When faced with high-pressure situations, your brain can enter what neuroscientists call "downshifting."
Your prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for complex thinking and decision-making, essentially goes offline.
Meanwhile, your amygdala, the threat detection centre, takes over, triggering one of three responses:
Fight, flight, or freeze.
For many of us, especially in professional settings where neither fighting nor fleeing seems appropriate, freezing becomes the default.
It's your brain's attempt to protect you.
The problem is, this protection mechanism evolved for physical threats, not the challenges of modern life.
Now before you can break the pattern, you need to recognise it:
Perhaps your usually sharp mind suddenly empties.
Your body becomes rigid.
Your breathing gets shallow.
You might even feel a heaviness in your chest.
Seconds feel like hours.
You become acutely aware of every moment passing, yet unable to act within that stretched time.
Sound familiar?
I see this constantly in leaders who are brilliant in normal circumstances but become unrecognisable under extreme pressure.
But over decades of working in life-or-death negotiations, I've developed a 4-step framework that works even in the most extreme pressure situations.
Here's how you can apply it:
1/ Trigger Recognition
The first step is becoming aware of your personal freeze triggers.
These are specific situations that reliably cause you to lock up. It might be public speaking, direct confrontation or being put on the spot.
Map these triggers by reflecting on past experiences where you've frozen. What was happening? Who was present? What was at stake?
Understanding your triggers gives you early warning signals to implement the rest of the framework.
2/ Halt the Spiral
Once you recognise you're beginning to freeze, interrupt the pattern.
The simplest way to do this is through what I call the "physiological interrupt" – taking a deep breath through your nose, holding it for one count, then exhaling slowly through your mouth.
It's essentially a direct intervention in your nervous system.
When you control your breath, you send signals to your brain that you're safe, helping to bring your prefrontal cortex back online.
3/ Access Your Anchor
Your anchor is a pre-established mental state you can return to under pressure.
Elite performers don't rely on willpower in the moment.
They create anchors in advance that they can access instantly when needed.
To create your anchor:
- Recall a time when you performed exceptionally well under pressure
- Notice what you saw, heard, and felt during that experience
- Identify a physical gesture (touching your thumb and forefinger together, adjusting your posture, etc.)
- Practice linking this gesture with that state of peak performance
With enough repetition, the physical gesture alone can trigger the mental state, even under extreme pressure.
4/ Work the Next Step
The freeze response often comes from feeling overwhelmed by the entirety of a challenge.
The antidote is radical simplification.
Don't try to solve everything.
Just identify the next step – the smallest possible action you can take.
In crisis negotiations, we call this "reducing the problem space."
When faced with a complex hostage situation, we don't try to resolve everything at once.
We focus on the next communication, the next small agreement.
This approach works just as well for a high-stakes presentation or difficult conversation as it does for life-or-death scenarios.
How you respond to pressure isn't fixed.
It's a learned pattern, which means it can be unlearned and replaced.
When I work with executives and teams, I often hear: "I'm just not good under pressure."
This is like saying "I'm just not good at tennis" after trying it once without coaching.
Of course you're not, yet.
Thriving under pressure is a skill built through deliberate practice, not an innate trait.
The leaders who perform best in crisis haven't eliminated the freeze response.
They've simply learned to recognise it earlier and move through it faster.
Until next time,
Scott
p.s. Registration for the Thrive Under Pressure Programme is now closed.
p.s.s. If you haven't picked up your copy of my new book ‘Eye of the Storm’ yet, you can click here to grab it directly from Amazon.
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