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How to prevent choking

Take smaller bites!!

Ok, no. I’m talking about performance-based choking, or as Jonah Lehrer puts it, “performing below skill level due to performance related anxieties”. Lehrer points to some interesting research which suggests that simplified thinking about your general technique can be enough to ward off performance anxiety.

When the expert golfers contemplated a holistic cue word, their performance was no longer affected by anxiety. Because the positive adjectives were vague and generic, they didn’t cause the athletes to lose the flow of expert performance or overrule their automatic brain.