#897 - Steve Magness - How Nervous People Can Perform Under Pressure

How many elite performers do you think have got the talent to be able to become world class, but don't actually have the inside game to actualize that potential?

I think it's a much larger percent than we realize. And I've seen it.
I've seen it at the junior, the high school, the college level. Athletes who were insanely talented, better than those became olympic medalists but they just kept getting in their own way they weren't able to express that talent and i would bet you that any coach or somebody who spent enough time in this field has dozens of stories uh just like i do yeah there's a do you know who lewis capaldi is british singer no okay so he i mean you'll have heard his tracks he's done billions and billions of streams and um he's having a tough time mentally at the moment he found a lot of pressure in between his first and his second album uh the as it's known the difficult second album and um had this pressure to perform, wasn't really too sure whether he could live up to his own expectations and what was needed by the label and what was wanted by his management and so on and so forth.
And he had Tourette's and he developed kind of a Tourette's tick, which was his shoulder, which is very common. And a lot of anxiety came along with it.
And a couple of times now on very big stages, I think he did this at Glastonbury last summer. He's certainly done it in a couple of his own live shows.
He's choked on stage doing his own songs. And, you know, the anxiety has gotten so bad that he hasn't been able to get the words out to the songs that he's written, the very thing that he wanted and i feel so bad for him because i i adore his music and i think he's like a wonderful kind funny guy at least in as much as you can tell from someone through the internet um but i always think about him as having this really unique blend of insane talent gorgeous voice, wonderful songwriting ability, real insight into the human condition with what he sings about and how he puts it into words and lyrics and sounds and then this other side which is his performance his inner game and the challenges that he faces and the fact that his inner game is limiting his capacity and i think for most people assume, well, people just aren't good enough.
They're not good enough at the thing that they're trying to do. And so many people have got the desire and the drive and they want and they try hard and so on and so on.
But they're kind of just not that good. They're not world-class.
But there's this very unique and kind of particularly vicious category who've got it the other way around, who are better than they need to be to be world class and yet don't have whatever it is, the constitution to be able to handle the pressure, the performance, the anxiety, the stress. Absolutely.
And it's interesting because you generally see it in those who have performed well either young or their first go out. So like the singer you were talking about crushes the first album.
And then the follow up often elicits more pressure and anxiety. Why? Because it's like the expectations rise.
And in fact, there's some research on, we call it the one hit wonder effect, right? You have your hit, you're the musician who finally has the breakthrough. And what happens is that follow-up is really difficult and often doesn't match.
And researchers studied this actually in authors, and they found that one of the main reasons that that follow-up is so hard and there's so much pressure and expectations is because our identity literally shifts. Before we had our hit, we were the guy expressing our talent, right? We were the singers and, hey, I'm good at this.
This is what I like to sing about. This is what I'm going to throw into the world.
Who cares? Let's see what happens. Once we had that hit, our identity shifts to, I am the singer.
I am the singer that is known for being creative at this. And what research tells us is that when our identity cements around that thing, now anything that could potentially throw that off is seen as our threat.
And our brain literally defaults towards threat mode. That's why the singer you mentioned struggles because he's on the stage, not expressing what he knows, but his brain is going into, this is life or death, run away from here, get off the stage, like play dead, whatever have you.
And that's why he chokes. Dude, so interesting.
I love this area of conversation. What an unseen price of success it is.
Your own expectation about yourself. You know, we talk about the price of success, the loss of privacy and not knowing whether people are with you because they want to be your friend because they want to be around the new hot singer or whatever whatever it is but your own expectation the fact that really what it seems like is in life trajectory is more important than position and if you're continuing to just get a little bit better and get a little bit better, and then you have, I mean, two authors, I don't think they'll mind me saying this, like Morgan Housel and Mark Manson, both of whom have told me this and said, yeah, I'm kind of fully prepared for the rest of my career to feel like a failure.
I'm never going to write a book that does more than the subtle art. I'm never going to write a book that does more than the psychology of money.
So even though Mark's second book did obscene numbers, you know, top 0.001% and whatever, whatever. It's like, yeah, but it's not subtle art numbers.
And Morgan's second book, same thing, same as ever. Really, really great, did great numbers.
He's going to do another one. That'll do great numbers.
But he's like, yeah, but it's not psychology and money numbers. And yeah, the reframing of any rapid success, any massive success is not a cause for celebration.
It's a new minimum bar by which your next performance will be measured. And is now a higher ledge from you to fall back down it's it's that comparison piece i mean i was having conversation with uh the author ryan holiday the other day and we were saying this similar thing to what you're expressing with mark and and he said essentially and i'm paraphrasing but he yeah, you kind of want your first book or your first thing to be like, pretty good, but not like, off the charts good.
Because if you're pretty good, you gain some confidence, you know, like, oh, this is good. I can write again, I can do this again.
But you're not trapped by the thing. And too often, what happens is we have that mega success and it's almost like we become trapped.
And I'm glad that Mark and the other guy you mentioned were able to see that because too often what happens is we don't. This is what you see in child film stars.
This is what you see in athletic prodigies. I mean, to a lesser extent,

