What goes through an athlete's mind in the highest-pressure moments of their career? How do professional footballers stay composed during a penalty shootout, or boxers maintain clarity in a title fight? These are questions that fans ask intuitively — and that sports psychologists answer with science.
Luka Škrinjarić: No. This is one of the most persistent myths in sport. The ability to perform under pressure is a skill, not an innate personality trait. Some athletes have temperamental advantages — a naturally lower baseline anxiety, for example — but the ability to execute complex skills under extreme pressure is built through deliberate psychological training. I have worked with hundreds of professional athletes over 15 years, and the ones who perform best under pressure are not the ones who feel no stress. They are the ones who have trained themselves to perform through it.
Škrinjarić: The stress response activates the sympathetic nervous system — heart rate increases, adrenaline floods the bloodstream, attention narrows. In moderate doses, this is actually performance-enhancing. The problem occurs when the response exceeds the optimal threshold, which we call "choking." At that point, the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, motor control, and strategic thinking — becomes suppressed by the limbic system's threat response. The athlete literally loses access to their highest-level cognitive functions. They revert to instinct, which under pressure often means reverting to their oldest, most deeply encoded patterns — which may not be their best.
Škrinjarić: You do not prepare for a single moment. You build a psychological skill set over months and years that is available in any high-pressure moment. Specifically, we work on three areas: arousal regulation — the ability to bring your stress response to the optimal level, not too low and not too high; cognitive control — replacing outcome-focused thoughts ("if I miss, we lose") with process-focused thoughts ("hit the target area I have chosen"); and pre-performance routines — a consistent sequence of actions that anchors the athlete in a familiar, controlled psychological state regardless of the external circumstances.
Škrinjarić: Consider a penalty kick. The goalkeeper, the crowd, the scoreline — all external. What the penalty taker can control is their breathing, their pre-kick routine, their target selection, and their self-talk. In training, we build a specific routine — for example: place the ball, step back, three breaths, pick the target, commit, execute. This routine is practiced hundreds of times so that it becomes automatic. In the World Cup final, the athlete does not need to "stay calm" — they need to execute a routine that is so deeply encoded it overrides the noise.
Škrinjarić: Team pressure management adds a communication layer. Under pressure, team communication typically degrades — it becomes shorter, less informative, more emotional. We work on communication protocols that are designed for high-pressure situations: clear callouts, acknowledgment routines, designated "reset" signals that the team recognizes. These protocols are practiced in training under simulated pressure conditions — added noise, reduced time, artificial consequences — so they are available when real pressure arrives.
Škrinjarić: Emotional recovery speed. Not the ability to avoid negative emotions — that is impossible and would actually impair performance. The ability to experience a negative emotion, process it quickly, and return to a functional state. The athlete who can recover from a mistake in 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes has an enormous competitive advantage. This is a trainable skill, and it is the foundation of everything else we work on.
Luka Škrinjarić is the founder of Mentalni Trening (mentalnitrening.com), a licensed sports psychologist, and vice president of the sports psychology section of the Croatian Psychological Society. He has over 15 years of experience working with elite athletes including national team footballers, NBA players, world champion boxers, and esports competitors.