Perform Under Pressure

Blue

The BLUE world is one of logic and reason. As we’ve seen, this system is responsible for higher mental functions such as prioritising, planning, abstract thinking, decision-making, goal-setting and problem-solving. These more advanced intellectual functions are linked to the frontal lobes, which sit behind the forehead.

There are three BLUE brain abilities that are particularly relevant to performance under pressure:

1 Logic, language and numbers

2 Metacognition

3 Working memory

1. Logic, language and numbers

The BLUE system processes information that has already been handled by the RED system. That means that it is a secondary system to the RED, always dependent on the information it is given, but it also means it can provide a feedback loop and revise the RED information. And because it has the capacity to form words it enables us to communicate all this through language. The RED system uses images, but the BLUE system is able to put names and labels to things, and to number them.

BLUE brain processes are conscious, slow and rule-bound, in contrast to RED processes, which are fast and unconscious. Our BLUE mind processes information in a linear way, one piece after another. Timelines and sequencing are its specialities. This means that the BLUE mind is often explaining and making sense of events that have already unfolded.

The BLUE mind is constantly interpreting our environment, breaking it down into a basic architecture of structures, categories and sequences to enable logical analysis. These attributes help with reflection, interpretation, planning and goal-setting. It allows us to understand the environment in an objective way and therefore try to anticipate and predict what happens next, based on stored information.

It is not suited to new situations or operating under stress, and is more at home with using a narrow focus to detect patterns, so it can create a narrative about the past or the future.

2. Metacognition: Thinking about thinking

Our BLUE mind enables us to think about how we think and feel, an extraordinary ability shared only with some primates in the animal kingdom. This process of stepping back and reflecting on our own and other people’s mental states is called metacognition, and it is this ability that allows us to adjust our emotional reactions. If we can’t reflect and review, how can we ever learn?

Metacognition occurs when our RED brain processes information from our body and environment through the limbic system, then passes it over to our BLUE brain for a second look. The RED and BLUE systems meet at the right orbitofrontal cortex, which is located in BLUE territory (as we’ve heard), behind the right eye socket. This is the key way-station, where the information is handed over for further review by the BLUE brain, particularly the left pre-frontal cortex. It assesses and adapts our perception of the current situation, considers how this matches with our goals and objectives, and makes conscious adjustments, before the information is returned to the right orbitofrontal cortex, which arrives at the final RED–BLUE combination.

Metacognition is critical for maintaining control over our mental responses, and for learning to perform under pressure. (It sits at the heart of the RED–BLUE tool, which we’ll meet later in the book.)

3. Working memory: Our mental laptop screen

Picture the mind as working like a laptop.

A laptop has a lot of files stored away in its hard-drive memory, where we can’t see them. We’ve forgotten most of the files, but they’re still there somewhere. Our mind is the same, with a huge number of files stored away in our unconscious mind, beyond our awareness.

The working surface of our laptop is the screen, which sits at the interface between the inside and outside worlds. We draw up information from memory storage (our inside world) and we also draw in information from the internet, or by inputting new data (our outside world).

Although it occupies the crucial interface position, the screen has a big limitation: we can only work on a small number of files or channels at a time, otherwise we quickly become overloaded and lose track of things.

Our brain works the same way. The mental equivalent of our laptop screen is called our working memory, a vital mental function located in prime BLUE-mind real estate in our pre-frontal cortex, the part of the frontal lobes that sits just above our eye sockets.

Though our long-term memory has enormous storage capacity, the capacity of our working memory is tiny. A famous psychology experiment in the 1950s showed that we can only hold between five and nine items in our working memory at any one time. (This is one reason why telephone numbers are usually seven or eight digits long, and why we break them up into chunks.) This experiment was later revisited because it was based on simple, learned sequences of items like numbers. When pieces of real-life information were used, the capacity dropped to just four or five.

But in some ways the human mind doesn’t work like a computer. On our laptop, our files are emotionally neutral and stored in a binary system of 0s and 1s, which allows the exact same file to be reopened every time. But in our mind they’re stored according to emotions, which constantly adjust the file contents, so that files are continually modified over time.

When it comes to operating under pressure, our working memory capacity can plummet. Normally we call up files (memories) when we want them, but when we’re under pressure, any memory that’s emotionally similar to the ones we have open can make its way to the surface. Worse still, thanks to our RED brain, any memories that contain threat – and therefore emotion – take precedence. Our working memory loses capacity quickly, so that we can only focus on one thing at a time, and have trouble accessing even basic information. We become self-conscious, just as worried about how we look as what we’re doing. And the content of our working memory changes from minute to minute, so we keep losing what we were working on.