I felt this myself as an athlete. I ran a 401 mile as a high schooler, and I was the number one junior athlete in the United States that year in the mile.
And that felt great until I realized, like oh, like I essentially am going to go down off this ledge because everybody else who is a little bit slower, a little bit slower, my same age is going to come for me. And inevitably, just based on math and the law of averages, someone's going to get me and I'm now going to be second or third or fourth or fifth.
And I got to tell you, I wasn't prepared for it. And it, it sends a kind of, you know, it just messes up your mind.
So it's, it's almost like you want to be that trajectory piece is figure out a way how to like, you know, be good enough to keep going, to keep exploring. Yeah.
But not so much with, you know, overwhelming. And one last piece I'll add on this is you actually see this when you study world-class athletes who make it to the top of their sport.
Some are prodigies, right? Some are the LeBron James that just have the outside talent and, you know, they have the other goods with them. But a lot of what the research shows is that it's often that slightly next rung down that has a lot of talent, but had to like struggle and fight and like figure out how to do things that ultimately makes it because they didn't have the pressure.
And more so they were able to go through the struggle and the ups and downs and navigate it and figure out a way to get through, which kind of created the resilience that allowed them to get to the top. How much of this do you think is internal biological neurochemical systems? And how much of this do you think is sociocultural sense of self self identity more kind of relational stuff yeah like anything it's a mix of both and we can we can see that right so on the acute level for instance we can look at some of the biological hormonal drivers that happen with choking right so for instance we have a stress have a stress response.
Do you have more cortisol? Or do you have more testosterone and adrenaline? We can manipulate that a little bit based on like, how we frame the competition, you know, our confidence going into it, how we're seeing it. But there's also like underlying biology that, you know, depending on this gene will affect your stress reactivity, right? So some people are born essentially like hyper responders to stress and go more cortisol, and some people aren't.
And like, that helps them perform under pressure. But I do think that on the flip side, the social cultural aspect, I think is more important now than ever.
Because what we know about this choking is that people don't choke in practice. They choke when they're on stage.
And research, psychology research tells us that part of that is because the public expectation and perception is one of our biggest threat responders, triggers. And nowadays, if you think about it, even for the youngest developing, we're almost all on stage at some point.
That stage could be social media, Instagram, TikTok or what have you, but that didn't exist. You know, 30 years ago, you weren't practicing your craft or promoting your craft to everybody else.
You're just practicing on the field or track or in the auditorium by yourself without too many people judging. So I think in a way, we have this biology that is kind of loaded to help or hinder us.
But we've got this social, cultural, kind of global world when we were meant to be local, that has just like pulled the trigger and said, like, screw it, you're all going to deal with this pressure to an enormous degree and have to figure it out. Explain, dig deep for me on how pressure impacts performance.
You know, we're talking about choking here, which I define choking. Let's get into the weeds, neurobiology of pressure, performance, all of that stuff.
Yeah, absolutely. So pressure is just this, it's how we react to stress.
So we can interpret that in multiple different ways. But when we look at stress, it's not good or bad.
It's just our brain making a prediction for how do we handle the challenge before us. And I've talked about cortisol and testosterone and adrenaline.
The best way to think about it is this. We have a bunch of levers we can pull, both from a hormonal standpoint, from a nervous system standpoint, and from like a psychological standpoint.
And which lever we pull depends on our brain kind of saying like, huh, what's going to help us survive this situation? So that's why if we look at stress or pressure, a little bit helps us perform well, right? We don't run our fastest in practice. We have to do it in a competition.
Why? Because that pressure increases what we call physiological arousal, which says, hey, body, prime your muscles to perform. Give me a little nervous energy or adrenaline to get my mind sharp and to essentially enhance the signal to noise ratio so we can see what we have to do clearer and the feedback coming in that helps us perform clearer.
But what happens if we go too far or we pull the levers that our brain goes like, hey, standing up on that stage is going to be like a life or death event. If you mess up, your career is over.
If that's the case, your brain's just going to go like, good, we'll make sure you don't get up there. And that's what all that anxiety or that fear or that rumination that I don't want to be here comes from.
So the bottom line is stress isn't good or bad. It's just meant to prepare, but the degree of it.
So how much we feel and then the direction of it, meaning is it directed towards, you know, seeing the thing as a challenge that I can take on and overcome, or is it directed towards this is a threat and I need to avoid or protect? And protect could mean physically, but more so it means like, you know, protect my ego, my sense of self from being embarrassed or damaged. How do we, what determines the direction that that goes in? So a number of things, again, some of it is like our biology and genetics, but a large part of it is, again, come back to that brain is predictive.
What evidence is it using to predict? So if we're taking on some sort of task or pursuit, it's essentially, are we prepared for the demands that we're going to face? So if I sign up for a marathon and I've put in all the training and I've got a coach and I've followed my training program and I've done the work, my body rightfully says on the starting line, a marathon's going to kind of suck no matter what, but we can see that you've prepared. Therefore, we're going to go a little bit more challenge instead of threat.
If instead off of a lark, or I think, you know what? I'm a runner. I got this and I don't train and I show up.
Your body is smarter than you. You might try and fake it until you make it, but it's not going to work.
Your biology is going to go, yeah, yeah, you're not prepared. Think threat.
We're going to try and convince you to drop out of this race by feeling overwhelming anxiety. So a large part of what way we go depends on, are we prepared for the demands of the task? So that means accurate appraisal of you yourself, what you're capable of and what you've done, and then accurate appraisal of the task itself.
What is this going to challenge? And then the last part that plays a big role is essentially is the juice worth the squeeze, meaning what are the risks and rewards here? The rewards could be intrinsic, could be extrinsic, but what benefit do I get from this? And then what's the risk? If it is literally I fail at this task and it's my job, we'll go to threat mode. If it's I lose this game and yeah, that sucks, but I'm not a professional athlete or my life or career isn't dependent on this, I'll be more likely to go to challenge mode because the threat is low and the reward is probably higher.
What was that study that they did with rugby players where they manipulated people that spoke to them before the event, before a match, something like that like that yeah so there's been a lot of fascinating work on rugby um in this where they look at all this stuff and a couple of different studies but one of my favorite is this is that they took rugby players and they essentially um sat them down for a game and had them either prepare or look at what they did wrong the last game with a friend or a coach or a stranger okay and when they sat down and looked at what they did wrong so that they could improve you know going into this game when they did it with a stranger cortisol goes through the roof testosterone plummets when they did it with a friend or you know a coach who's supportive testosterone goes up cortisol goes down but most interestingly to me is this is if that stranger was a big dude so not skinny distance runner steve but you know linebacker cortisol goes up through the freaking roof

