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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 (#ulink_0ee5961f-4fa3-57e1-a7f3-67025ca430f8)? 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.
As much as our mental blueprint is laid down during our childhood, one of the major discoveries of modern science has been that our brain continues to adapt and adjust itself at the microscopic level throughout our life. Remarkably, if part of the brain is damaged, then other nerve cells, especially the adjacent ones, can sometimes help out to compensate for the loss.
Much like the memories in our brain, the patterns encoded in our nerve-cell networks when we were young still influence how we feel and act in current situations. Like a pathway through a forest, the more we use the same nerve-cell pathway, the clearer and easier it becomes. We find ourselves following the path without really thinking why we are doing it; it just feels natural. Which it is: it is now in our nature to react a certain way in difficult moments.
The opposite is also true. If we stop using a particular pathway, it will become overgrown and not so easy to go down. In a high-pressure situation, every time we resist the urge to escape the discomfort by following a certain path, that nerve-cell escape path is weakened – and the uncomfortable path is strengthened. What we consciously experience is that the urge to escape that moment is reduced and we can tolerate a little more discomfort.
The pathways in our brain are constantly being strengthened and weakened. We strengthen the impulse to escape every time we reward it by moving away from discomfort – and we weaken it every time we tolerate the urge to move away.
Our performance habits are not random. If we want to change our performance under pressure, then we need to change the biology that drives it.
The RED–BLUE tool is all about being comfortable being uncomfortable. Under pressure, do we give up or rise up? As someone wise once said: ‘Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.’
THE HUMAN BRAIN
Structure & function
The brainstem and limbic system connect primarily with the right hemisphere to provide emotional regulation, operating through images, feelings and direct experience (RED). The left hemisphere operates through language, logic and reflection (BLUE).
CHAPTER 3
Chapter 3, Balanced Brain vs Unbalanced Brain (#ulink_032b3f1f-ccc0-5172-8c00-f720ba3b7f58)
Our emotional regulation system sits at the heart of our performance under pressure.
Our RED system evolved through repeated connections with our primary caregivers, and this determines how much feeling we can tolerate and how flexible our responses are when we become uncomfortable.
Far from being a wishy-washy system of feelings and sensations, the RED system is the primary driver of our psychological reaction in pressure situations. Our emotional blueprint – laid down in our first two years and constantly revised through life experience – has a lot to do with how we respond to pressure, and whether we become prone to unhelpful behaviours. When our emotional regulation is poor and RED dominates, our attention becomes divided or diluted and our focus is dragged away from the present moment. We lose emotional flexibility and the ability to think clearly and our behaviours default to basic survival instincts, out of keeping with the situation.
In my experience the most commonly identified pattern is for performance under pressure to cause over-arousal – too much RED – rather than under-arousal. But one trap is to assume that under-arousal comes from too little emotion, when in fact it often comes from too much anxiety and tension and a partial freeze reaction. Going ‘flat’ can look relaxed, but is actually very different – and is sure to lead to poor performance.
Trying to ignore or suppress our RED mind is a weak strategy, because it has evolved to never be snubbed or shut down. In fact, trying to overlook it actually powers up our RED response until it gets our attention. If need be, it will take over and make its presence felt.
But whatever template we have now does not fully determine how we respond to pressure. Our BLUE system is designed to exert some control over the feelings and impulses that emerge when we are emotionally uncomfortable. Our BLUE mind can kick in to provide balance and control of our RED system, and we can get the two systems back in sync.
Our BLUE system controls RED emotion first of all by naming it – remember our left hemisphere has the power of language – and simply naming a vague, hard-to-describe physical experience has a very settling effect. Our BLUE system can then reappraise the situation by focusing on the negative experience and modifying its meaning. Left-brain naming and meaning-change dampen down the RED emotional intensity.
It’s important to remember that the RED system is not inherently good or bad, any more than emotions are good or bad. Our feelings are a normal and essential part of life. Without them we would never experience the joy of close connections or the thrill of chasing goals and achieving them. The RED emotional system is what gives us drive and energy; it gets us going. It’s just when RED goes into overdrive and we lose control that we meet problems.
It would be a serious mistake to label RED as bad and BLUE as good. Both systems are very useful for their intended purposes. Too much RED may be more common, but being too BLUE can be just as harmful to performance. It can cause us to lose emotional connection, becoming detached, aloof and even cold. Team spirit would be impossible within a completely BLUE world.
