’s about understanding your own mental processes,” Houses said.
Each player develops his own routine for taking penalties: some look at the grass, others look at the target, Häusler explains.
Liverpool player Andy Robertson believes brain scans have helped him. Last season, Liverpool won two major tournaments on penalties.
“Before they came along, it was more just kind of: throw the ball and, you know, take the steps, or whatever I did before that,” Robertson said. “Now I just follow my routine.”
So when a World Cup player inevitably steps up to take the crucial penalty that will decide his nation’s sporting fate, the outcome could depend on what is going on in that player’s mind as much as his athletic skills.
It will be a public, high-stakes example of a characteristic of human behavior that scientists and researchers are still learning to understand.
But that won’t make viewing any easier.
Guests in this episode:
Sian Beilock is a cognitive scientist and author of Choke: What the Brain’s Secrets Reveal About How to Do Things Right When You Need to And How the body knows its mindShe was recently named president-elect of Dartmouth College.
Sandra Bezic is a former Olympian and Canadian figure skating champion (with her brother Val), and is now a producer, director and choreographer.
Carolyn Christie is a retired member of the flute section of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. She now teaches classical flute at McGill and is also a certified mental skills consultant.
Niklas Hausler is a neuroscientist and co-founder and CEO of the German start-up Neuro 11.
Noa Kageyama is a performance psychologist. He maintains a blog and a podcast, Bulletproof Musician.
Elizabeth Manley was a world and Olympic silver medalist in figure skating in 1988 and is now an executive life coach.
Jennifer Montone is the principal horn of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Aaron Williamon is director of the Centre for Performance Science, a partnership between the Royal College of Music and Imperial College London.
Written and produced by IDEAS contributor Peter Brown.