even more than

right okay even more than

if it was a skinny stranger

why because like

a big stranger is way more intimidating

so our brain reads the

room and environment and says

like this dude is big I don't

know who he is we're watching me

suck right now brain default to threat mode. And then presumably looking at your successes before, is that better than looking at your successes with a coach or with a friend? Is that even better than looking at your failures? Yeah, absolutely.
So we have these sensitive windows. So these sensitive periods before and after games or matches or things that we we care about a performance of some kind yeah performance of some part and essentially what our brain is going on this mission looking for like evidence are we prepared or should i hit the eject button and right before a game you're super sensitive where it's like anything that it picks up is going to be highly valued.
So if we look at the things that we did well or the successes or our plays last game where we performed at a high level, then what happens is that it puts us in that challenge mode because our brain goes, okay, yeah, we are prepared for this. We've had success before, like release the testosterone and adrenaline, take it on.
So we have to be very careful. And this is why actuality, gosh, several years ago, I spoke with the NBA team and we talked about all this stuff and it came down to one of their biggest problems was this, is halftime their players were going into the locker room and the first thing they did was get on their phone scroll through social media right and they're on social media what do you think is on x you know about so-and-so player it's like you're trash and they they'd come out and they'd be flat you at halftime.
And you're like, well, of course. They're priming their minds with, you suck.
You're doing horrible. So we have to be really freaking careful, especially in that performance zone of what we're feeding our brains.
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Is there anything else I really want to get into, you know, how people can prime themselves more effectively, how we can interject, how we can, what we can do in these moments before and during a performance. But is there anything else to say on the neurobiology of what's going on? Yeah, I mean, there's always stuff.
It's fascinating. I think the biggest thing that I take away is, or the other thing that is really important here is our mindset impacts things too.
So what we're thinking can impact where our biology goes. And I know that sounds a little woo-woo, but it's true.
And one of the ways that they've shown this is how we read the feedback coming in. So what I mean by this is we all know we feel like anxious at some point before performance.
But whether we label that and interpret it as this is my body getting me prepared, or this is my body like freaking out, will shift like a the interpretation, but B will also have an impact on the like downstream hormonal consequences on which way we go so the way i like to think about all this stuff is it's all kind of interconnected it's again you're think of your brain as saying like i have all this information in the world and i have all these levers i can pull in which way i go i'm gonna to go based on our experience. So what I know from the past that has worked, but also all the information coming in.
So you as the athlete or the performer can influence that. So how you're looking at, you know, or remembering what worked in the past, A, sets the stage, your expectations set the stage,

and then B, the information sources you're taking in. This is why, you know, this is why athletes use hype songs sometimes or like whatever have you, because that shifts that information source from being like, you know, I'm anxious to like, let's get pumped, let's go.
And in certain situations, like that shifts our biology to be ready to perform better. The only recent analogous situation that I've had is I was doing some live shows.
I've done like solo live shows. It's two hours of me on stage in front of audiences from, we started at 40 people and then we moved up to three and a half thousand.
So I did, I really ran the full gamut where you can see the whites of their eyes and you basically can see nobody and um one of the things that i needed to do as part of preparation is i need to get my tongue warmed up i need to be thinking about the material i need to i in terms of the uh physiology of the mouth i need to actually be warm and um a couple of times i tried a series of vocal warmups given to me by my speech coach. And then one of the nights, I think it was one of the London shows, I just had a dressing room filled with people until five minutes before I was going to go on stage.
And we were just talking, shooting the shit, coming up with ideas. Oh, what do you think is going to happen with Trump and blah, blah, blah.
And I was like, fuck, I forgot to warm up. I went out and everything was the most lucid it had been because I achieved the outcome that I wanted.
That was my hype song. That was the equivalent of my hype song.
And I've got some friends in bands and they can do precisely the same thing. They can have sort of a very isolated, hyper-autistic, broken down vocal warmup thing, or they can have sort of a very like isolated hyper autistic broken down vocal warm-up thing or they can just put a playlist on of songs they love and sing to it as they get dressed and um yeah i think that equivalent's true on the framing thing or i guess the story that you tell yourself this is such a funny story but i think it's funny i i was on an assault bike about three months ago and um i'd finished this workout doing a norwegian four by four thing and heart rate's coming back down it's sort of 150 145 or something now peaking at whatever 160 170 so i'm coming back down and then like bam it's as if someone put a piece of burnt toast directly under my nose like i remember that from school it It's like, burnt toast, you're having a stroke.
And I felt really dizzy. I had this ringing in my ears and obviously very, very panicky.
So I got off the bike and I sat down and it was the strongest smell of toast I've ever had directly. And I was like, I'm dying.
This is it. This is how I go.
On the floor of Onnit Gym in Austin, Texas, this is how I'm going to be a fucking vegetable for the rest of my life or whatever and uh anyway it passed i went in to get ct scan i went in to get like a brain angiogram with contrast all of this stuff and uh there was nothing it wasn't a transient ischemic attack it wasn't a stroke it wasn't anything uh it seems like it was maybe a migraine with aura and the aura for some people is visual for some people it's olfactory for some people it's sound whatever uh but it was really really scary and i have this thing in the back of my mind i'm like well maybe it was maybe it was a stroke and they'd missed it maybe it was a tia and they'd missed it or whatever so i'm in i'm in a car i mean the back of a london cab in november one day before the live show a couple of days before the live show last year, in the back of a cab, and like, bam, I just smell popcorn. The strongest smell of popcorn, immediately my heart rate goes through the roof.
Like, holy fuck, it's happening again. I knew, I knew that it wasn't some weird migraine thing brought on by whatever, me training.
Like, I know that I'm broken. Like, this is the beginning of the end for me.
This is how I die. I die in the back of a London taxi cab smelling popcorn.
And then I hear this sound and it's the fucking taxi driver rustling his hand in a bag of popcorn hidden between him and the door. And it's that popcorn.
He says, yeah, sorry. Do you want, would you like some? Like, no.
And immediately my heart rate comes straight back down all of the panic i had i found it hilarious like giggling to myself in the back thinking i thought that was dying this bloke just wanted to have some butter kissed or whatever it is and um yeah the story that you tell yourself highly determinant of uh what's going on physiologically first off i'm glad everything's okay but yeah. Yeah, me too.
Second off, that illustrates perfectly how our brain works. And there's so many crazy studies that show this or experiences.
We've all had similar things like that. One of my favorites is there, it was years ago, some psychologists did a study on I'm drinking Essentially like a milkshake Right and they just

