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I think, therefore I choke

But the new science of head games could turn shanks
into scores

Updated: March 8, 2012, 11:38 AM ET
By Jaimal Yogis | ESPN The Magazine

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Dan WintersScience is turning the corner on why athletes
choke and how to prevent it.

This story appears in the March 19, 2012 "Choke Issue" of ESPN The
Magazine. Subscribe
today!

IT WAS A CHIP SHOT. With just 15 seconds left in the AFC championship
game against the Patriots in January, the Ravens' Billy Cundiff
faced a 32-yarder to send the game into overtime. Like all NFL kickers, Cundiff
uses the scoreboard to keep track of downs and where he should be in his prekick
routine. As the Ravens stalled at the Pats' 14-yard line, the Gillette Stadium
scoreboard showed third down. Problem was, it was wrong, the Ravens say.
Unprepared and probably a bit confused, Cundiff was rushed onto the field by
screaming coaches. He hadn't missed a fourth-quarter kick all season. But he got
a mediocre snap; the laces weren't quite out. His kick came low off of his foot
and hooked left. With his teammates looking on in horror and disbelief, Cundiff
had just choked -- badly.

In 2010, Cundiff had booted the football as far as anyone in history, with a
record 40 touchbacks, earning a spot in the Pro Bowl. Of the 66 field goals
he'd attempted in the past two seasons, he'd missed only 12.
Considering that Cundiff had played for eight different teams in the previous
seven years, with only 11 touchbacks combined, he'd seemed nothing short of a
new kicker.

What very few people outside out of Cundiff's inner circle knew was that he'd
become a guinea pig for the new science of clutch. For decades, sports
psychologists have been trying to keep athletes from cracking under pressure,
with no measurable sign of success. But now a breed of scientists is putting new
technology to work for athletes like Cundiff under game conditions. They have a
much clearer grasp on why athletes choke and are at least in the ballpark when
it comes to preventing it.

If you'd been watching Cundiff on the sideline this past season, you'd have
seen him toying with a silver gizmo the size of an iPod. Given to him the
previous year by psychologist Louis Csoka, one of his mental trainers, it's
known as an emWave, and it measures heart rate variability (HRV). Not beats per
minute -- that's old-school. Designed by the research company HeartMath, the
emWave examines in real time how athletes are responding to old sports
psychology tricks like visualization and meditative breathing. It's the same
gizmo used by military elite tactical teams to regulate stress levels before
deployment.

Cundiff had been using the HeartMath methods since 2007. A green light on the
gizmo meant Cundiff felt confident and prepared, his heartbeats evenly spaced.
When Cundiff was nervous or even panicked, however, the emWave flashed red and
he knew to focus on his breathing as he'd been trained.

Historically, anyone who dares to give pro athletes mental advice -- be they
M.D.s, psychologists or shamans -- often gets the eye roll or the pat on the
back. But in an email, Cundiff told HeartMath trainer John White that his
hocus-pocus was making all the difference. "Not only were my mental skills
continually improving," he wrote, "but they were working in game
conditions, not just practice ... I was killing the ball and having a great time
doing it. People, in general, don't deal with stress. Moving forward, stress
will be the least of my worries."

Bryan ChristieMost of a pro's moves are
so hardwired by practice that even the kind of pressure that causes the heart to
race and stress hormones to rage won't throw him off. As soon as doubt or
unfamiliar thoughts rise up, however, all bets are off. Click for
more.

SOON AFTER Cundiff's kick sent the Ravens back to Baltimore, I travel
to the Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek, Calif. In an office shaded by
mountain redwoods, White hooks me up to an emWave and rigs it to a computer
screen. There is my heart rate -- the rhythm looked far more like a jagged
mountain range than the uniform pulse I'd expected.

"This is perfectly healthy," White says, but not so ideal for performance.
The anxiety I was feeling with all those scientists staring at me was causing
the wild heartbeats that can harm academic and athletic results. Feelings of
gratitude and love, on the other hand, create gentle, repeating HRV waves that
HeartMath terms "coherence." That's the state in which expert archers shoot more
accurately, pro golfers hit the ball farther and kickers (though there hasn't
yet been an official study) get closer to Cundiff circa 2010 and 2011.