In the end our screen may overload and freeze, and we need a moment to shut down and reboot before we can see things clearly again.

As the screen sitting at the interface between our internal and external worlds, our working memory sits at the heart of our mental performance under pressure. It acts like Brain HQ, because it’s where we gather information from our immediate environment, match it against information and patterns that we call up from our memory banks, manipulate the information a bit, then make a decision and act.

When our screen is clear and at full power, it drives us forward. But when our RED mind interferes, our crucial BLUE capacity is compromised.

Through metacognition, the BLUE pre-frontal cortex has a huge role in keeping RED activation in check. RED overdrive, which leads to shrinking or disintegration of our BLUE mental screen, and loss of braking power on our RED system, is a double whammy for performance under pressure. Our BLUE logical analysis, metacognition and working memory can all be severely affected – and quickly.

Zac is a competitive gamer in the middle of a tense duel. He doesn’t want to lose and face the social media backlash he suffered last time around.

He’s playing right at his limit when he receives a text message from his girlfriend, asking why he hasn’t turned up to meet her as promised. He completely forgot in the midst of his online battle, and now he’s facing an argument.

He loses concentration, and his opponent strikes and gains the advantage, which makes Zac angry and even more distracted. Things go from bad to worse. He gets tunnel vision and starts missing background details. He becomes erratic, swinging between being too hesitant and being too impulsive. He can’t think straight, and his mind keeps jumping to how he’s going to explain things to his girlfriend. He feels like he is playing against two opponents – the one online and himself!

Performing effectively under pressure is about keeping our BLUE mental screen clear even during significant RED mind activity.

Red and Blue

Like it or not, our RED and BLUE minds have an intimate reciprocal relationship. It is, in a sense, like a lifelong marriage.

How we manage that marital relationship will go a long way to determining how far we travel towards our potential. When RED and BLUE are working harmoniously together, we are in a position to do more with our life. When they are at odds, our performance suffers.

For effective performance under pressure, we need RED and BLUE to be operating in the right proportions to suit the situation.

In life-threatening moments, RED beats BLUE because survival beats potential. When we’re in genuine danger it’s time for emergency action, not reflection. The RED fight–flight mechanism goes into overdrive and more or less shuts down BLUE functioning.

In the reverse direction, the BLUE system can dampen down the RED response, but can’t switch it off. Survival never entirely goes out of fashion!

So the RED–BLUE dynamic is that RED operates in the here and now and can at any moment severely disrupt BLUE with emotions; while BLUE constantly works away to keep the emotional RED reactions and impulses in check, probing the past and scanning the future. At our best, our RED and BLUE minds will complement each other as they work in tandem.

RED and BLUE are both important to performance under pressure, but both are able to undermine it too. The key lies in our ability to adjust the balance, because that will govern how we pay attention in any given moment. Our ability to balance the two will go a long way in influencing which mental pathway we go down when we are uncomfortable.

How Our Early Years Set the Pattern

The way our brain develops in the first two years of life will have a large say in whether we can hold our nerve in high-pressure situations as adults.

Attachment theory is based on the idea that strong emotional and physical attachment to at least one parent or caregiver is essential for early development. This psychological model can help us understand the impact our early years have on our ability to regulate our emotions later in life.

A strong emotional connection between infant and parent allows the infant to retreat to the parent when they are fearful (attachment), but to continue to explore the world if the parent is reassuring and seems unconcerned about the situation (exploration). The key is that the infant reacts to signals that reveal the parent’s mental state.

The interesting thing is that this attachment behaviour is learned without words. It’s a constant process that happens before we can talk, and even before we can move independently. Our parent intuitively matches our emotional state, providing signals through tone, touch and look, with the eyes being the critical connection point.

On the biological front, our brain goes through a massive growth spurt over the first year of life, to more than double in size to weigh over a kilogram. Our brainstem and limbic system are already maturing, with the amygdala – our superbly sensitive threat detectors – fully functional at birth. Our sympathetic nervous system develops in our first year, to give us the energy to engage and explore visually. If bonding goes well, this first year has a very positive impact on the infant, and most interactions are soothing and joyful.

