Harris’s book The Happiness Trap (2007) is the one I see most often recommended by psychologists to understand how to incorporate more acceptance, commitment and flexibility into your life. He does not believe there is anything inevitable about choking – and that everyone can practise in a way that makes them less likely to choke. “Could I have dealt with that differently? Could I have had methods to slow myself down? I think I could.” Consider a mentally tough bike rider who might be great at climbing a mountain, but prone to complete panic if they get a puncture or a spectator runs out into the road. Or a mentally tough actor who can handle the pressure of a live audience – right up till the moment of distraction from a mobile phone, at which point they forget their lines. Their mental toughness means they would survive the moment, but they wouldn’t be thriving in it or ready to adapt – their performance will suffer and their enjoyment will disappear. Boreout can occur when someone is without motivating forces and has no reason to do anything. Imagine just drifting aimlessly, completely bored. It can be fun doing nothing for a while. But sitting watching TV in your pyjamas all day every day is not good for your performance and not good for your health.

Blascovich J, Tomaka J (1996) The biopsychosocial model of arousal regulation. Adv Exp Soc Psychol 28:1–51 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. Gonadal hormones may also interact with the stress response to produce behavioral responses to pressure, especially since we have evidence both that they impact cognition on their own as well as having an interaction with cortisol. For instance, there has been extensive interest in the possibility that estrogen improves working memory performance via upregulation of hippocampal activity (Korol and Gold 2007; Hampson and Morley 2013), although not all studies support this (see Janowsky et al. 2000). Further, estrogen might mitigate the negative cognitive effects of glucocorticoids, or at the very least act to positively impact cognition and oppose the negative impacts of glucocorticoids (Herrera and Mather 2015). The cognitive impacts of progesterone are somewhat less clear, but if the stress response is a key component of choking under pressure, there is some evidence that progesterone might positively impact performance under pressure by ameliorating that stress response. Both endogenously produced (Frye and Walf 2002) and exogenously administered (Frye and Walf 2004) progesterone had anxiolytic (stress-relieving) effects in rodents, and a synthetic progesterone derivative was found to specifically modulate the effect of corticotropin-releasing hormone (a key hormone in the HPA cascade) on anxiety behaviors (Britton et al. 1992). This is an important consideration for our understanding of how hormones might produce behavioral responses under pressure: some hormones might affect cognition directly by acting on the cognitive systems needed to complete the task, but some might also improve performance by attenuating the stress response.Early in his match on Sunday, Poulter struggled, going two shots down after four holes. Yet Poulter still “knew I’d win my point”, he said later. “It’s a weird feeling when you’re in the zone and all that mayhem is going on around you, and you find that you are entirely focused on the shot. All this adrenaline was flowing and I was thinking to myself: ‘There’s no way I’m losing this.’” Moving on from boreout, there’s a transition and then we are into the comfort zone. You’ll recognise this as a moderate level of pressure that feels comfortable. It’s enough to motivate you to get things done and you can function happily here. A few hours earlier, Europe feared they had lost the Ryder Cup. Now, Europe could “go to sleep on a high after winning the last two matches,” Poulter recalled, and the team felt “energised to go out to have an opportunity to win”. For hundreds of thousands of years human survival has been based upon hunting and gathering food, finding shelter, seeking a mate and raising a family. That powerful sense of purpose is hard wired into our genetics. We can’t feel good unless we have a purposeful goal.

To perform well under pressure, you need several elements in place: an ability to distance yourself from destructive thoughts and self-talk; a way to cope with overwhelming feelings; the mental flexibility to respond in the most effective way; and, finally, to know what matters to you. However Peak Performance is primarily directed at the leaders and members of small teams – perhaps platoon and below – while nodding to middle management in regard to training and employee welfare and organizational culture and ethos – subjects that will interest those at the sub-unit level and above. Boswell wants to prevent others going through what he did. “My mental and physical side just basically crumbled in front of God knows how many people watching live on television … I’ve only watched it once – and then not all the way through. But I watched about five or six balls and just thought: ‘That’s a car crash.’”

Data Availability Statement

I’ll step through the various zones on the curve so you can better understand the relationship between pressure and performance as well as their implications for stress and our mental and physical health. Boreout

Point to where you are on the pressure performance curve right now. Trace your movement along it over the last week, month or year. What caused you to shift along in either direction? How can you manage the pressures you are under? The High Performing Team explains how structured communication, situational awareness and cooperative behaviour empowers teams to achieve peak flow. It promotes graded assertiveness which empowers junior members of a team to raise issues. Quality leaders are encouraged to use ‘Rally Points’ whereby the perspectives of the team are sort to ensure maximum situational awareness and a shared mental model. Frontline Leadership lists the qualities of a leader and applies high value to emotional intelligence and leader vulnerability.