It's easy to be skeptical of coherence -- until you see it. White asks me to
breathe -- five seconds in and five seconds out -- visualizing each breath
entering and exiting my heart. Instantly the peaks become more even slopes. One
minute later, White asks me to conjure up people I love, and the wave looks even
more consistent. "It's not perfect," says White, "but close." That is in just
two minutes. Imagine, White adds, how coherent athletes and soldiers who
practice every day could be.

If the zone is real -- a biologically measurable state -- how could Cundiff
have gotten back into it during the chaotic last seconds against the Patriots?
Ask 15 psychologists, psychiatrists or biologists this question and you'll get
somewhere around three times as many answers.

Still, a semiconsensus is developing among the most advanced scientists. In
the typical fight-or-flight scenario, scary high-pressure moment X assaults the
senses and is routed to the amygdala, aka the unconscious fear center. For
well-trained athletes, that's not a problem: A field goal kick, golf swing or
free throw is for them an ingrained action stored in the striatum, the brain's
autopilot. The prefrontal cortex, our analytical thinker, doesn't even need to
show up. But under the gun, that super-smart part of the brain thinks it's so
great and tries to butt in. University of Maryland scientist Bradley Hatfield
got expert dart throwers and marksmen to practice while wearing a cumbersome cap
full of electrodes. Without an audience, their brains show very little chatter
among regions. But in another study, when dart throwers were faced with a
roomful of people, the pros' neural activity began to resemble that of a novice,
with more communication from the prefrontal cortex.

"Stress and worry aren't what necessarily cause the problem," says Sian
Beilock, a University of Chicago psychologist and author of the book Choke:
What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have
To. "But if they lead to trying to control performance" -- that is, trigger
the prefrontal cortex -- "it's more likely to end in a choke."

The body's reaction to that is akin to what happens when your computer runs
on RAM rather than the hard drive, says Dr. Michael Lardon, author of Finding
Your Zone and a trainer for many PGA golfers, Olympians and NFL players:
"Reaction and accuracy decrease."

It's the athlete's job to shut up the prefrontal cortex, and Cundiff -- given
his leading-edge routine -- surely could have done this under normal
circumstances. (The kicker refused The Mag's interview requests.) But he
simply may not have had the time, or enough experience with a scoreboard snafu,
to get back out of his head.

That's why the most advanced mental trainers now discourage thinking, instead
encouraging athletes to embrace the rush of competition that can freak them out.
Rather than urging "just relax," they show athletes how to reframe stress as a
positive. "If you view that feeling of adrenaline as a reason you're going to
fail, it can work against you," Lardon says. "But if you view it as a signal
that you're going to do well, it can boost performance."

Take long-snapper David Binn, who
worked with Lardon during 17 years with the San Diego
Chargers. Long-snapping is a lot like kicking field goals -- a single
repetitive act that exposes choking. Yet because he understands stress is a
tool, Binn hardly ever makes a mistake. "He's very low on the neuroticism
scale," Lardon says. "You or I steal a piece of bubble gum and our blood
pressure goes through the roof. This guy is unflappable."

Lardon, Binn and I go to dinner in San Diego three weeks after Binn signed
with the Broncos, which was a mere 24 hours before Denver's divisional
playoff game. The snapper admits that 17 years of unfettered
success has stopped him from getting horribly nervous before big games. Yet he
frames the nerves as a reason he's going to once again nail it.

Other athletes are less bulletproof than Binn, however, and need more
high-tech TLC to find coherence. Lardon has been working with the man Binn used
to snap to, Chargers kicker Nate Kaeding,
and helped him become the NFL's most accurate field goal kicker ever (86.5
percent). "Nate is the best kind of athlete to work with," Lardon says, "because
he does everything diligently, mental or physical."

Along with having Kaeding practice on the emWave, Lardon has taken Kaeding to
the San Diego lab of his friend Dr. Richard Gevirtz, one of HRV's pioneers.
Gevirtz obtained Kaeding's perspiration levels and heart rate to determine his
ideal breathing -- eight breaths per minute at rest -- to get into coherence.
Gevirtz then matched this rate to one of his musical tracks -- think
computerized flamenco guitar -- over which Lardon records spoken visualizations
that he updates according to what Kaeding is working on. "You look forward to
kicking from the right hash," says one snippet of reinforcement. "You enjoy the
feeling, you accept the challenge." Lardon and the Chargers' production team
also feed Kaeding highlight reels of his best recent kicks, accompanied by the
same HRV music, for Kaeding to watch the night or morning before a game.

