Inquiry · Emotion and Performance · Part 2 of 4
What Pressure Does
How feeling reaches the thinking mind and the body, and why the cost often hides until the effort runs out.
By Orion QuinOctober 19, 2026About 23 minutes
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1 (King Henry)
The result can look fine while the work is already costing too much
In the first part of this series I argued that a feeling is information with a job. This part follows that information down the wire: what a feeling does to a thinking mind, what it does to a moving body, and why the damage so often hides until the effort runs out. I first noticed the pattern when I was testing athletes, where the numbers moved with the person's state and the training log could not say why.
The answer I have come to is less dramatic than the popular one. Pressure does not simply "make people choke," and arousal does not simply help or hurt. Feeling changes where attention goes, what working memory is spent on, how the heart is set up for the task, and how hard the task feels. Most of those changes show up first as a rise in cost. The result stays intact for a while, which is exactly why nobody notices.
A constructed scene
Picture someone who for two years has looked after a parent who is slowly failing, while holding down a job. She has not missed a deadline. She remembers every appointment and every prescription. Her manager calls her reliable, and her brother, who lives far away, says he does not know how she does it. Nobody asks how she is, because nothing is visibly wrong. What the results do not show is that she rereads the same email three times before sending it, that small things make her sharp with people she loves, and that she needs most of Sunday just to be able to begin Monday. The outcome is fine. The price of the outcome has been climbing for a long time.
She is constructed, not a real person. I use her because she shows this whole part in one life: a result that stays intact while the cost of producing it rises, and an audience that can only see the result.
What a feeling does to a thinking mind
The easiest way I know to hold the research is this: emotion changes what the mind spends its limited resources on. A working model first, because it shows why a drop in any one piece drags the rest down.
The prefrontal switch
The best-studied road from feeling to thinking runs through the prefrontal cortex, which holds information in mind and keeps updating it. Amy Arnsten's work, drawn largely from animal studies with some human support, describes something like a switch. When we feel alert and safe, prefrontal circuits lead our behavior. When stress is high and uncontrollable, high levels of catecholamines (noradrenaline and dopamine) weaken those networks and strengthen older systems: the amygdala's conditioned responses and the habitual action circuits of the basal ganglia. Deliberate control gives way to reflexive control.1 Even fairly mild uncontrollable stress can cost prefrontal ability quickly, and longer exposure changes its structure.2 A companion theory, adaptive gain, adds that the question is rarely how much arousal but which mode the brain's noradrenaline system is in, focused or searching.3
Two qualifiers. Most of the mechanism data come from rodents and monkeys, and the word doing the heavy lifting is uncontrollable. The research does not say that arousal impairs thinking. It says very high catecholamine levels do, and that our sense of control shapes how high they climb.
Attentional control: why anxiety hides
If I had to pick one idea for understanding anxiety and thinking, it would be attentional control theory. It proposes that anxiety pulls attention toward threat, outside us (a frowning examiner) and inside us (worrying thoughts), and weakens the control systems that keep attention on the task. The part that is easy to miss is the difference between effectiveness, the quality of the result, and efficiency, the result relative to the effort and resources spent. The theory predicts that anxiety hurts efficiency more than effectiveness, because people compensate with extra effort or processing. Effectiveness suffers only when the demand is high enough, or the compensation limited enough, that the extra effort runs out.4,5
That explains a puzzle teachers, coaches and managers keep running into: the person who is plainly anxious and still hitting the numbers. The result looks fine, so nobody sees a problem, but the cost has gone up. Anxiety so often shows up first as fatigue, irritability or slowness, and reaches the result only under the heaviest loads.
From my own rowing (memory, not data)
In 1990 I rowed bow in the four at Nationals in Ohio. We were novices entered in the varsity category, and we finished third in the country and earned a medal. Later the same month five of us, all twenty years old, drove to Indianapolis for the National Team selection race and were clobbered by the best in the country, most of them on their way to the Olympics.
