THE HUMAN CONDITION / WHY WE CHOKE : When Stakes Are High . . . and You Blow It

When weekend hacker Gary Pia recently watched professional golfer John Cook miss a 2-foot putt at the British Open, he felt a familiar “sense of constriction” in his neck.

The sensation turned to gagging when Cook sliced a subsequent shot and sent the ball rolling under a police barricade. Cook had let one of golf’s grandest titles--and $195,000 in prize money--slip away.

“He blew it,” Pia says. “I know the feeling.”

Just a few days earlier, Pia had smacked a shot wildly off target and missed an easy putt while golfing with friends at a neighborhood course in Pasadena. At stake? Pride and a hamburger with fries. Nonetheless, he experienced enough pressure to push his nervous system into involuntary overload.

“Sometimes, when the pressure’s on, your mind and body just tense up,” Pia says. “You get nervous. Your muscles tighten. You become mentally and physically inhibited.”

You choke.

Sooner or later, it happens to everyone, from Olympic athletes to politicians on the stump to stylists facing an unruly head of hair. We all find ourselves in pressure situations where we don’t function efficiently. Our thought processes seize up like a bad engine. Our hormones run amok.

One Riverside woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, says she threw up in her new boss’s office her first day as his executive secretary.

“My boss was a very dynamic person, and I wanted to make an impression,” she says. “He asked me to perform a task on the computer that I knew how to do, but my mind went blank. I sat at the computer for a half-hour, getting more and more tense. Suddenly, I got sick. It was terrible.”

“In these pressure-filled situations, some people become overwhelmed with anxiety,” says Ruth Lerner, a Westwood psychologist who has worked with business professionals, musicians, students and Olympians such as Jackie Joyner-Kersee to increase performance. “Their head feels like it’s going to explode.”

Experts say any personality type can choke, but those who lack confidence or experience in specific areas are particularly prone to collapsing when the stakes are raised. They can, however, learn to function under such conditions.

“People choke when they sense they can’t handle a situation,” says Chaytor Mason, a professor of psychology at USC who teaches fighter pilots at Norton Air Force Base how to keep cool under stress. “They choke up when they run out of ideas, then they blank out. Their mind goes dead.”

Stories of people’s brains and bodies betraying them are countless and cover a wide spectrum of human endeavor.

Chris Ludeman, a normally polished commercial real estate executive in Los Angeles, says he “gagged big-time” when he met the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester during a visit to England.

Upon meeting the royal couple, Ludeman became confused about proper protocol. Rather than bowing at the appropriate moment, he curtsied instead, then bowed, then turned red.

“The duke probably wanted to bust up laughing,” Ludeman says. “But I felt like an idiot. Can you imagine? I curtsied and bowed. I really choked on that one.”

Melanie Marcheschi, a third-year law student at Yale, winces as she recalls crashing and burning in one of her first classes.

“There were probably 120 students in the class, and I’d been at Yale for all of three weeks,” she says. “Everyone was trying to sound intelligent, and I was just sitting in class listening when the professor called my name and asked me a question regarding a fine point of contract law.

“I felt a surge of adrenaline, my heart was pounding and, for some reason, I blurted out the wrong answer. I knew the correct answer, but I gave the wrong one. To this day, I don’t know why.

“The professor just stared at me, laughed and gave me a look like, ‘How can this woman give that response after everything we’ve been talking about for the last two hours?’ ”

Good question.

Experts say the tendency for capable and clear-thinking adults to choke under pressure stems from a complex mishmash of the psychological and physiological.

“There is no doubt that choking is caused by a physiological response to stress,” says Bob Girandola, a professor of exercise science at USC. “When people get uptight, it causes a release of (adrenaline) through the body. If too much is released, it can adversely affect a person’s coordinated movement and blunt his thought processes.”

High levels of hormones cascading through the body may help you, say, lift the side of a car in an emergency. But the same hormones, Girandola says, may inhibit your chances of answering your law professor correctly.

“You get too nervous,” he says.

“Almost everyone experiences this to a degree,” says Dr. Grant Gwinup, professor of endocrinology at UC Irvine. “In mild forms, it can actually help you function better and make mental processes sharper. Choking comes when you get too keyed up. When a normal response to pressure becomes self-defeating.”

Technically, according to Gwinup, the physiological explanation for a self-defeating response begins with the body’s adrenal glands, but also includes the sympathetic nervous system. In tense circumstances, a “sympathetic discharge” originates in the brain, sending billions of nerve messages down the spinal cord and into muscles, organs and glands throughout the body. This causes the heart to speed up and triggers nervousness.

“In extreme cases, this can be terrible,” says Gwinup, who has treated overresponsive performers, politicians and athletes. “Some are completely incapacitated by it.”

Even professional athletes who appear supremely confident under pressure often are going bonkers inside, Gwinup says.

Psychologists say athletes--and most people, for that matter--can learn to minimize adverse physiological responses to external pressure and concentrate on the task at hand.

Lerner counsels clients to draw on past successes as a foundation for success in the present.

“I tell them to look through their past performances and mentally piece together their successes to get the performance they are striving for,” she says.

“If a person can’t draw on his own success, he can draw from other role models. He visualizes himself in their place doing what they do. He steals that behavior.”

Similarly, when students are faced with an important exam, Lerner suggests they visualize everything about the test beforehand.

“They should see themselves walking in, sitting down, answering questions,” she says. “They should go through a mental rehearsal and create an image of success.”

William Parham, a sports psychologist and professor of psychology at UCLA, says the quickest way to choke is to lose focus on the here and now.

“(Athletes) are worried about the past or the (consequences of the) future,” says Parham, who works with college, professional and Olympic athletes. “But if they zero in on the present--what they can do now to maximize their performance--then they can execute what they need to execute.”

He says he has worked with athletes who have one state of mind during less important regular-season play, who freeze up during landmark competitions or playoffs.

“It’s not the event that’s important,” he says, “it’s what one makes of the event. Whether you are competing at a college track meet or the Olympics, you have to realize the track is the same, the distance is the same and you are the same. Everything is the same except the meaning people assign to it.”

Parham says athletes participating in the Olympics often are weighed down by expectations from fans, family, media--even an entire country--that can provoke a personal crisis.

“An athlete has to be internally focused and not worry about external things like the competition, a coach or what people might think,” he adds. “They need to know their goal and follow a strategy to get there. It gets memorized in their brain. It’s like finding a groove.”

Consider the experience of Capt. James McCullough, a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot who flew 55 combat missions over Iraq during the Persian Gulf War McCullough recalls one mission, on the third night of Desert Storm, during which he was targeted by three clusters of surface-to-air missiles in western Iraq.

“I could see the missiles coming at me,” he says.

McCullough barrel-rolled his jet to avoid the missiles and completed his mission--which was bombing Scud sites.

“As I was getting out of there, that’s when it all hit me,” McCullough says. “My heart was pounding, my blood pressure went up. I thought, ‘Wow, that was close.’

“I got through it by concentrating, by doing what I’d been practicing for seven years.”

And, according to psychologist Mason, who has McCullough in one of his classes at Norton Air Force Base, by having a healthy dose of self-confidence. A key component, he says, in staying alive over enemy territory or making a putt to win a Big Mac and fries.

“Whatever the situation, the bottom line is, you’ve got to believe in yourself,” Mason says. “You’ve got to believe that you’ll make it.”

Says recreational golfer Pia: “It’s worth remembering that you can’t choke unless somehow, some way, you’ve already been good enough to put yourself in a position to win.”