The point here is to rewire Kaeding's amygdala -- the hothouse where memories
of extreme highs and lows are consolidated and seared into our being. Because
recollections of disasters often trigger self-consciousness, Lardon is
force-feeding Kaeding an antidote: memories of success. He even recommends his
athletes move on as quickly as possible when they mess up to avoid ingraining
the memory more deeply (though he encourages them to celebrate with a fist pump
or a "yeah" when they do well). He wants them to be less likely to think when
the heat is on.

It has worked oh so beautifully. Except when it hasn't. After a fantastic
regular season in 2009 in which he missed only three field goals out of 25 [he
went 23-for-28 in the 2010 season and was out with an injury this past season],
Kaeding missed all three in a playoff game against the Jets. Kaeding also
declined to comment for this story, saying he wanted to let his play speak for
him in 2012. But after the playoff loss, The New York Times quoted Kaeding as
saying that he couldn't recover from the first miss of the game, a mere
36-yarder. "For some reason," Kaeding says, "I was unable to make that turn in
my head." The Chargers lost the game by three.

[+]
Enlarge

AP Photo/Winslow TownsonCundiff has had
some great seasons quietly practicing with the emWave. But the gizmo, which
monitors the nuances of heart rate, couldn't prevent his crushing miss against
the Patriots.

THE TRUTH IS, all athletes choke at some point. Can the new HRV
science help them choke less often? Cundiff's and Kaeding's careers indicate the
jury is still out. Golfer Charlie Wi, however, strikes a more hopeful note. Wi
was skeptical of the HeartMath shtick when he first tried it, but White told him
to judge by his results. "And over a four-year period, we have watched his
scores get steadily better," White says. "For him, this isn't fluff anymore.
It's cold, hard cash."

White felt particularly proud this past February watching Wi duke it out with
Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson at Pebble Beach. After playing really well the
first three days of the AT&T pro-am, Wi started to choke on the front nine
Sunday, shooting three over par. This was where Wi used to lose his cool. But
White watched as Wi closed the back nine with three birdies, finishing second
overall. "That's exactly what we worked on," White says. "How to turn that
corner."

What that entails, of course, isn't all that different from what yogis have
been trying for millennia. But athletes aren't yogis. They need results. They
need action. "Athletes seem to like emWave because you can get better at it and
see the progress," White says. As Lardon tells me, "it's hard to get NFL players
to meditate, but you can always get them to play video games." And
so HeartMath has video games -- for example, one where a race
car's movement is determined by how coherent a player can stay while driving
through increasingly stressful obstacle courses. Soldiers who use the emWave
during intense conflict exercises are proud to boast that they can stay in
coherence even when their psychologically induced heart rates rise 100 beats per
minute.

As for Cundiff, he likes to turn the difficulty on his emWave up to the
highest level, which uses a much narrower algorithm to determine if you're in
the green, and then listen to the loudest, most jarring noises he can find.
"That's really tough to do," says White. Apparently it wasn't tough enough to
prepare for an error on the scoreboard and a yelling coach. But then again, "no
gizmo is going to solve all your problems," White says.

I ask White what he thinks Cundiff has to do to get back on track in 2012.
"Just remember that he was a great kicker before this," White says, "and he
still is." And stick with the regime. (Maybe change the jarring music to
recordings of a screaming coach?) And for the love of God, he needs to forget
his failure and lodge a bunch of new fourth-quarter victories in his amygdala.

Jaimal Yogis spent the last two years interviewing scientists and
athletes for his next book, The Fear Project, due out January, 2013 from
Rodale. Follow The Mag on Twitter, @ESPNmag, and like us on Facebook.

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ESPN The Magazine: March 19, 2012

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FEATURES IN "THE CHOKE ISSUE"

NCB: The quest to get Coach Cal his first title

NCB: 'Cuse ready for March

NCB: The rise and fall of Rumeal Robinson

NBA: Kobe Bryant is not as money as we think

NFL: Billy Cundiff and the science of failure

MLB: The hard-loss lessons of Chipper Jones

Olympics: Backing Ryan Lochte

COLUMNS

Peter Keating: The end of missed free throws

Howard Bryant: An athlete's apology tour

Chris Jones: The number that kills careers

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Redskins acquire No. 2
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Joyner: Jets make right call on Sanchez

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