Two races, three weeks apart, and they were different kinds of day. Indianapolis was a race with a verdict, from a field we could not beat, and with no say in how it was read. That is the pairing Dickerson and Kemeny found drives the largest stress-hormone response: being judged and having no control at the same time.6 I read that loss then as not humiliating, a privilege not measured by where we finished. A loss to better crews is also not a choke, and I will not pretend it was.
What I can say about myself is narrower. Racing has never been a place of great anxiety for me. Once you have practiced something a thousand times you learn that you can only prepare the conditions, not the outcome, and once the movement is automatic it flows. The thinking of the movement is what disrupts it. That is the monitoring route to choking, described below, seen from the inside, and the worry route needs a verdict to feed on. I did not measure my heart rate, my effort or my attention in either race, so this shows nothing about cost. It is one person's recollection.
Effectiveness is the late indicator. Efficiency is the early one.A reading of attentional control theory
To catch pressure sooner, watch how hard the work is costing, not only how well it turns out. A medal is an effectiveness number. I have no efficiency number for that boat, so I cannot say what third in the country cost us.
Where the attention budget goes, and how skill breaks
Working memory is the small workspace where we hold and handle information. Under pressure it gets spent two ways. One is worry: thoughts about the outcome, the audience or the consequences move in and take up room. The other is monitoring: attention turns inward and starts supervising a skill that normally runs unsupervised. Both shrink the budget available for the work.
Choking is the extreme case, a drop in performance worse than the demands of the situation would predict. Sian Beilock and colleagues' golf-putting work set the pattern: experienced putters putted worse when they were told to attend to the mechanics of their stroke than when they were given a second task to do.9 DeCaro and colleagues later refined it: pressure can break a skill through distraction or through explicit monitoring, and which one matters depends on how much the skill leans on working memory.8
Distraction
Worry and outcome thoughts use up working memory. Most exposed: tasks that lean on working memory. Sign: mental errors, a lost place, poor decisions.
Explicit monitoring
Attention turns inward onto the steps of a practiced skill. Most exposed: well-learned, automatic movement. Sign: stiff, deliberate execution of something that was fluid.
A third route, narrowing, is the threat bias above: attention gets pulled toward whatever signals danger. All three are changes in where attention goes, which is why most interventions that work give attention a job instead of trying to remove the feeling.
When the feeling is right
Part 1 told the story of 309 medical students whose test anxiety stopped predicting their exam scores once their preparation was counted: for them the feeling was mostly reporting a gap, not causing one.10 It was one selective sample, and the authors say interference may still appear in novel situations. I keep it in view here as a reminder that the arrow can run either way, and that the first question about a worry is still whether it is distorting or reporting.
What the body does with a feeling
The body takes part in every feeling, as a source of signals going up to the brain and a target of commands coming back down. Four channels matter most for doing something well: the cardiovascular response, the felt sense of effort, the control of skilled movement and, over longer stretches, the risk of getting hurt. The evidence is not equally strong for all four, and the table says so up front.
| Channel | What the research suggests | Confidence |
|---|---|---|
| Cardiovascular pattern | The same arousal can run as a more efficient challenge pattern or a less efficient threat pattern, depending on how it is appraised | Reasonable, with small performance effects |
| Perceived effort | Mental strain can make the same physical work feel harder without changing heart, lung or muscle measures | One well-known experiment; replication varies |
| Skilled movement | Pressure can disrupt automatic skills through over-monitoring (see choking, above) | Strong in laboratory and sport settings |
| Injury risk | A history of stressors goes with a small increase in injury | Small, heterogeneous, correlational |
The heart reads the appraisal
Challenge and threat both involve sympathetic activation, the mobilizing response of faster heart rate and breathing. What separates them is the cardiovascular pattern that comes with each, and the attention and decisions that follow. In the laboratory study that made arousal reappraisal famous, participants told that their stress response could help them showed more adaptive cardiovascular responses, and less attentional bias toward threat cues, than participants told to ignore their arousal.11 A purely mental instruction changed a physiological pattern, toward efficiency, not toward calm. The heart did not slow down. It worked better. If you expected the lesson to be "relax," this is the first small crack in that idea.