Switched they just had different labels. Like one said, you know, ice cream milkshake.
And the other said like nutrition shake, right? They were the same freaking drinks. But the one labeled like milkshake, when they drank it, like their little hormones i forget exactly i think it was ghrelin the satiety hormone shifted differently than when it was the you know labeled as the healthy shake and again same calories same everything just the label affected affected our little biological reaction and i think too often we we kind of just like shrug this off but it's how it's of course it's how our brain works it's just like this little thing in our head that has to use that external sensory information or internal feedback to decide well how am i supposed to make sense of this so if everything in the world is sending and telling you like, there's that smell again, you're having a heart attack.
It's over. This is how you die.
This is it. Of course, your brain is going to be like, sound the alarm, like make him feel all the anxiety in the world.
Shoot his heart rate through the roof. We don't really experience the world.
Like we don't experience it directly. What we experience is our nervous system telling us what that world means.
And yeah, it's fascinating. You mentioned as well before, I'm opening my coat to find that I've got no knickers on underneath biologically or medically today.
In any case, I did a full genome test a little while ago. Awesome, so fascinating.
And then I actually fed it into ChatGPT. And I'd already had a consultation with the doctors and stuff like that.
And it was really interesting. A lot of it's to do with psychological disposition, how you clear dopamine, adrenaline, cortisol, all of this stuff.
And I've been having conversations with ChatGPT, learning about the building blocks of myself. And yeah, it turns out that I clear cortisol very slowly slowly very sort of dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine dominant um so the classic overthinking overachiever uh very driven to do stuff and terrified he's not going to make it work and uh yeah you know as you were saying that there's certain people i asked chachi pt what would be an awesome job for me to have and what would be a terrible job for me to have and uh for the terrible job would be something like um a sniper or a a frontline infantryman because just the ability to get yourself up to that level of arousal and then bring yourself back down you it's just it's not there for you and um I I completely see what you mean that we have certain people are built for certain things and we often find our way there in any case.
You don't know why, but you just tend to enjoy slightly slower music. You don't know why, but you always tend to sort of jiggle your foot when you're sat and you're happy and you're chilling out in an evening time, but somebody else is sat completely static, whatever it might be.
Our nervous systems and our bodies seem to just be able to arrive at the place that is most efficient and kind of normal for us. And yeah, sometimes we try to force square pegs into round holes.
Go, hey man, if you want to be cool as a cucumber when you've got to take a three-point shot as the buzz is counting down, you're kind of not built for that. Tell you what you are built for though, X, Y, and Z.
And yeah, it's ruthless when you kind of get that, I don't know, like we could call it the Capaldi effect. You know, somebody who wants a thing and their nervous system really is not built for the thing that they want to achieve, even if their talent is.
Yeah, I think this is, it's often we see talent as like physical gifts, right? You look at me and you're like, oh, of course, you're not going to be a world-class weightlifter, right? And if I tried to, I could train really hard and get better at it. But I'm not, my genes aren't built that way, right? And I think- The classic five foot five person trying to be in the NBA.
Yeah, exactly. Like, we have to understand that.
And to do a degree, our psychology, these underlying things, as you said, dopamine,

adrenaline, all that stuff, we have different sensitivities.

Now, I'm not trying to be super deterministic here because there's room to wedge and grow

within this.

And what I would say is working with elite athletes is I've seen our elite performers,

I've seen a lot of people where I'm like, oh, you probably are like the stressed out, you know, overthinker. How are we going to get you to perform in the clutch? They're never going to be, I don't know, Michael Jordan.
But what they can do is get better at that skill. If you acknowledge like, hey, here's your tendencies.
And I can't just tell you, hey, try to be like Michael Jordan. No, we got to accept some of this.
We got to accept it. You're going to be more nervous.
You're going to be more like hypersensitive to this stress. This is just who you are.
But let's develop some coping strategies or some like different tools that allow you to at least, you know, be okay on game day when it's ready to go. Okay, dig in.
We need to interject. Everyone's screaming, saying, this is me.
I get nervous before the presentation for work. I keep choking when I'm playing local league softball or whatever it might be, because there's a hot girl that plays on our team, and I'm terrified that she's going to think I'm a wimp.
What are the most evidence-based strategies of how we can reframe this stuff? Take us through it. Yeah.
So there's a ton of different directions. And what I'll say is that in the research sense to bear this out and practice is that there's nothing that works for everybody, basically.
You got to find what works for you. So the best method is trial and error on seeing what clicks.
We can attack this from a number of different ways. I think the simplest ones are when you're in that moment, what I call is like, you've got to figure out how to like disrupt and realign kind of where your nervous system is going.
And there's tricks we can use. For instance, if you just feel that overwhelming anxiety and stress, one of the simplest tricks to use is literally dunk your head or splash your head with cold water.
Why? Because we have this thing called the diving reflex, which whenever we get splashed or our face goes into cold water, heart rate tends to drop, nervous system shifts from sympathetic to parasympathetic, and we relax. So simple, easy tool to do that.
Other things that tend to work and what research tells us is how we focus can shift this stress response in both directions. So for instance, if you're feeling overwhelmed and nervous, what research tells us is if we can go broad focused, Meaning think of like Looking at the horizon Rather than you know

