Matthew Jensen
BIOL 1610
3/8/2017

Super Bowl Psychology: Why Athletes “Choke”-- and How to Avoid It

The article I chose was very fascinating and can really be applied to our own life. I always wondered why when I thought about performing a particular task perfectly or too much, I usually would fail after a short amount of time. This article really caught my eye and I’m excited to share how we can overcome or diminish our overthinking in high stress situations.

For years, any individual I personally can think of has been placed in high stress situations. Situations where we tend to over think and “choke” if you will. I’ve always wondered why this occurs especially when that individual has practiced or developed the skill to easily do the task but fails instead. Speaking in public, competing in sports, or performing a talent in front of large audiences are all examples where this has occurred. This article speaks to individuals in these settings who have practiced and should be able to perform optimally and does not address individuals who have fluke performances.

Sian Beilock, a neuroscientist, did a study in 2008 with both expert and novice golfers. She asked both groups of golfers to take their time and also putt as quickly as they could. She discovered that the expert golfers performed well when they putt quickly and performed worse when they took their time while the novice golfers performed better when they took their time and did worse when they putt quickly. These results created a hypothesis that expert golfers had practiced enough so that this motion was now beyond their conscious awareness, or as she calls it “autopilot”. As soon as the expert golfers were under pressure and began to overthink the motion their performance began to drop. 

Beilock claims this is because this skill is now autonomous like walking up the stairs and is controlled by the cerebellum, but as soon as the individual starts thinking about the movement it becomes controlled through the cerebral cortex. This is why athletes with the capability of performing simple tasks tend to perform worse under pressure. They over think. She states that if we were to think to hard about our knees when we walked down the stairs things could happen such as falling on our face.

Beilock gives great examples of what to do to not overthink as often. Perform the skill under pressure! If you are going to be in front of an audience, begin performing in front of groups of people you don’t feel comfortable with so that you can learn to relax your mind. Another example she gives is to sing a song or focus on other things that don’t relate with the stressful task at hand.

This article was very insightful and I feel can lead into further studies on how maybe focusing on a task in a stressful situation can actually help in certain cases.



Reference:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/super-bowl-psychology-why-athletes-choke-and-how-to-avoid-it/