How our Mind Works under Pressure

To learn about why our reflexive reaction to pressure is threat, we need to understand some basics about how the human brain works. Our goal is not to turn you into a neuroscientist. Instead, we will translate the science of the brain into simple and practical terms.

When you have an easy-to-understand, working model of your brain, you can begin to use this knowledge to your benefit. Our goal is for you to apply these teachings in your own life—to override your primal, reflexive reaction to pressure and consciously choose a different, performance-enhancing response.

If we look at how our mind operates under pressure, it’s helpful to consider three key regions of the brain and how scientists and psychologists can help us understand the mechanics of how we handle pressure.

The Caveman (a.k.a. the reptilian complex)

The Conscious Thinker (a.k.a. the neocortex)

The Hard Drive (a.k.a. the limbic system)

The Caveman (applicable to both men and women; I’ll use Caveman throughout for simplicity’s sake) lives in the brain stem and cerebellum. It is the threat center of your brain. The Caveman’s goal is simple—to survive. It is constantly on patrol, looking for danger. When faced with a threat, the Caveman’s instantaneous reaction is fight, flight, or freeze. This reaction is the Caveman’s most frequently used and most important instinct.

In prehistoric times, when many threats were physical in nature, the Caveman’s fight, flight, or freeze reaction served as a successful survival response. By natural selection, the people with the fastest and strongest Caveman had the highest survival rate.

Tens of thousands of years later, the Caveman part of our brain’s operating system is alive and strong as ever. However, with today’s world being so very different from the prehistoric world, the Caveman isn’t as valuable as it used to be. Most of the pressure situations we face in the modern world don’t involve a physical threat. Instead, our threats are typically psychological in nature. However, our Caveman does not distinguish between today’s psychological threats and prehistoric physical threats. It reacts the same way to speaking in front of others and being judged as it does to being chased by the neighborhood pit bull. The blood rushes to our limbs to get us ready to run or punch; when this happens, the blood is rushing away from our brains! Our capacity to think clearly is restricted.

As a result, our Caveman’s fight, flight, or freeze reflexive reaction doesn’t help us with psychological threats. In fact, this reflexive reaction hurts us. The very strength of the Caveman in prehistoric times turns out to be a huge crippler of performance under modern-day pressure.

Let’s look more specifically at how the Caveman reacts to modern-day pressures.

It fixates on what could go wrong and is consumed by fear, worry, and doubt.

It quickly forms an opinion based on feelings, not facts, and then seeks information that supports its opinion.

It lacks perspective, exaggerating the importance of a situation.

It fails to see options, thinking in terms of absolutes, do-or-die.

It exaggerates the likelihood of a poor outcome.

It exaggerates the consequences of failure.

It is insecure and highly concerned with others’ judgment.

It personalizes failure.

For modern-day pressures, whether it’s a critical business presentation, an academic test, an athletic performance, or a piano recital, letting your Caveman take over is a bad idea. Daniel Goleman, author of the bestseller Emotional Intelligence, coined the term amygdala hijack to describe “emotional responses from people which are immediate and overwhelming, and out of measure with the actual stimulus because it has triggered a much more significant emotional threat.”

How do we know when we’ve been hijacked by our Caveman? It’s emotional and irrational reaction typically results in negative self-talk:

Why am I doing this? This is a stupid idea. There’s no way I can do this. The people I’m competing against are so much better than me. What if this goes wrong? What if I make a bad decision? I can’t handle this. Is there any way for me to get out of this? This is the most important presentation/game/performance I’ve ever had. I’ll never get another opportunity like this again. I have no choice. I must succeed/win. If I screw this up, it’ll be devastating. I won’t be able to show my face around here ever again. This is a nightmare. I’m terrible under pressure. There are a lot of people watching me. They will think I’m an idiot. They will laugh at me. My teammates will be so disappointed in me. I am a total failure.

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What would you think of me if I talked to you the way you talk to yourself? You’d think I was a jerk. You have no right to be your own worst coach.

—Rick Peterson

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If we put a speaker on your thoughts and broadcast what you say to yourself, we would institutionalize you. You wouldn’t hang out with people who talk to you the way you talk to yourself. So why do we talk to ourselves this way?

It isn’t really you talking. It’s your Caveman. This is a very important point and distinction.

By allowing you to understand that these instinctual, primal pressure reactions are from your Caveman and not from you, we hope to enable you to stop beating yourself up for having these thoughts and emotions.

So if the Caveman isn’t really you, who are you? The part of your brain you want to activate under pressure is the Conscious Thinker. It lives in the neocortex of your brain. While the Caveman’s goal is to survive, your goal as the Conscious Thinker is to thrive.

