A panic attack is such an overwhelming feeling that your brain has to almost shut down, your focus is narrowed, you can only see one way out of a problem - even when it's the wrong way and it clearly isn't working. Panic seldom - if ever - happens in baseball. While a game or play might matter, it isn't life-or-death enough for the brain to generate an overload of neural transmissions.


That quote is from Prof Dan Willingham (U Virginia) ...a wonderfully dry understatement. Choking is more than non-optimal, it's a failure to perform as expected. And when the choking repeats, at-bat after at-bat, you're in a slump.

Everyone in baseball knows that term - you've either experienced it, or you're braced for it to happen to you at some point. But that doesn't mean we understand the mechanism.

Why and how do we psychologically choke? What causes a single act of "choking" and why does it so easily lengthen into a slumping performance. And what can we do about it?
 


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