This book is fundamentally about finding our RED–BLUE balance, not about casting RED as a villain and BLUE as the hero of the piece.
My aim is to help you perform effectively when you’re out of sorts and stressed, not when it’s plain sailing. As we’ve learned, under pressure we will experience discomfort, so we need to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable – not just coping with discomfort, but thriving within it.
How well we perform depends on the quality of our attention. And our control of attention is driven by the interaction between our RED and BLUE mind systems.
Whether RED and BLUE are in sync or out of sync will have a large say in whether we can perform under pressure. If we are badly prepared, pressure can take us down. If we are well prepared, pressure can lift us up to new heights.
In this chapter, I’ll look at the most common ineffective patterns of feeling, thinking and acting under pressure, and contrast them with the most common effective patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving under pressure. Understanding these patterns provides us with a better chance of detecting when we are going off track, and more idea of how to get back on track once it happens.
Threat vs Challenge
Threat
Tony is running late for an important meeting at work with his boss. He has tension in his neck and shoulders, his heart and thoughts are racing, and he feels a little sick. There’s no direct physical threat here. He knows that in the same situation, most of his colleagues would not be bothered at all. If he does arrive late his boss probably won’t even comment. But still he feels anxious.
Now that we’ve met the RED–BLUE mind model, we can understand what Tony is going through. Somewhere in his past, being late has led to some painful feelings. Perhaps it was being late on the first day of school. Maybe it was a combination of several occasions when he was late or cut it fine for sports practice and got yelled at by the coach, which caused him some embarrassment. These painful experiences have been long since buried among Tony’s unconscious memories. But today, as he sees he’s running late, a fusion of those painful memories and the feelings linked to them is once again automatically triggered by his RED system, which is primed to react to threats (whether real or imagined). No specific memory comes to mind, but the familiar feeling does. And so Tony’s anxiety system kicks in, and he ends up tense and anxious.
Turning up on time is a performance moment. No gold medals are at stake here, but being punctual is personally significant to Tony, while for others it’s not particularly important.
It goes to show that even apparently mundane, everyday events can carry a hidden performance agenda. And so when we enter an arena where the stakes are genuinely high, it should come as no surprise that our emotional reaction can skyrocket.
Think about this reaction as an unconscious, two-stage process. The first step is that old, painful feelings get automatically stirred up. The second step is that the feelings trigger an anxiety reaction to block those feelings from surfacing. These steps happen so fast that we usually only notice the second one – the anxiety reaction – which makes it seem like that happened first. But some people pick up a spike of emotion – perhaps a hot feeling surging up through their core – before the anxiety reaction comes in over the top to shut the emotion down.
Anxiety can make us feel tense or go flat if we hit our threshold, which can disrupt our thinking and senses. It can also cause a host of other physical sensations through our fight, flight or freeze reaction. But they’re different from the primary feelings of anger, guilt or grief. Anxiety is a secondary reaction.
The combined effect of the primary painful feelings and secondary anxiety is that we experience discomfort. This discomfort doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It comes about because of a process inside of us. And it isn’t random – it’s very predictable. We will get anxious in the same types of situation, again and again, when others do not.
Tony’s experience shows us that the common phrase ‘performance anxiety’ oversimplifies what actually happens inside our body. The external performance – being on time or not – activates Tony’s unconscious blueprint of feelings, which then trigger his anxiety.
The middle step is key. Though it usually happens so fast that we are not aware of it, it’s most definitely there, because otherwise, why would people react so differently to the same external situation?
As we’ve seen, external fear arising from real physical danger is hard-wired within us and is an automatic survival mechanism, driven by our biology. In brain terms, we react long before we can consciously think it through. And internally driven fear, or anxiety, is generated by our personal psychology. It’s not a genuine survival moment in the physical sense, although it is in the psychological sense: the anxiety is generated by doubt about our ability to mentally survive the occasion.
Although most performance situations don’t literally involve threat to our physical survival, it might threaten our psychological existence if we mentally live and die with our image and reputation. If we subconsciously frame these moments in survival terms, we will trigger survival responses.