Effort is felt, not only done
Samuele Marcora and colleagues showed how mental load leaks into the body. After a long, demanding cognitive task, participants cycled to exhaustion. They gave up sooner than after a neutral task and rated the same work as harder, while the measured responses of the heart, lungs and muscles did not differ.12 The authors read this as evidence that effort is partly a perception, a signal about how hard the brain has to work to keep going.
From my own rowing (memory, not data)
The mornings at Cal began at 5:00, in a van of teammates who were mostly short of sleep, and even the warm-up was a race: you never wanted to be down on another boat. I have no numbers for what those mornings cost. I mention them because Marcora’s result is a reason not to wave the cost away: work that begins already tired can feel heavier than the measurements say it should.
A caution: this is one influential study with a modest number of participants, and later work on mental fatigue and endurance has been mixed. Still, arriving at a physical task already mentally drained may cost more than the numbers say it should.
The slow cost: stress and injury
Emotion also works over weeks and months. A 2024 meta-analysis of 19 studies found a low but significant relationship between an athlete's history of stressors and sport injury (r = .12), with a lot of variation between studies.13 It is correlational and small, and concerns life stressors in general, not nerves before an event.
Put the four channels together and you get a loop. Body signals feed the brain's construction of an emotion, the emotion shapes attention and effort, and attention and effort change what the body does next. That is why a feeling is hard to talk someone out of, and why you can step in at almost any point.
Pressure, and the curve everybody draws
Ask almost anyone how arousal relates to performance and they will sketch an upside-down U: too little arousal, poor performance; too much, poor performance; a sweet spot in the middle. It gets credited to Yerkes and Dodson and is probably the most repeated picture in the field. You have likely seen it on a slide, drawn with great confidence.
It is also much weaker than its reputation. The 1908 paper concerned how quickly animals learned a discrimination under different strengths of electric shock.14 Peter Hancock and Neil Ganey, reviewing the history, concluded that it bears only loosely on how humans perform under stress, argued that the single idea of "arousal" has failed as an explanation, and offered a model built on attention and adaptability.15 A separate critique aimed at music performance found little support for treating optimal arousal as settled.16
So I do not draw the curve here. It squeezes a two-part question into one: how much activation, and what the mind does with it. The second part has the stronger evidence.
The same arousal, two readings
The biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat is the sturdiest framework for that second part. When people judge that they have the resources for a demand, the body tends toward a challenge pattern. When they judge that the demand is more than they have, it tends toward threat.11
A meta-analysis of studies published after 2017 found that people in a challenge state performed better than people in a threat state across several domains, sport among them. The effects were small, and the risk of bias was generally low.17
Whether the feeling helps depends on who is feeling it
The same level of anxiety can help one person and hurt another, partly because of how it is read. In a comparison of 50 rugby league players and 50 target rifle shooters before competition, the groups did not differ in the intensity of their anxiety. They differed in direction: more of the rugby players saw their physical anxiety as facilitative, and more of the shooters as debilitative.18 It is a small, early, self-report study, and the groups differ in more than sport. Even so, a racing heart plausibly helps when the task rewards force and gets in the way when it rewards stillness.
The practical offshoot: reading arousal as readiness
If the reading matters, it can be taught. In studies of singing, public speaking and math, Alison Wood Brooks found that people who reappraised pre-performance anxiety as excitement felt more excited and performed better than people who tried to calm down.19 That fits the cardiovascular findings, and it is easier to use than being told to relax, which rarely helps anyone who is already panicking. The honest size of the effect is modest: d = 0.23 across 44 effect sizes in a 2024 meta-analysis, which the authors call promising, cheap and not a silver bullet.20 Part 3 has the details and the rest of the toolbox.