In the second year of life the parasympathetic branch of our ANS matures and connects with our right orbitofrontal cortex. This happens as we’re becoming more mobile and therefore more in need of frequent interventions from our parent to set limits that keep us safe. The signals increasingly come from a slight distance, and largely through face and eye contact.

This is a big change in tone. We’ve become used to mainly positive parental reactions, but now we’re faced with a real mixture of encouragement to explore, and signals to hold back. When we see our parent’s concerned reaction, our anxiety spikes, but our parasympathetic nervous system down-regulates our stress levels and careful matching from our parent restores the connection. When there is a good connection, our parent is said to be attuned to us.

By 18 months, we’ve been exposed to many, many interactions. The right orbitofrontal cortex is providing the final adjustment of the output from our limbic system, regulating our arousal level and emotions up or down.

By the end of the second year, we’ve built up an ability to cope with some fear and stress, and to quickly return to exploring when the situation is safe enough. If it’s not safe, we’re able to quickly seek contact with the parent and come back under emotional control so we can re-energise (a process known as refuelling). We learn to tolerate fear without becoming overwhelmed or lost, and to settle quickly if we do become distressed. This is called a secure attachment.

However, an unhelpful pattern can be set up if the parent is unresponsive, or too responsive, or if their behaviour is inconsistent and the infant is never sure what to expect.

If the parent is too quick to soothe, the infant isn’t exposed to any fear and doesn’t learn any tolerance of stress and discomfort. Over time, the infant will develop a tendency to become agitated, restless and over-aroused.

On the other hand, if the infant is looking for reassurance and it is delayed, or not provided, the infant’s distress increases. If the distress continues to rise, the infant can reach its threshold and suddenly shut down, becoming quiet and still. It learns that help and reassurance should not be expected, so it starts to isolate itself and become lethargic (under-aroused).

Both of these patterns – and a situation where there’s no clear pattern – are called insecure attachments, where the infant’s ability to regulate their emotions is impaired. (A word of caution: no parent can be attentive all of the time, and this is not a platform for judging the quality of our parents – or anyone else’s.)

The quality of the parent–child interaction is more important than the circumstances in which a child grows up. People can be emotionally resilient despite a difficult early family life, while emotional fragility can sometimes emerge from what appears to be a solid family environment.

Memory

The signals we receive from our parent and our reactions to them are absorbed into our memory and act as powerful automatic templates or ‘scripts’ for our responses to later events. By the time we’re 18 months old, encoded memory scripts are ingrained in our limbic system and automatically guide how we manage our arousal in new situations.

During our critical first two years, a huge number of nerve cells are produced, which are pruned back to reflect our dominant reactions, good or bad. Our RED reactions become hard-wired. We form memories of automatic procedures that are either healthy and flexible, or rigid and unhelpful.

Our memories can be divided into two main types:

1 Explicit memories, which encode facts and events

2 Implicit memories, which encode procedures for how to do things

An explicit memory records what happened and when, and labels it as either pleasant or unpleasant. To form an explicit memory, we have to consciously focus our attention, which requires our BLUE mind. But explicit memories are not true records of what happened, because they are also encoded with emotion from our RED mind, which makes them more vivid. In addition, they are influenced by the way we are paying attention at the time. We can generally recall a memory more easily when we’re in the same emotional state we were in when the memory was formed.

Implicit memories are unconscious records that show us how to do something, such as writing. As we’ve seen, these are formed from birth through repeated experiences. We don’t consciously have the experience of ‘remembering’: when we are writing, we just do it. Our implicit memories run automatically.

The early scripts that capture how we think, feel and act in response to cues from our environment are examples of powerful implicit memories. We have no sense of recall when they are triggered; we just ‘find’ ourselves functioning in a certain way that feels entirely natural, whether it is helpful for us or not.

But certain implicit memories formed during childhood can modify this early emotional template, and can have a particularly powerful effect on our performance under pressure.

Shame and trauma

Emotionally overwhelming events are stored in the brain as traumatic memories. Because they are processed in extreme conditions, our memory only records fragments of the event. It seems that during the recording, our RED brain emotion disrupts BLUE brain attention.

Sometimes people do not mentally process the scene and only the body-based experience is recorded as an implicit memory, which is why people can re-experience the same feelings as in the original event, even without a visual memory.

But it’s important to make a distinction between big-T trauma – reserved for major events like natural disasters and violent incidents, commonly associated with helplessness and loss of control – and little-t trauma, referring to lesser events that are not life-threatening but still carry some emotional impact.