The bottom line is that performance situations stir up deeply ingrained emotions held in our body, and anxiety in the form of tension can instantly lock things down, making us uncomfortable and affecting our ability to think clearly under pressure.
Performing under pressure usually means performing when we are uncomfortable.
Challenge: Going beyond threat
If our RED mind is primed for survival, our BLUE mind is primed for potential.
Safety comes first. If we are not safe, our RED mind is activated and dominates our thinking and behaviour. But once we are safe and the RED mind is calm enough, other opportunities open up. (It doesn’t have to be completely calm, just within the window of discomfort where you can still operate.)
The BLUE mind is well suited to looking at our immediate environment, solving problems and adapting. When we’re not forced to pay attention to getting out of a situation we don’t want to be in, our mental effort can be focused on creating a situation that we do want. In modern language, we call this goal-setting.
With its emphasis on language and logical analysis, our BLUE mind sees possibilities, nuances and opportunities by matching the current situation against prior experience. That’s how it evolved – as a creative, forward-thinking, adaptive mechanism. If the RED mind is the security at the door, the BLUE mind is the creative headquarters tucked safely inside, where plans are hatched and problems are solved.
When we engage our BLUE mind in pressure situations, a fundamental shift in mindset can occur: threat is replaced by challenge. Instead of trying to flee and bring the situation to an end as quickly as possible, our BLUE mind draws us towards the obstacle that’s in our way, using all mental resources at its disposal to adapt, adjust and improvise so we can overcome the challenge.
In a survival situation, there is a simple threat focus on outcomes such as living and dying, or winning and losing. With a challenge focus, our attention is drawn to the process of finding a way through. Judgment is replaced by movement. Instead of ‘Will I survive?’, the question becomes ‘How far can I go?’
If we regard the situation as a challenge, we’ll focus not on the outcome but on our capacity to deal with the demanding and difficult moments. Rather than a burden to bear, we’ll see the discomfort as stimulating.
Of course, with this challenge mindset, we will regularly fall short. But the key is in the method, not the outcome. What matters is our state of mind when we perform under pressure, not whether we succeed or fail. We don’t lose heart when we don’t meet the challenge, because we appreciate that the learning we’ve just experienced is precious. Moments of failure arguably create more opportunities to get better than moments of success. The critical step is to embrace the pressure situation in the first place.
No one can meet every challenge. If we do, then we’ve set the bar too low and the challenges we’ve set don’t really deserve the name.
To reach our full potential, we have to keep pushing ourselves to our limit and beyond. We have to put ourselves in a position to deal with more and more demanding tasks. It’s about full commitment to the moment.
This is more difficult than it sounds. The discomfort makes most people flinch, so they never fully test themselves.
The word test comes from the Latin testum, meaning an earthen vessel. The idea was that the vessel was used to examine the quality of a substance placed within it – like a test tube. Some material was put inside it and subjected to different conditions, like heat.
Our performance arena is the equivalent of a test tube. Our mind is the material inside it. And the condition we’re being subjected to is pressure.
Our personal properties are being deliberately examined under pressure. When we face the heat, what qualities do we display? How do we function as we approach our limit? Do we retain our resilience, or melt and lose our mental structure?
When we start approaching test situations with relish, our tolerance of discomfort increases. Don’t worry, you don’t have to actually enjoy the discomfort – you just have to appreciate what it achieves. Discomfort is not a punishment, it’s a testing moment we’ve earned, and an invitation to step up to the next level.
The big mental shift in performance under pressure comes when we can feel fear but accept deep inside that we will mentally survive the moment. Once the mental threat in a situation is contained, it loses its power to overwhelm us emotionally and shut us down, allowing us to re-energise and face the challenge.
A challenge mindset means feeling the discomfort, but facing down the challenge without flinching.
Alex, a freestyle skier competing at a big championship event, is about to start her second run after her first one ended in a fall. A second poor run would see years of hard work end in misery.
In that moment, Alex is scared. Not of falling, or of missing out on a medal, but of the shame she’ll feel when she sees her coach, parents and teammates afterwards. She feels empty inside. She’s facing psychological devastation. It’s a RED alert moment.
But she has prepared for this possibility. At precisely the instant when everyone else gives up on her and sees what she might lose, she sees an extraordinary opportunity and what she might gain: a comeback story for the ages.
