Increasing Your Area: Managing Stress
Like most of us, I spent last Sunday evening glued to the television watching the Euro 2020 final between England and Italy. For the first time since 1976, the final two teams in the competition could not be separated within 120 minutes of play so the match would be settled by a penalty shoot-out.
Penalty shoot-outs are among the most intense and dramatic experiences in all of sports. They are normally only used to settle high-stakes games between evenly matched elite teams. Entire tournaments, the success or failure of a project years in the making is defined in seconds with just a kick of the ball.
For the shoot-out, England played their jokers. Of their players who have taken multiple penalties in their career, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho have the two best conversion records in the squad. When it comes to in-game penalties, Rashford had an 89% conversion rate, Sancho had 92%. Both were sent on as substitutes in the final minutes specifically to take penalties in the shoot-out.
Let’s briefly teleport out of the Euro 2020 final and into the Manchester United training ground on a standard Thursday morning. Suppose we ask Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho to take twenty penalties each against an equally competent goalkeeper as the one they faced in the Euro 2020 final. I am confident both would score at least eighteen or nineteen, that’s a 90-95% success rate.
In Wembley Stadium on July 11th 2021, both of them missed. England lost the shoot-out. Had they both scored, England would have been European Champions before Italy even had the chance to take their final kick.
It is difficult to relate to what these men must have been experiencing as they walked up to take their penalty kicks. What thoughts went through their minds? No doubt they thought of their teammates who’d played so well to get this far, the team’s manager who had entrusted them with this, the journey they’d been on together the last few weeks and all who’d helped them along the way, all of the mentors and influences throughout their careers who contributed to them being where they are now. They would have thought of the thousands fans in attendance, their families and friends included, and of the millions watching expectantly at home and in pubs around the country, starved of international football success for over half a century, people for whom the next few moments could be among the happiest of their lives. Now they had the chance to put that right. Or they could let them all down. This was indeed a stressful situation.
It is remarkable that humans can perform routine tasks so well in one environment and when transplanted to another they can fail. Penalty kicks are a routine task for a professional footballer, particularly regular takers like Marcus and Jadon. Their failure on this night was not due to their technical competence, which is beyond dispute, but ultimately down to pressure, or acute stress to be more precise.
Acute stress is short-term stress we feel in momentary situations. When we aren’t at ease, when we are worried, nervous, anxious, when there are multiple things happening at once, when there is a lot of thoughts occupying our head while we are trying to perform a task. Acute stress prevents the mind from focusing and once the mind is not locked in, even the most basic tasks can suddenly become extremely difficult.
I’ll provide a very simplified example from my own experience. I notice that I suffer from mild acute stress when I have to enter my house alarm code within a couple of seconds of opening the front door. Typing four digits to set the alarm when you’re leaving the house is simple. It’s done by muscle memory within about half a second. Typing those same four digits to turn off the alarm within a time limit whilst the system is beeping, threatening to scream the neighbourhood down is a different matter. It is essentially the same task but I notice it is harder in this environment.
Fortunately it is something I can work on pretty much every day and I am finding it less and less stressful. Magnify that by a thousand or so and you have a footballer taking a penalty in training versus taking one in a shoot-out. The same principle applies. The task is the same but the external factors at play influence our performance.
The more proactive I try to be in my life, the more I have found situations of acute stress tend to manifest in me. Sometimes I find myself trying to manage what feels like a hundred things at once and trying to provide the necessary attention to each one can result in stress if my mindset is not right. As a result, in these situations I can end up performing none of these tasks to the best of my ability. Upon reflection, I would realise I have failed to accomplish a very basic task due to the amount of things happening at that time demanding my focus, and me attempting to oblige. The amount of factors at play that has led to me not being focused on one thing at a time, on the process. I did not manage the situation and allowed myself to become stressed. I underperformed. There are few things in life
Interestingly, stress is common theme in air crash investigations. Often it is discovered that due to the multitude of factors happening simultaneously, a technically skilled and experienced pilot was unable to perform a simple task that would have saved the aircraft and all the lives lost with it.
So what can we do to mitigate against the effects of acute stress?
No one is impervious to stress but there are things we can do to reduce its impact on us and our performance in these moments. I’ll share my thoughts and what methods work for me in the hope that anyone reading can translate this to their own life. As with most things, there’s no magic bullet for stress. There is no ‘one size fits all’. Each of us needs to find our own ways to manage it.
Broken down mathematically, stress is equal to the force applied divided by the area of application. A large force on a small area will cause a lot of stress. A large force on a large area will cause less stress. So we have a role to play in this. If we ‘increase our area’ we reduce the effects of the force applied and thus reduce the stress we experience. External forces and thus some level of stress are unavoidable in everyday life, but increasing our area, i.e. improving our ability to cope with the external force causing the stress, that is something we can manage.
The first thing to do when you are experiencing stress is to recognise it and acknowledge that you can do something about it. Make the distinction between the external force and stress you feel. You’re never “under pressure”. Pressure /stress is a product of an external force or forces acting on you and your own resilience — which you control entirely. So next time you feel “under pressure” or “stressed out” over something, apply different logic. Think instead “there’s an external force acting on me, but I am resilient, I am a big area and this force will have a hard time causing me to feel stress”. External forces and factors like that are inevitable. Stressful situations are not.
Focus on one small task or step at a time. Break it down. Know that you are competent and able to perform this task in isolation. The overall process is probably something you’ve done a thousand times. Even if it is something new, break it down to it’s most basic level, with each step representing something you’re familiar with and competent in.
Avoid multi-tasking. A quote I love: “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” Regardless of whether a task requires a couple of seconds to complete or several hours, trying to do something else at the same time will, as a result of the acute stress induced, ensure both tasks take longer and are done to a lower standard than where they to be done in isolation. Focus your mind on one thing only. Prioritise that. Make the main thing your focus. Do it well. Then move on to the next thing. Do that well too. It will add up. Better to have five tasks done well in thirty minutes than the same five tasks done sloppily in ten.
Focus on the process. For our England penalty takers this is putting the ball in the net from twelve yards. Nothing else should draw your focus. Shut out the potential negative implications of any failure. Focus on the task at hand, not the potential outcomes. This will inevitably lead to spiraling negative thoughts as you run through all the negative consequences in your head. They haven’t happened yet and have no place in this moment. You control the outcome of your situation. You choose your own adventure here. Should the worst happen, we deal with it then — not now. While our actions can control the outcome, we focus on our actions.
Coming back to the formula for stress (force divided by area), so long as there is an external force there will be stress. This is unavoidable and the magnitude of this force is often beyond our control. The tactics and practices I have discussed above are what help me to minimise how much of this external force acting on me becomes stress within me, something that I feel. Force is inevitable and often uncontrollable but own the area part of the equation. We choose this part.
We are better able to control this than we realise. Increase your area as much as you can. Minimise your stress.
