The Science Behind Choking And Mental Fortitude

You've probably experienced the effects of choking yourself: it's the feeling of cold sweat on the nape of your neck, your stomach turns and your brain goes into complete overdrive. You start to overthink situations you've been in countless times before and suddenly you're overly harsh on your performance. Well, don't worry. It happens to the best of us. Even pros can and will choke under high pressure situations.

It's a self-defeating cycle: the thought of wanting to perform better actually makes you play worse. It makes you a lot more self-conscious which combined with fear and anxiety demolishes your critical thinking skills and overfloods your working memory.

Your working memory, in layman's terms is the part of your short term memory that contains all the information that has to be immediately available in a short window of time. It's what's in the back of your mind while you are focusing on the task at hand.

When you encounter a high-stress situation this kind of resource gets drained faster than usual, making you perform worse.

So the obvious question arises: how do you deal with pressure?

According to Sian Bedrock, a renown psychologist from the University of Chicago the key is trying to loosen your mental grip and letting the autopilot programmed by many hours of practice take control.

There are multiple ways to do this. The most obvious one is to practice under moderately higher stress than usual, so you won't feel the weight of the entire world when you have to walk the walk. Try getting into the mindset of "every single move counts towards victory".

The other one is something you may have seen pros do before - distracting themselves, tuning out their surrounding, only focusing on the game at hand. SKT's pre-game clapping and the karaoke that a couple teams put on before they get in the game serves this purpose. Having a ritual like this enables you to grasp onto something solid in high stress games.

Find your own mantra and you'll find yourself being the pillar of your group.