What gives attention a job
For anyone facing a judged performance, the question is what could give attention a job. A systematic review of 47 studies on choking interventions found that, on the whole, they helped. The most consistently supported were pre-performance routines, quiet-eye training, left-hand contractions and acclimatization (practicing under pressure). Goal setting, neurofeedback and reappraisal cues showed null results.21
The strongest items share one feature. A routine gives attention something specific to do, quiet-eye training holds the gaze on one place, and practicing under pressure takes away the surprise. None of them removes emotion. Part 3 takes up routines and pressure practice in full.
The evidence in more detailroutines, and a caution about external focus
A 2024 meta-analysis of pre-performance routines, covering 112 effect sizes, found moderate-to-large effects in experiments under pressure (Hedges' g = 0.70, wide interval) and a smaller effect in pre-post designs, and the type of routine did not change the result.22 A June 2026 position statement from Exercise and Sports Science Australia names routines and pressure training among the main families.23
One more caution. You have probably heard that you should focus on the outcome of a movement, not its mechanics. A 2024 robust Bayesian meta-analysis of the external-focus literature found strong signs of reporting bias and, after correcting for it, effects close to nothing for performance (g = 0.01) and small for retention (g = 0.15).24 That does not show that where you point your attention is irrelevant. It suggests the confident, universal advice ran ahead of the evidence.
The same story in different rooms
Most of what we have looked at came from a laboratory, a playing field or a classroom. A promising hypothesis is that much the same machinery runs wherever someone has to do something well while it matters. The studies do not collectively establish that, and the rooms differ in what the feeling is about, how long it lasts, and how much the research can tell us. Most of my career was spent using exercise to help people with health and disease, and how a person felt mattered to how they recovered about as much as the exercises did.
The classroom and the exam
Two experiments reported together in Science by Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock tested an almost embarrassingly simple instruction: before the test, spend ten minutes writing about your worries. It helped in a laboratory math task and in a ninth-grade biology final, and the authors read it as getting worries out of working memory, where they compete with the task.25 The experiments are small, so hold them loosely. Part 3 gives the numbers.
The operating room and the clinic
Here the stakes are other people's bodies, so care about what is known matters. A 2024 systematic review of 19 studies on stress and surgical performance found that stress in simulation was generally associated with worse technical performance, and that no study showed an effect of acute stress on patient outcomes.26 The middle link has reasonable evidence. The final link, to patients, has not been studied, which is a case for more research and for treating stress management as a safety question, not for assuming the effect is zero, or large.
The evidence in more detail19 studies, mostly simulated
Fifteen of the 19 studies were simulated and four were in real surgery. In simulation, stress went with less efficient instrument movement, longer times and more errors, though three simulated studies showed no clear deterioration. Non-technical skills were more mixed. Stress-management training and practice were associated with lower stress and better performance. Measurement was inconsistent and samples were small.26
The stage, the office and the field
Stage fright is where the advice to "calm down" comes out fastest and has the least support, which is why Brooks chose karaoke, public speaking and math tests.19 At work the evidence is thinner but suggestive. In seven studies with 585 participants, people who used their own name or "you" rather than "I" when thinking about an upcoming social stressor appraised it as more of a challenge and less of a threat, and did better and felt less distress and rumination during tasks such as first impressions and public speaking. The rumination and anticipation findings each rest on one or two studies.27 And the mood and creativity meta-analysis suggests that for work that needs new ideas, a calm mind is not the best target. An activated, positive one is.28 Sport gives no single general answer either: the sprinter and the marathoner ask different things of arousal and attention.
The sources I have used say little about parenting, caregiving, negotiating or teaching a difficult class. The same machinery may well run there, but the studies cited do not show it. Plausibly is the word to keep in mind.
