Choking and panicking

[mmcirvin]

Here's a thoughtful essay on the two main ways people fail under stress: choking (in which instinct is lost, and mechanical, explicit reasoning tries to take over with little success) and panicking (which is the opposite: fear-driven reversion to instinct when logic is needed).

Under stress I tend to be far more a choker than a panicker; it's one of the many reasons why I am no athlete. That statement would probably sound strange to people who know of the spirals of worry that I can get into, but those are more over-thinking than the reverse.

When I'm trained to deal with a situation by following rote procedures, I can usually keep my cool for long enough to get through it. This is why I don't have the common paralyzing horror of public speaking, provided that I've got a prepared talk and a good understanding of the subject matter. But my implicit learning, as Gladwell calls it, is very fragile. I can get good at some video games, when they take place in a safe environment in which I feel at home; but the moment any social or other stress kicks in, instinct goes out the window.

The times when I do panic are situations in which there is no rote learning to fall back on, such as all the awkward social situations I found myself in as a teenager, in which I really had no idea what actions were expected of me and imagined there was something terribly elaborate that I didn't know.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And that may have actually been choking by Gladwell's definition: an excess of wariness combined with "stereotype threat".

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I love Gladwell's writing. I'm re-reading "The Tipping Point" right now.