Under pressure, or not?

Pressure is something that has always been fascinating to me. When do we feel pressure, what causes it, and why does it affect some people more than others? 

I have been affected by pressure over many periods of time and in many situations; I can feel it when I have deadlines or when something matters to me, and I want to do a good job. Or when I am standing at the start of a running event, which I have trained well for, and I know I am in good shape, and therefore have set an expectation of myself to achieve a certain time.

I have always thought that pressure is helpful, but what is interesting to me, and something that comes up in coaching a lot, is when it gets too much and becomes unhelpful.

I’ll never forget a training session I was delivering when one of the participants talked about the amount of pressure she was under. I could see it in her eyes and hear it in her voice. I really felt for her and could see that this was clearly an example of pressure being too much, and when I carefully suggested that pressure was just thoughts, it definitely didn’t land well. It really made me think, how do we define pressure and what can we do about it when it gets too much, and how can I talk about it in a more helpful way in future.

When pressure helps performance

One of the most well-known ways for measuring whether pressure is helpful or not is the Yerkes-Dodson Law of arousal. The inverted U-shaped graph shows arousal against performance. There is a sweet spot that shows with the right amount of arousal, or pressure, our performance improves, but too much, and it decreases. This doesn’t feel like anything new, but helpful to know that psychologists have been studying this for decades. The Yerkes-Dodson experiment, although on mice, was performed back in 1905.

We know that pressure can improve performance, but what is pressure? Researchers document that pressure can stem from "any factor or combination of factors that increases the importance of performing well on a particular occasion" (Henderson et al., 2024). Pressure may increase the importance, but what denotes how important something is to us?

A good example that many of us can relate to is when we go for a job interview. You might feel pressure when you need to perform well at the job interview because perhaps you are unemployed and really need the job, but when you're being interviewed, and you don’t need the job, perhaps there is little to no pressure felt.

Is pressure driven by what matters to us?

This raises an important question: is pressure situational and values-driven? If something is important to you, for whatever reason, you might feel more pressure than if it isn’t. Pressure = importance, importance = values, so is pressure our values in motion? Can we use this to change the narrative and therefore the amount of pressure we feel?

In past employment, I’d hear from colleagues that they "had to stay up to 10 pm to get the reports finished". Pressure was driving them to work late week after week. Feeling that you have to stay up and get the reports finished comes down to values like integrity and accountability, as well as work ethic. How do we balance the internal drivers that ensure we go above and beyond, and stay within our working hours to protect us from burnout when it is pressure that drives us to overwork?

Reframing pressure

A way of defining pressure that has been useful to me has been to describe it as the gap between what is being asked of me (or what I am asking of myself) and my perceived ability to perform or deliver it. It provides an opportunity for a shift in narrative; rather than worrying about not being able to do something, how about I look for evidence that will show me that I will be able to do something, or investigate why I might not be able to do it in a practical sense, like because there is simply too much work to get done in the time I have.

Both of these scenarios provide us with the opportunity to take action. Reframing, or pushing back. For an employer, employees working late daily is actually quite unhelpful; it masks a bigger problem, although good management and leadership should be able to see this and deal with it, often it is cultural. But it doesn’t need to be, especially if we don’t want our staff to burn out.

So, if pressure is a narrative driven by our internal drivers like values, then we have the opportunity to shift it by first recognising that we want to shift how we feel, doing a dive into why we feel it, and then deciding on what can be done. I can change my thoughts, and therefore I can figure out what I need to do to be different. One of the most common questions I ask in coaching is, "How do you want to be different?"

Pressure isn’t something that happens to us; it’s something we can understand, influence, and reshape. Be curious, be the change you want to see. 

References

Henderson, J., Kavussanu, M., Cooke, A., & Ring, C. (2024). Some pressures are more equal than others: Effects of isolated pressure on performance. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 72, 102592. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2024.102592

ScienceInsights. (2026, March 15). What is the Yerkes–Dodson law of arousal? https://scienceinsights.org/what-is-the-yerkes-dodson-law-of-arousal/