Focused on a spot on the wall, what that does is it tends to shift us into a lower stress load. It shifts our body saying, okay, we're not narrowed, we're not stressed.
Alternatively, and this is going to sound contradictory, but I think it gets at the nuance of what this stuff entails and how it works. If you are standing, you know, about to take a penalty kick in football or soccer, right? One of the best things you can do is narrow as much as you can on where you're going to shoot.
Because that will send the message that like, yes, this is important. We can't deny it.
I'm going to block out the rest of the voice and everything that's going on and just focus on this thing. And what research tells us is that that longer, slightly longer gaze will allow us to perform at a higher level.
So the gist I'm getting at here is, and there's a lot, is that what we're trying to do is figure out where our nervous system lies and then say, okay, how can we nudge or manipulate it so it's a place where we can be productive? And most of that relies on either turning down the volume so that we don't feel super overwhelmingly stressed, or alternatively, giving it a focus point or something to do. This is where routines come into play and why they work.
Because if you have that routine, it's you're giving your brain something to focus on and say, okay, forget all this overwhelming nonsense over here i'm gonna you know put on my shoes this way etc etc um but it's those two directions that tend to go or tend to help the best in other news creatine is one of the most researched and effective supplements for improving strength muscle recovery and it even improves cognitive performance and mood. But not all creatines are created equal.
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That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Okay, dig into some more practices in those for me.
Yeah, absolutely. So I think, so let's look at when we talk about routines.
So the important point here is, and you kind of touched on this earlier, is we want the routine to gradually build us to where we're ready to perform at the task at hand. So what does that mean? Gradually build us physiologically and psychologically.
Physiologically, what it means is getting us, our body, whatever you're

doing, ready to perform, warmed up, all that stuff. Psychologically, that routine is supposed to build towards giving you the confidence to do the task at hand.
I'll give you a quick, there's a study and then some stuff that came out of a performance coach who works in the NFL, who I'm good friends with, who told me this. He said, when our routine includes practicing something that we're good at, we tend to get that bump in testosterone.
When we practice something that we're not quite good at, that we have a little doubt on, we tend to get more cortisol. So the example that I'll use from research is coming from women's field hockey, Olympic level.
If the forwards practice shooting goals, they got the bump in testosterone. If they practice defending, they got the bump in cortisol.
Why? Because if you're a forward, you're used to trying to score. So apply that to your own life when you're looking at how am I preparing for the task at ham? Am I reinforcing with my routine the things that I'm good at and I'm comfortable at, maybe practicing the sessions of the speech or the drums that I've got down? Or are you going over and over again? Like, oh no, this is where I'm going to screw up.
I better erase this. That will shift your psychology.
The time to work on the stuff you're not good at was hours and days. You just got to go with it.
And the last thing I'll say, and this kind of ties into routines and it ties back to what you said about being around friends. The biggest cheat you have is to be around others.
Because the research is very clear. We evolved to share the load.
So there's this psychological theory called social baseline theory, which essentially says that we outsource part of our emotional regulation. So if it's us alone, we can't outsource that regulation where we have the entire burden.
And if you think back when we're, I don't know, thousands of years ago on the Savannah, it makes sense because if you were alone when you were out hunting or gathering, you were screwed, right? If you're with your tribe mates and a lion pops up or a tiger or what have you, you at least have some sort of shot. So we evolved to outsource things.
And what some fascinating research has shown is that where our emotional state will go where those around us go.

So in sport, if a coach is losing his mind on the sideline, research tells us that players will feel more anxiety and pressure.

If he's calm, cool, and collected and looks confident, even if he maybe isn't, but looks confident on the sideline, players feel more confident and have more positive emotions around them. And the last thing I'll say on this part, which is the most fascinating part to me, is a group of researchers, several groups, took individuals and they stuck them at the bottom of a steep hill.
And they said, essentially, how steep do you think this hill is, and do you want to run up it? When they're alone, they would say, this hill is 20 degrees. Hell no, that sucks.
When they were with a friend, they would judge the hill to be 7 degrees shallower, and be like, yeah, it's fine. This same research has been replicated in lifting weights or lifting heavy boxes.
When you're with others, you judge the box to be, to, you guess that it weighs less, right? And what researchers say is that the sense of belonging or connection helps make the difficult seem more manageable because we know that we have someone else there that's going to have our back if you know we fall short i mentioned i'd been hanging around with some bands recently and i was on tour while they were on tour and it was so interesting because i you know i had tour manager and i had the videographers and all the rest of the stuff, but they're busy. They've got shit to do and they're not on stage with me and with the show, the team and the editors and stuff, it's cool or whatever, but it's largely just me steeping in my own neuroses, looking at notes and thinking about what I want to ask Steve later on today and whatever.
And you don't really share that burden, the weight. You don't laugh at the difficult times.
You don't cry at the sad ones. There's no sort of collective effervescence or whatever going on.
And then my friends that are in bands, they're just living and breathing it together. They haven't showered for 36 hours.
The sound kit didn't arrive until one minute before they were about to go on stage and they didn't even get to sound check but they they styled it out and dude that was so sick that was so cool that we did the thing and um it just really made me think huh that bands have really sort of got this locked in from a creative perspective because you know how many people are elite athletes that are listening but i think people are kind of closer to bands in that they maybe have some sort of projecty presentation shared kind of outcome goal thing that's maybe not actually super physical it's maybe a little bit more creative and uh yeah they've got it they've got it dialed and i guess as well this also kind of explains the beauty of the clubhouse after the game that you get to bring into land the either successful or difficult

experience with the people that were on the sidelines and the coaches and the rest of the players and maybe some family members. And you get to work out what did this all mean, as opposed to just telling yourself stories and allowing your own nervous system to run away with itself.
Yeah. I mean, it will, and there's research on this.
It will fundamentally shift how we deal with failure or setbacks or losses.