It is often said that nothing in training can exactly replicate the pressures of the biggest moments in matches. But even if that is true, more pressurised training can help athletes cope with pressure on the field. 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. These same principles are especially important when you feel under pressure – for instance, imagine your boss surprises you by asking you to pitch your product to an array of potential buyers, or perhaps you’re feeling nervous as you prepare to meet your partner’s parents for the first time. You might think that, in such high-pressure situations, the way to excel is to grit your teeth and toughen up. But a mentally flexible approach is arguably more beneficial, especially when you are clear on your values and know what matters to you. With values, you always have a direction, and every time you need to make a decision under pressure, you have a barometer against which to measure. A flexible, values-driven approach helps you perform well because you’ll be mentally nimble and you’re always working to meet your own metrics in life, not those driven by others, by fears or by expectations.

For instance, many decision-making tasks are based on the assumption that individuals will maximize their outcomes by choosing the “best” response, something that animals and humans fail to do consistently (Waksberg et al. 2009; Zentall 2016). There are many possible reasons for this. It could be that animals are making a mistake, or do not understand the task, although that seems unlikely given many species’ expertise at these tasks. It also may be that they are showing some of the same decision-making biases seen in humans (De Petrillo and Rosati 2019; Williamson et al. 2019) or that rules of thumb are good enough most of the time (Watzek and Brosnan 2018), and of course animals show individual differences based on demographic factors, personality (Hopper et al. 2014) and differences in various cognitive abilities. Another possibility, inherent in these decision-making tasks, is that each individual’s outcome depends on their own decision-making performance—in other words, there is pressure within these tasks for animals to maximize their outcome. As we know that some humans (and monkeys) are more prone to choking under pressure than others (and indeed, that increasing that pressure can lead to suboptimal choices: (Jones et al. 2011), it follows that some animal subjects would also be better at coping with pressure than others when completing decision-making tasks. Thus, at least some of the differences in how individuals respond to pressure could be related to individual variation in the HPA stress response or their interaction with other sources of individual variation, especially if biological responses to pressure cause a breakdown in cognitive abilities such as working memory that are needed to make the correct choice. As dusk fell over Medinah, Poulter secured a one-shot victory with a remarkable 15ft putt on the 18th hole, celebrated by a roar of delight and a scream of “Come on”. Dr Hearns’s work can be compared to Matthew Syed’s Bounce, an insight into how those in Sports and the Arts achieve greatness. However, the unique selling point for Peak Performance is that it is perhaps a more realistic guide to how individuals or teams can achieve consistent high performance. Within the Leadership genre the book sits comfortably next to Chris Fussell’s One Mission: How leaders build a team of teams, which is aimed at mid-level/strategic leaders. Other types of working memory tasks (and tasks that involve fluid intelligence, a process related to working memory) beyond mathematical problem-solving are also affected by pressure. For instance, the Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) task involves visual completion problems that require participants to select the final image to complete an array. Notably, the matrices vary in working memory demands, which could make some trials in the task particularly prone to deficits under pressure. Indeed, participants were influenced negatively by pressure only on high-working-memory demand trials. High-working memory capacity participants also showed a greater accuracy deficit under high pressure (Gimmig et al. 2006), supporting that working memory processes are susceptible to pressure in areas beyond mathematical reasoning. As another example, the Simon task (Simon 1990) requires participants to ignore irrelevant location cues to respond correctly to a visual color cue by pressing one of two buttons, a procedure that involves controlling processing in working memory by directing attention. When participants were tasked with completing trials in the Simon task while in the presence of an experimenter (a situation that might increase pressure through monitoring), they were significantly more likely to show an effect of the interference of the irrelevant cues (Belletier et al. 2015). This effect was heightened in high working memory capacity participants (Belletier et al. 2015). Working memory (and processes that are related to it, such as executive attention or more general fluid intelligence) has been admittedly the most well-studied process in terms of purely cognitive performance, but it also has been particularly well-supported by those studies. These sections have a strong resonance with the Centre for Army Leadership’s Leading Through Crisis: A Practitioner’s Guide where Army leaders are asked to communicate honestly and encourage challenge. Tools of the Trade explores the need for high performance teams to be matched with the right equipment and be proficient in operating such equipment. Pressure TestingPractise 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. We are rarely either totally stressed or completely relaxed, but often somewhere in the middle. Our position can change week-by-week, day-to-day, or even minute-by-minute.