Why Peak Performance Fizzles When the Stakes Are High

"Jackpot" scenarios disrupt the brain's ability to perform with superfluidity.

Reviewed by Davia Sills

Key points

• "Choking" under pressure is common in high-stakes, high-reward situations.
• Jackpot scenarios disrupt the brain's ability to "go with the flow" and perform with superfluidity.
• Overthinking causes the frontal lobes to clamp down, freezing up automatic muscle memory.

Superfluidity is the ultimate state of flow. Muscle movements seem to happen automatically and effortlessly when you're in the zone and experiencing peak performance associated with frictionless flow states.

"Choking" under pressure is the antithesis of superfluidity. When athletes choke, motor coordination becomes discombobulated and muscle movements lose smoothness. The jerkiness associated with choking causes athletes to fumble, drop the ball, double-fault, triple-bogey, or strike out.

The ability to perform with grace under pressure when the stakes are high is rooted in the automatic muscle memory held in the cerebellum (Latin for "little brain").

Overthinking causes the big brain's frontal lobes to "clamp down" on cerebellar feedback loops, disrupting the preparatory activity in the motor neocortex needed to automatically move muscles in smooth pursuit of a target, which leads to underperformance (Chabrol et al., 2019).

"Jackpot" Rewards Can Freeze Up Muscles' Fluidity

New research (Smoulder et al., 2024) shows how "jackpot" scenarios interfere with peak performance by causing the frontal lobes to become overactive and upend automaticity by interfering with how the motor cortex automatically prepares for movement. This study sheds light on why it's so easy to psych yourself out in ways that cause your muscles to freeze up in high-stakes, high-reward situations.

First author Adam Smoulder and colleagues found an inverted-U sweet spot between small rewards and "jackpot" rewards that triggers motivation and arousal in ways that don't cause the cerebrum's frontal lobes to clamp down and interfere with optimal performance. However, when reward potential is exceptionally high in jackpot scenarios, neural mechanisms make it more likely that an athlete gets frazzled and their performance fizzles.

"We found that increases in reward drive neural activity during movement preparation into, and then past, a zone of optimal performance," the authors write. "We conclude that neural signals of reward and motor preparation interact in the motor cortex (MC) in a manner that can explain why we choke under pressure."

These findings align with the Yerkes-Dodson law, which posits that performance levels increase in tandem with arousal up to a certain point but are suboptimal if someone's state of arousal is too high or too low and moves outside a "Goldilocks zone" within the inverted-U's curve.

"Keep It Loose" to Prevent Choking Under Pressure

But what can you do when the stakes are high, and you want to hit it out of the park? The researchers suggest that the best way to avoid choking under pressure is to let go and "unclamp" your frontal lobes by not overthinking. As senior author Aaron Batista explains in a September 2024 news release,

"If people trying to avoid choking under pressure were to benefit from our study, we suggest they could beat it by finding the right balance between self-awareness and self-control, and just generally keeping it loose when the stakes go up, even if there is a natural tendency to clamp down."

When the prospect of winning big gets too high, the odds of self-sabotage and choking under pressure increase exponentially. The antidote for crumbling under pressure is to unclamp the intellectual machinery and executive functions of your frontal lobes by letting bottom-up processing seated in the "little brain" run free by getting your "big brain" out of the way.

Overthinking Causes "Paralysis by Analysis"

The latest (2024) research shows how jackpot scenarios interfere with the motor cortex's ability to perform with frictionless flow.

Because the automaticity of superfluidity is driven by subcortical brain regions beneath the cerebral cortex, if top-down processing takes over and the "intellectual machinery" of your frontal lobes clamps down, it's more likely that you're going to choke. Tennis legend Arthur Ashe famously called this syndrome caused by overthinking "paralysis by analysis."

To avoid crumbling under pressure, don't overthink the jackpot or dwell on winning a trophy. Instead, loosen your attention on the prize and let go, knowing that the more you think about a high-stakes jackpot, the less likely you are to stay in the optimal performance zone driven by bottom-up processing rooted in the cerebellum's subconscious.