Based on this goal, let’s look more specifically at the winning beliefs of you, the Conscious Thinker, under pressure.

You see pressure as a challenge, an opportunity to demonstrate your skills.

You are filled with confidence.

You are focused only on what you can control.

You are focused on performing to your capabilities, doing your best.

You perform for yourself, not for others.

Your self-esteem is based on your intrinsic worth, not on your performance or the opinion of others.

You search out facts before reaching a conclusion.

You see the big picture and keep the situation in proper perspective.

You explore options.

You have an objective view of the likelihood of a given outcome.

You know you can deal with the consequences of any outcome.

You learn from less than ideal outcomes.

As you’d expect, the self-talk from your Conscious Thinker is much more helpful.

I am performing because I enjoy it and it helps me reach my goals. I know I can do this because of the skills I’ve acquired during my practice and preparation. I don’t expect to be perfect. I expect to do my best and perform like I have in practice. While I would like to succeed/win, I understand I am not in control of all the factors impacting the outcome. Because I’ve given my best, I can live with any outcome. I am focused on being my best, not on concerning myself with what others think of me. That’s out of my control. Regardless of the outcome, I will have other opportunities in the future to demonstrate my skills.

Your Conscious Thinker is where choice lives. Even though it’s not always easy, it’s critical to remember…

Based on the descriptions of how the Caveman thinks and how you think, it’s easy to see pressure situations create a battle for control of your mind. Unfortunately, in this fight, the Caveman has a couple of unfair advantages.

The Caveman is faster. According to Dr. Evian Gordon, a neuroscientist who specializes in high performance, five times each second the brain non-consciously determines what is dangerous and steers away from it. In every situation, before any input has a chance to reach the Conscious Thinker, it goes to your Caveman first. You can’t change this. In situations where physical danger is present and a fight, flight, or freeze reaction is warranted, this could actually save your life. However, in situations where the perceived danger is psychological, as most modern-day pressures are, the Caveman’s reaction is not helpful.

The Neuro-Leadership scientist David Rock explains the threat response “is mentally taxing and deadly to the productivity of a person… [The threat response] impairs analytical thinking, creative insight and problem solving.” As a result, it’s a good idea to understand and avoid triggering your threat response.

In addition to being faster, the Caveman is stronger. Many more of the neural pathways in our brain are devoted to danger and threat detection than to reward detection. As a result, it’s easy to see why fear, worry, and doubt are so deeply embedded in our operating systems.

So how do you know when your Caveman has hijacked your thinking? Dr. Steve Peters, author of The Chimp Paradox and an English psychiatrist who works in elite sport, says the easiest way is to ask yourself,

Quite simply, if the answer is no, then your Caveman is in control.

You’re probably thinking, “I should just get rid of my Caveman.” As I learned about how the brain functions, I had the same thought. And while surgery to remove your amygdala would likely improve your performance under pressure, it would leave you with some very undesirable side effects. For one, you would lose your fight, flight, or freeze instinct that protects you from legitimate physical threats. Second, without an amygdala, you would be void of emotion. You’d miss out on life’s joyous moments, some of which include performing your best under pressure.

So, if we can’t get rid of our Caveman, what are we to do? We need to learn to tame our Caveman. But first, let’s look at the third part of our brain which is useful in understanding how we think under pressure.

Your Hard Drive resides in the limbic system of your brain. It stores your values, memories, and beliefs and uses these to decide how to act. The Caveman saves to your Hard Drive values, memories, and beliefs based on emotion. Your Conscious Thinker saves to your Hard Drive values, memories, and beliefs based on logic.

Just like a real computer, your Hard Drive doesn’t know the quality of the data you put into it. It simply acts on the data it is given. In the case of the Caveman, you’re left with the old saying, “garbage in, garbage out.” The opposite is true as well. The more your Hard Drive contains values, beliefs, and memories from your Conscious Thinker, the better your decisions and actions under pressure will be.

We readily acknowledge this is an overly simplistic view of what’s really a very complicated process going on in our brains. Again, our goal is not to turn you into a neuroscientist; it is to give you a model of your mind under pressure that you can understand and apply.

Now that I know how my brain works under pressure, what’s next? In order to perform your best in the clutch, you need to learn to tame your Caveman and download more of your Conscious Thinker’s values, beliefs, and memories onto your Hard Drive. This requires you to use the skill of reframing.

You need to override the reflexive frame your Caveman presents to you under pressure and choose the better frame of your Conscious Thinker. To do this, you need to create space and time.