What engineering adds beyond a metaphor
Chips are an easy source of confident-sounding analogies, so I will be brief. This is an analogy, not neuroscience. Hardware designed after nervous systems is event-driven: units signal when something changes and stay quiet in between, so energy is spent where there is signal.
That is the whole contribution. It turns a loose metaphor into a design question that can be tested on people: does an aimed state spend resources the way an event-driven system does? In practice, that would mean the same result at lower cost, repeated in the same person and compared with that person's own bad days. It does not mean quieter is better.
The most efficient system is not the least active one. It is the one that allocates its resources appropriately while holding the quality of its output.
Capacity is how much a system can process, efficiency how economically, effectiveness whether it processes the right things. Emotion's main job looks like effectiveness: it sets the salience, stakes and urgency that decide where capacity goes. The link from chips to people is a working hypothesis. A quiet person is not automatically performing well.
Measuring the driver as well as the engine
If efficiency is the early signal and effectiveness the late one, most of the tools people use are looking at the late one. Scores, splits, grades and sales figures tell you what happened. They are poor at telling you what it cost, which is the part that predicts what happens next. A time sheet can read as a good day while the cost climbs.
What follows is my own thinking, not a finding, and I have not tested any of it as a method. A plain notebook seems like enough to start. After a task that matters, I would jot down how hard it felt, how long the preparation took and how much was left afterward, beside the result. Before the next one, I would guess how I expect to feel, then check the guess against what happens. Over weeks, a flat result with a rising cost is the pattern attentional control theory describes. A fitness watch or a heart-rate strap can sit beside the notes, to compare what the body recorded with what it felt like, though I would treat neither as the truth. Part 1 says more about keeping such notes private.
Try this: watch the cost, not only the result
For one task that matters, note each time how hard it felt, how long the preparation took and how much was left afterward. Look for a flat result with a rising cost.
Evidence: anxiety hurts efficiency before effectiveness, and effort is partly perceived.4,5,12 The practice itself is an inference from the theory and has not been tested as an intervention.
What this does not show
Everything here describes tendencies in groups, and it is a lens, not a diagnosis. None of it tells any one person what their racing heart means.
Several of the central ideas are hypotheses. Adaptive gain theory rests mostly on animal and modeling work, the engineering analogy is an analogy, and the claim that the same machinery runs in every room is a promising idea the studies do not collectively establish.
The effects are small to moderate, and some are wide. The routines estimate has a confidence interval from 0.24 to 1.16, and the external-focus advice nearly vanishes after correcting for reporting bias. The surgical findings end at the simulator, because no reviewed study showed an effect on patient outcomes.
The rowing scene is memory, not data. It is one person's recollection of two races in 1990, with no measurements, so it illustrates the ideas and does not test them.
This part concerns the ordinary range of stress and performance. Intense or persistent anxiety is a matter for a clinician.
Where this leaves us
Pressure is not one thing, and it does not announce itself at the result. It shows up in the cost first, in how attention is spent and in how hard the same work feels, and the useful moves are the ones that give attention a job instead of trying to switch the feeling off.
Where in my own life am I the one who looks fine, and what is it costing me?
Pressure sounds a real alarm, and most people have no plan for it. If a feeling can be read, sorted and aimed, what are the tools, how big are their effects, and which popular ones are oversold? Part 3 takes up regulation: what works, what only sounds good, and why the same strategy helps one person and hurts another.
Next in the series: Part 3, Working With It.
Sources
- Arnsten, A. F. T. (2015). Stress weakens prefrontal networks: molecular insults to higher cognition. Nature Neuroscience, 18, 1376–1385.
- Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 410–422.
- Aston-Jones, G., & Cohen, J. D. (2005). Adaptive gain and the role of the locus coeruleus–norepinephrine system in optimal performance. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 493(1), 99–110.
