Pressure Kills Cognition

The Inner Game series sums up this idea with the phrase, “Trying fails, awareness cures.” That is, consciously trying generally doesn’t work as well as simple awareness. In fact, trying too hard is a guarantee for failure.

The mere presence of a looming deadline can panic the mind into failure. For example, there’s a well-known psychology study that was done with seminary students.[126]

The experiment took a group of seminary students on the day of the Good Samaritan lecture. Against this backdrop of being good stewards of the earth and helping and serving your fellow man, the researchers set up an encounter. They took one set of students and explained to them that they had a critical meeting with the dean of their ...

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