So if we're with others in that like band situation or a team after a game and we're all, you know, eating in the locker room and we bring our family in, if we do that, we handle failures and losses much better. And again, some research shows we get that testosterone increase and cortisol decline instead of if we're alone, that cortisol increase, that testosterone decline.
Why? Because like we're around others. There's a whole field that it's called social recovery that looks at an athletic performance, not the like ice baths or the foam roller foam rolling or the gadgets that help for recovery, but how being around other people literally helps us physically perform.
It's the secret of, uh, you know, the San Antonio Spurs, the basketball team, uh, phenomenally successful for, for a long period of time. It's why their coach, Greg Popovich, would institute these after-game team dinners.
And again, I talked to some other NBA teams and they're like, oh, we tried the team dinners, no one showed up. I'm like, okay.
But the point is that socializing with others helps us recover. And there's a hormonal reason for this too.
When we socialize with others, we get a boost in the hormone oxytocin. What we know is oxytocin works against cortisol.
So it dampens down that effect so that it doesn't run away. So instead of stewing over the loss, we're over it relatively quickly.
and then we can learn and grow from it. Where in, you know, your or I profession, if we're standing on stage, we're kind of screwed because we don't have that.
So maybe- Well, I mean, you know, I think there's an integration, at least I tried to make a change with this and I'm trying to do it more with the show as well, which is to create that sort of social cohesion. You know, I'm, it's kind of weird because you don't want to mandate people.
It's like, Hey, come hang out with me. So I don't feel too nervous or whatever, but that's kind of what you're saying.
You're saying, Hey, we've all got a bunch of things to do. Everybody's feeling the pressure in this situation.
Let's go and do it. One other interesting element.
I don't know if this ports across, but I was reading a book called Your Brain on Love by

Stan Tatkin, Neurobiology of Attachment and Relationships. And in it, he talks about why it's very important to resolve conflict very quickly.
And he basically uses this example that when your threat response is elevated for an extended period of time, it moves into long-term memory, and that kind of gets taken down into the body. And I have to imagine that there's something similar going on here, which is you have a bad game, and then you think about it for ages, and you never dissipate it using that social support system.
And then next time that you come along to play, you've got this predisposition to that kind of arousal. And that's what's in your head, as opposed to just being like, man, shit happens.
Fuck, you were tired or whatever, this, this, and this. You thought you played bad? Do you see me when I did that thing? So yeah, I imagine that that moving from quick resolution to long-term memory thing also important.
It's the same exact thing. And this is why you see, you know, sometimes the reaction, especially in American football, where after a lot loss, like coaches just light into the athletes and players.
What does that do? Does that resolve it quickly? No, it makes you feel like shit for a long time. You go home and like, my coach hates me.
I got to figure this out. And it keeps you in that.
And then that moves it to that long-term memory. And coming back to what we said all the way at the beginning, the brain is predictive.
And when you're standing there about to start that next game, if that's in your long-term memory, that is what your brain is using to prepare. So similar to you smelling the popcorn, your brain's going to be like, I've been on this field before.
I've seen that coach before. I know what's going to happen.
And you just shrink, right? I imagine the implications for the well-meaning, but over-enthusiastic and overly critical sports parent here are just like replete you know that's that's one of my favorite uh topics to deal with but absolutely because it's even more i think important because there you're not just ingraining like long-term memory for adult, right? You're ingraining the patterns of how to handle stress, failure, competition for essentially a lifetime because- From your primary caregiver. Yeah, from the person who matters most in your life.
And this is where it can go all wrong. I mean, so my wife is a elementary school teacher.
So we go to way too many, you know, elementary school soccer and football and baseball games because her kids all ask her to show up. And that's where I'm just like holding my hand over my mouth so I don't say anything because there are so many instances where I'm like, oh, dear God, this is where those kids who I used to deal with coaching college and professional athletes, this is where that fear is developed right here in front of me on that eight-year-old soccer pitch.
Yeah. Little Timmy is going to come back in 10 years with an AK-47 and actually shoot up this entire school, I'm afraid, Father.
You've caused this issue to happen. It wasn't him.
It wasn't him being radicalized by 4chan. It was you.
It was you and how hard you pushed him when he was eight years old playing soccer. Yeah, dude, I've seen it.
I've seen it a number of times. And it's strange, right? Because you think, well, I'm passionate.
I want my child to do well, or I want my team to do well, or I want my whatever. And it's one of those situations where if you're in a position of leadership, authority, if you're a coach of some kind, if you're a caregiver, you need to put your own nervous system to one side.
It's like, it doesn't matter about how you feel right now. What are we here to do? We're here to facilitate the performance of that person that's in front of you.
And if you're stressed, you can deal with it afterward or you can deal with it behind the scenes. The person that needs to go out there and perform, you need to get out of the way and help them.
And that permeable membrane period that you have an hour before, an hour after, something like that. If you're in the car, I'm in the classic backseat of the car conversation.
You're driving home and what do you remember? They know that they failed they know that things didn't go well what are you going to do drive it home that that's spot on and this is the make or break part for youth sports in fact there's some research that shows that something like in the u.s 70 of kids who try sports quit by the age of 13. And if you look at why, one of the main contributors is fear of failure from an important adult, meaning a coach or a parent has instilled this fear of failure so much that some 12-year-old says, you know what? I used to enjoy playing softball, but screw it.
I don't want to deal with that feeling. And then you've lost that kid, not only from something that is important maybe to them that they enjoyed, but I also think in today's world, you've lost them from like some sort of physical activity that could have set them up for like, this is normal to do in life.
Talk to me about the role that failure plays in shaping our true identity.

I mean, it's how we internalize things.

So our identity is shaped through kind of a phase of exploration.

This is why when we're young, like our identity kind of bounces around, right?

