Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff works dot com where smart happens. Hi Marshall brand with today's question, what causes someone to choke under pressure? Anyone who watched the Master's Tournament this year or who followed the tournament in the news knows that there was a shocking breakdown by Rory McElroy during his final nine holes. He played well through three and a half rounds or sixty three holes, and then he choked. It was as though he had forgotten
how to hit a golf ball. And if you've ever played golf, you know that this isn't an exceedingly uncommon event. Uh. You know, professionals choked quite often in golf, and you yourself may have experienced it on the golf course where you go to hit a ball and you can't hit it straight to save yourself, and then you try to correct that you can't, you'll get the second shot anywhere where you want it to be, and suddenly you have
forgotten how to play golf. Or you might have experienced it in a public speaking situation where you can't make words come out of your mouth, or you might have gone into a test and choked and couldn't find the answer to any question on the test. Or you might have met particularly attractive member of the human species that you would like to get to know better, and when you go to talk to him or her, you can't get any words out of your mouth that that sound
anything other than ridiculous. Or and this one is really common, you go to be on a TV show for the first time and this question pops into your head. What am I supposed to do with my hands? And you've never had a problem with your hands before. You've lived your whole life without thinking about what to do with your hands, But suddenly, with a TV camera focused on you, you don't know what it is that you're supposed to do with your hands, and it becomes an amazing source
of confusion for you. The point is that human beings choke all the time. This is a very common phenomenon for human beings, and the question is what causes people to choke? What is going on when we choke in a high pressure situation or any situation where we're trying to get a good outcome rather than a bad one. There is some excellent material on the web that talks
about choking, and if you want to google it. You can google brain stuff how choking works to find links in a couple of videos that that show the process of choking. But one article in particular is called the Psychology of choking, and it explains it this way. There are two different ways that we can do things with our bodies in the real world. One way is under conscious control and the other way is under unconscious control.
So you are using the conscious process. Whenever you're learning something, you know you're let's say you're learning to drive a stick shift car. You are sitting there and you have to consciously think about taking your foot off the gas, putting your foot onto the clutch, moving the gearshift knob, and then reversing that taking your foot off the clutch while you apply the gas smoothly. And you're doing all
that consciously, and it's hard. It takes time, and it takes a lot of thought, and it's frustrating, and you
mash the gears and and stuff is difficult. If you've ever tried to drive a back ho for the first time, you run into the same exact thing where you know, if you could just move your arm the way you wanted the back ho to move, it would be trivially simple to drive a back hoe, but you're doing it with these two levers that have four positions each, and you have to consciously think, let's see, if I want to extend the arm outward, I have to move this
lever in this direction. And that is the conscious way of doing things. Then the other way is, after lots and lots and lots of practice, you can drive a stick shift car without thinking about it, or you if you've ever seen a really good backhoe operator do his or her thing, they can make a backhoe move just like it's their arm. It's an extension of their body. It's unbelievably precise and smooth, and you know, even could be delicate if it needs to be. They they a
good backhoad driver is an amazing person to watch. So you have these two systems, the conscious system, which is kind of slow and messy and frustrating, and the unconscious system where you literally don't even have to think about it. You just are doing your thing well. The article The Psychology of Choking explains that what happens when you choke is that, through essentially overthinking, you override or you disable the un conscious system that has allowed you to perform well.
And whatever it is you're doing, let's say talking, you normally talk unconsciously, and when you get into a public speaking situation, that breaks down. When you're trying to be on TV and you don't know what to do with your hands, You've always dealt with your hands unconsciously, and now, uh, that breaks down. The golfing case, they've been golfing, you know, through years of practice, they can golf unconsciously. It's all
wired into the brain. And what happens when you choke is that unconscious system gets overridden by the conscious system and you revert back to the conscious system for doing things. The unconscious system is essentially lost. And this is why when you're in this choking situation, everything looks so uncomfortable and unnatural and stilted, because the conscious system is like that. If you're having to use your conscious brain to think
through the motions, it just doesn't work. This leads you to wonder, maybe what can you do if you ever find yourself in a situation where you're choking and you need to unchoke, you need to perform in a normal way, then the solution might be to relax and find a way to turn off your conscious mind again, you know, breathing deeply or meditating for a short period of time or something to just shut down the conscious side to relieve the pressure so that you're unconscious can take over
again and start doing what it does well, automatically doing the task at hand. If you'd like to learn more about this again, you can google brain stuff how choking works, and it will lead you to some videos and a really good article on the topic. For moral on this and thousands of other topics, is it how staff works dot com