- Eysenck, M. W., Derakshan, N., Santos, R., & Calvo, M. G. (2007). Anxiety and cognitive performance: attentional control theory. Emotion, 7(2), 336–353.
- Derakshan, N., & Eysenck, M. W. (2009). Anxiety, processing efficiency, and cognitive performance: new developments from attentional control theory. European Psychologist, 14(2), 168–176.
- Dickerson, S. S., & Kemeny, M. E. (2004). Acute stressors and cortisol responses: a theoretical integration and synthesis of laboratory research. Psychological Bulletin, 130(3), 355–391. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.130.3.355
- Beilock, S. L., & Carr, T. H. (2001). On the fragility of skilled performance: what governs choking under pressure? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130(4), 701–725.
- DeCaro, M. S., Thomas, R. D., Albert, N. B., & Beilock, S. L. (2011). Choking under pressure: multiple routes to skill failure. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140(3), 390–406. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023466
- Beilock, S. L., Carr, T. H., MacMahon, C., & Starkes, J. L. (2002). When paying attention becomes counterproductive: impact of divided versus skill-focused attention on novice and experienced performance of sensorimotor skills. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 8(1), 6–16.
- Theobald, M., Breitwieser, J., & Brod, G. (2022). Test anxiety does not predict exam performance when knowledge is controlled for: strong evidence against the interference hypothesis of test anxiety. Psychological Science, 33(12), 2073–2083.
- Jamieson, J. P., Nock, M. K., & Mendes, W. B. (2012). Mind over matter: reappraising arousal improves cardiovascular and cognitive responses to stress. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 417–422.
- Marcora, S. M., Staiano, W., & Manning, V. (2009). Mental fatigue impairs physical performance in humans. Journal of Applied Physiology, 106(3), 857–864.
- Chyi, T., Lu, F. J. H., Hsieh, Y.-C., Hsu, Y.-W., Gill, D. L., & Fang, B.-B. (2024). Relationship between athletes' history of stressors and sport injury: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 131(1), 192–218. https://doi.org/10.1177/00315125231216329
- Yerkes, R. M., & Dodson, J. D. (1908). The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 18(5), 459–482. https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.920180503
- Hancock, P. A., & Ganey, H. C. N. (2003). From the inverted-U to the extended-U: the evolution of a law of psychology. Journal of Human Performance in Extreme Environments, 7(1), 5–14. Reprints Hancock & Warm (1989), Human Factors, 31.
- Rivera, K., Smyth, L., West, S., & Pike-Rowney, G. (2026). From mice to music: a historical critique of optimal arousal in music performance. Music Performance Research, 13, 1–37. https://doi.org/10.14439/mpr.13.1
- Hase, A., Nietschke, M., Kłoskowski, M., Szymański, K., Moore, L., Jamieson, J. P., & Behnke, M. (2025). The effects of challenge and threat states on performance outcomes: an updated review and meta-analysis of recent findings. EXCLI Journal, 24, 151–176. https://doi.org/10.17179/excli2024-7995
- Hanton, S., Jones, G., & Mullen, R. (2000). Intensity and direction of competitive state anxiety as interpreted by rugby players and rifle shooters. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 90(2), 513–521.
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- Exercise and Sports Science Australia. (2026, June 10). Performance under pressure in sport: a position statement from Exercise and Sports Science Australia (ESSA).
- McKay, B., et al. (2024). Reporting bias, not external focus: a robust Bayesian meta-analysis and systematic review of the external focus of attention literature. Psychological Bulletin.
- Ramirez, G., & Beilock, S. L. (2011). Writing about testing worries boosts exam performance in the classroom. Science, 331(6014), 211–213.
- Tam, A., Bateman, S., Buckingham, G., Wilson, M., Melendez-Torres, G. J., Vine, S., & Clark, J. (2025). The effects of stress on surgical performance: a systematic review. Surgical Endoscopy, 39(1), 77–98 (online 2024).
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