When you're elementary school, sometimes you go home from school and you say, hey, I'm a firefighter. Today, I want to be a policeman.
You're in a heavy exploration phase. As we age, we move a little bit more from exploration to commitment.
Why? Because we need some sort of secure sense of self. But what happens is that sticking ourselves in the arena where we're exposing ourselves to see, exposing whether we're good enough or not, right? And we have to face some sort of challenge or potentially failure.
Those are those keystone moments that allow us to kind of like shape the rest of our identity on whether we're going to be like resilient or two degree fragile. So failure comes in here and it essentially says, how are you going to internalize this story? Are you going to internalize the story as I'm Steve, who can bounce back from these

things, can take on challenges, who, yes, cares about the wins or losses, but also cares

about the team and the experience I have and the exploration of am I getting better at

this thing and the dedication to it?

Or am I going to internalize the story as not that I failed at this thing, but I am a failure. And whenever we internalize it as I am a failure and I need to, it pushes us to protect our sense of self.
And we go into like what I'd call avoidant instead of resilient mode. This episode is brought to you by AG1.
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What are some ways that people can, I mean, you know, that again, we're talking kind of about reframing, but are there any other strategies where I, in fact, here's another one, the fear of failure. It's not only dealing with failure, but dealing with the fear.
So you haven't even failed yet, but you've got this very visceral concern that it might happen. What are some ways that people can step in before and can be better at reframing after? Yeah, so I think before you have to look at where that's coming from.
Because that fear is coming from someplace and often it's someone external to you. So I'll use some examples from my own coaching world is I've worked with athletes who are adults who are college age, high performers, who would be lights out when we traveled and their parents weren't there, but at a home competition would just choke because their parents were there.
And what you realized is tying back to that youth sports thing is they had this fear of failure coming up because they wanted to impress their mom or dad so much because their mom or dad essentially validated them through their athletic performance. So in that case, what do you have to do? You have to say, okay, how do we detach this a little bit? How do we create a little bit of space? Okay.
And actually the research, whether it's from parent or not, where it comes from matters. The other part is, again, how do we create space there? There's research that shows that while caring deeply about a pursuit is important to get you driven, if you care so deeply that it becomes essentially a unidimensional self, meaning I am a writer and that is all I am, we're going to experience fear of failure at a much higher rate and choke at a higher rate.
It's like investing your entire stock portfolio into one company. Bingo.
So what do you have to do in stocks? You diversify. It's the same when it comes to your sense of self and failure.
So again, research tells us is if you have what psychologists call self-complexity, meaning you recognize and realize that maybe you're a dad, you're a husband, you're a runner, you're a writer, you're a creative, you have all these different facets and all will vary in their importance, but all are a part of you. Then if you fail at one, you're going to be more resilient to bounce back quicker.
This is why there's research that shows that athletes with hobbies tend to be more resilient under pressure than athletes who don't have hobbies.

It's why if you look at there's a long study on Nobel Prize winning scientists that found that Nobel Prize winning scientists were more likely to have a serious hobby or leisure activity than those who were a rung or two below who never reached that top wow and and part of it is because it makes you more resilient because like again it's not the end of the world it hurts a lot but it's not the end of the world so it brings your it brings your level of focus down into that goldilocks zone the amount of pressure that you've put on yourself. Yeah, fascinating, man.
I mean, God, how counterintuitive in many ways as well. And this is where I'm increasingly sort of becoming disenchanted with the hard work fixes all ills approach, that just working harder, bro, a lot of the time results in you

making your performance worse

and creating these odd psychological scars

or perspectives of how you see the thing that you do.

And what you actually need to do

is to smoke some weed and play Nintendo Switch.

That would be highly rejuvenative for you.

Or you need to take up some sort of a hobby.

You need to diversify that self-worth.

I love it. Tim Ferriss said something similar.
He said that he needed, that the moment where he started to feel better about himself is when he realized he wasn't just a podcaster or an author. He was lots of these other things too that came along for the ride.
And even more than that, how much of it gives you a perspective on the world that even if it's not just this is where i take my source of identity from it reminds you that there's other things out there even if they're not your sources of identity so it reminds you that oh huh look at the look at the huge range of different lives that people lead and i mine's kind of good i told you i just got back from got back from Jamaica and Kingston, Jamaica, isn't exactly the most salubrious of surroundings. There's a fair bit of poverty there and some crime.
And I wasn't going to use the ATMs in downtown for fear of whatever. And you're looking around and thinking, wow, look at all of the different routes that people's lives go down.
How varied things could be. And I kind of like my life.
That's pretty good. Whereas if you're just permanently stuck in Instagram real comparison degen mode, you don't get that same kind of perspective.
You only get it moving in one direction. Stress tends to narrow us.
And when it's perspective due, it zooms us back out. And we need both, right? We need to be able to go narrow and say like, hard work, I'm going to work hard.
Of course, hard work matters. But if we only narrow and we go narrow and narrow, identity shrinks, hard work is the answer to everything.
Like the thing that made us good is going to be our enemy. And I'll validate what you said on essentially, you know, playing Nintendo Switch.
I don't know about smoking weed for athletes. I can't tell them to.
They might get banned. But, you know, what we see there is that with about, I would say, 90% of the lead athletes that I've worked with, I've had to get them to go in the other direction.
They're already good at being obsessive. What you have to do is get them to let go.
And however you can get them, not let go fully, but they're never going to be able to let go fully because they're like performers who are strivers. But if you can get them to let go just to touch, that's where it comes through.
And actually in the book, I tell the story of Tony Hawk, who his friend and fellow skateboarder told him when he was stuck, he said, risk not winning, which essentially meant like hey dude let go of the achievements and trying to do the thing and just get back to skating and that's when he did his famous 900 trick because like often the thing that we're good at like traps us and narrows us and we got to go in the other direction to you break through. What does it look like to move from a mindset of protection to one of exploration? I mean, essentially what it is, is it's being open to novelty.
It's being open to failure. It's being open to shifting and seeing your perspective.
It's kind of the way I would explain it is it's kind of going back and having almost like recess for adults. Because if you look at exploration, exploration is the heart of play, right? So I have two toddler girls.
And if you look at how they learn, they essentially are just exploring the world and dabbling with different things and jumping off stuff that they shouldn't jump off, but getting hurt and not that bad. And what that does is it allows them to figure out how the world works and where the paths are that they can go explore more.
And I think as adults, what happens is our identity cements. We get known for one thing, we're really good at one thing.
So we feel comfortable in that situation. But when we feel comfortable in it, we default towards protection and avoidance.
And what we need to do in our life is have things that give us back a little of that sense of play. So as a writer, that might mean, don't just research things for your next book, your next article.
Go read interesting things. Maybe that means fiction, right? Yeah.
What do you want to read? What do you want to write about? Right. It's that, not what does social media tell me I should do at.

