How our brains keep us from performance excellence

When Sports Becomes a Head Game

I wrote on this subject 4 years ago – Do you win or do you choke? – based on an article in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell.

This piece expands the impact of how performers handle the stress of not winning.

In studies of golfers and soccer players, Sian Beilock, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, has shown that elite athletes perform superbly when distracted but begin to make mistakes as soon as they are told to pay more attention to their movements. “I think what happens in high pressure situations is that the athletes start paying attention to things they’re not used to thinking about at all,” she said. The result, she said, is that in these stressful situations “they can feel as if they are performing a different skill.”

But a flat-line mental state may be harder to induce than once assumed, psychologists are learning.

Big losses in particular — flaming out in a crucial competition — may carry a deeper emotional charge that alters future performance. Amateur athletes in particular have invested their identities in their sport. A single bad performance can end everything, instantly drying up support from sponsors and coaches.

In a study to be presented before the Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting in April, Dr. Davis led a team of researchers who had 13 elite Canadian swimmers watch a video of a recent race in which they had faltered badly. Two racers had underperformed in Olympic races in Athens. The other 11 had failed to make the Canadian team altogether, despite top ratings entering the qualifying race.

While watching the videos, the racers showed peaks of activity in several areas of the brain that have been implicated in depression, and blunted activity in the areas that prime people to perform, the study found. “I think with some athletes we need to address the emotions and feelings connected to the loss directly” to restore performance, Dr. Davis said.

Sports psychology remains much more complex than we yet understand. I suspect that the same concepts can apply to other activities.