In big-T trauma situations, some people can develop highly distressing memories that come into their mind out of the blue. Some powerful memories called flashbacks actually take us back into the moment as if we were re-experiencing the trauma; the sense that it happened in the past is lost. People suffering from post-trauma syndromes have symptoms of high arousal (feeling jumpy and on edge, experiencing flashbacks) or low arousal (detachment, numbness), or both, often swinging erratically between the two.

Most of us have a lot of little-t and perhaps a few large-T traumas encoded in our memory systems. And some of our first little-t traumatic memories date from the attachment process during our early years.

When we become mobile and our parent starts setting limits, we’re suddenly confronted by the sight of their face showing disapproval of our behaviour, and our urge is to feel shame. It’s an abrupt, painful reaction that leads to silence, avoidance of eye contact, and feelings of isolation. These emotions can be seen in the face of a child before they learn to talk.

How we manage shame in early life plays a major role in how we learn to regulate our emotions. These moments are absorbed as implicit memories and become automatic procedures when similar moments are encountered later. If moments of shame are managed well, we’ll be able to maintain emotional control while experiencing moderate levels of discomfort. But if the attachment traumas become consistent, we’ll feel like we can’t tolerate and cope with the strength of the feeling and develop a strong tendency towards becoming anxious and agitated (over-arousal), or washed out and flat (under-arousal) when we become uncomfortable.

None of us can recall our earliest traumatic experiences. But most of us can remember moments of shame or embarrassment from our schooldays – whether we tripped on the stage at school, fluffed our lines in the school play, failed an exam or missed an open goal.

Our RED system doesn’t forget these moments, because they’re moments of social threat. The RED brain is brilliant at storing these moments away as implicit memories, even if we can’t recall the moments explicitly, so it can warn us if similar situations reappear. When that happens, our RED memory of the event – apparently asleep for years but in reality only resting with one eye open – springs to life. It reminds us, in an instant, of the social threat, and our RED survival system is reactivated. It doesn’t matter that these days we don’t consciously recall the original threat; the RED system makes us feel it anyway.

This explains why we can find ourselves in a performance situation, thinking (with our BLUE mind) that we have it under control, but feeling anxious without really knowing why. Our subconscious mind is recognising some aspect of the current situation that is symbolic of the old event, and the old feelings come up. Some subtle aspect of the situation – a tone of voice, certain words, even a smell – triggers our deeply stored RED memories, and the reactions that follow. Instead of growing large and facing the moment down, we find ourselves shrinking and hesitating under pressure.

Remember the golfer facing the final hole in Chapter 1? He experiences fear not because of a physical threat, but because of the potential judgment of the crowd. He’s undoubtedly faced other situations involving judgment throughout his life. Some of those experiences will have been associated with strong emotions like anger, guilt and grief.

The golfer won’t, and can’t, recall all those situations right now, but he still gets an instant negative emotional hit. The golfer has an unconscious emotional blueprint, which has gradually formed throughout his life, and is now triggered during any situations involving judgment.

In RED–BLUE mind-model terms, uncomfortable feelings like fear occur when our RED mind dominates our BLUE mind. Our ability to face and handle these uncomfortable states provides the template for our performance under pressure.

Although you may not have thought about it this way before, your performances started at birth. When you did something – anything – you performed, and that elicited a reaction, good or bad, from your parents or caregivers. This happened with your first milestones. Then at school. It happened with your friends. At work. On the stage or on the sports field.

Our lives have developed into a sequence of performances, and nuanced emotional interactions with those who watched us. Our responses to this have been encoded as a collection of performance memories. Over time we have developed a highly individual, and strong, mental blueprint relating to performance. It has been built on the numerous occasions in which we felt we have been exposed to judgment, and it is this subconscious blueprint that is activated when we encounter new performance or judgment situations.

Significant physical injuries suffered in the past, or psychological blows such as major losses or humiliations, can all affect our current performance. But the greater the emotional regulation we have, the more we’ll be able to cope with the trials and tribulations of harsh, distressing or even traumatic performance experiences.

What little-t performance trauma can you recall from your childhood or adolescence? What was your emotional reaction at the time? Can you see a link between this and how you react to similar situations now? Do you become too ‘hyper’ and lose your ability to think and feel clearly? Do you become distant or shut down? Or can you cope, recover and recharge yourself to continue with your performance?

Changing our brain

The great news is that however our RED system reacts under pressure, we can increase our BLUE control over those reactions, thanks to a property of our brain called plasticity.