And then I think other things are perspective shifters.

So there's a large body of research that tells us that getting out in nature shifts us into exploration mode. It tells us doing interesting things.
So there's some research on dating that shows that dates that are what we call or what psychologists call more self-expansive, meaning they're challenging, difficult, maybe make you feel alive a little bit, doing daring things. those kinds of dates are often more successful than, you know, going to the movies or getting coffee because it makes us feel alive and it opens up our self to be open to getting to know this person sitting across from us.
So the answer for exploration to me is like, do perspectives changing things and do real things in the real world that make you feel alive. Yeah.
What's the role of values and goals and sort of the clarity around that stuff? Is that important? Yeah, to a degree, it is. Goals serve two purposes.
They're motivators, and then they tell us what to focus on or what's important. What research tells us, there was a big meta-analysis that came out actually not too long ago that showed us that process goals work pretty well and that outcome goals really aren't tied to performance which is kind of counterintuitive but the reason there is because often those outcome goals are motivating for simple things that we can easily achieve but once it becomes difficult, those outcome goals essentially become glaring signs that tell you that you haven't achieved what you want yet.
So instead- Oh, wow. Yeah.
You've posited an ideal and then you compare yourself to that ideal and inevitably you find yourself lacking. Right.
You've set this huge standard. And of

course, when you're looking up at it, it stops being inspirational or aspirational. And it starts telling you that you're not good enough and you may never be good enough.
So instead, using process goals, which are essentially like, what are the steps that I need to take to give me a shot? those tend to work well.

And if we look at values,

values are important. But what's really interesting to me is that a lot of the research tells us that our values tend to go where our environment goes or our groups or belonging goes.
So the most important thing is, yeah, know what you value. But the most important thing is probably surround yourself with people who value similar things, whether that's like hard work or connection or drive or fairness, whatever it is that matters to you, your values are going to go where that group tends to go.
There's a beautiful summary of a philosophy article I was reading recently that said, goals are intentions, not attachments. They provide a direction, not a destination.
And I thought that was just such a wonderful reframe. The process over outcome thing has been popularized ever since james clear sold a billion bucks but um it's something that we regularly need to kind of even with myself you know just so much dopamine available when you think about a big goal that you're working toward and it's all excitable as opposed to one step toward the goal is nothing.
It's smaller than nothing.

So I guess one other element that is kind of interesting that's much more normal is perfectionism and self-sabotage in just normal daily life. the way that we go about things the story kind of the the micro insults that we we bestow on

ourselves that i imagine do sort of damage our self-worth and our confidence and maybe they bleed out into the big things um but how can people overcome that self-sabotage and that perfectionism in in normal daily life yeah so one of it is i i think the big part on this is is defining success and defining your comparison point. So what is success to mean to you? Because perfectionism at its heart is like this idea that like, in order to feel, you know, valid, I have to achieve x, y and z and do it in x, y and z way, right? It's that perfectionism piece.
And what research tends to tell us is that the higher the level of perfectionism, the higher likelihood of self-sabotage and choking in sport as well. So what we need to do is get really clear on, okay, like let's shift the bar, right? Shift the comparison piece on like what matters, how am I defining success? What does success look for me in this endeavor? And then like, what is my comparison piece or how am I measuring that along the way? And essentially the way I like to look at it is move from perfection to some sort of mastery or some research in sport calls it like shifting from perfection to excellence because excellence is still very good but it comes without that negative uh inclination of like everything has to work out perfectly to uh to get there so is that just a mental reframing is that just the story you tell yourself or there are other sort of interventions? Yeah.
So a lot of the perfectionism is a reframing, but the other part of it is what I'd call interventions that put you in a place where you do something wrong or not up to your perfectionist standards and have to sit with that so it's almost like dealing with anxiety and realizing that it's going to be okay i mean this is at the heart of treating things like ocd where you know after you have a you know intrusive thought what do you do you have to do some sort of tick uh to suit that thought

at the heart of perfectionism although it's different there's a lot of similarities which is like if i don't get do this exactly the way that i want i have this intrusive anxiety that pushes me to go back and do the thing so to deal with it we have to do the same thing we do with ocd which is essentially in very small bites be imperfect stare at that thing that is imperfect and sit with it until that anxiety dissipates and you realize it's it's gonna be okay like i need to leave it i'm still here died. The world still hasn't thrown me out.
Yeah, fascinating. Steve, you're awesome, man.
Your depth of insight into psychology is sick. And I'm so glad that you're doing your work and continuing to get it out to everyone.
Where do you want to send people? They're going to want to check out everything that you're doing. Yeah, so you can check out the book, win the inside game, wherever books are sold, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all that stuff.
And then I'm on social media, X, Instagram, YouTube, all at Steve Magnus, where I just talk about, you know, the mental and physical side of performance all day. Cause that's what I like to nerd out about.
Dude, you're great. You're really, really fantastic.
So let's run this back soon.

I appreciate you.

Good luck with the rest of everything. Good luck managing two small nightmare girls

that are presumably running rings around you.

That is my life right now.

I'm just trying to survive.

No thriving going on,

but I appreciate you, Chris.

Godspeed.

So see you next time.