Why Even the Best Shrink From Pressure When the Lights Are Brightest

Germany's failure to advance at the World Cup and what it tells us about pressure.

After 120 minutes of play, Germany was tied with Paraguay. Off to penalty kicks they went. Through the normal five attempts for each side, they were deadlocked 3–3, with Manuel Neuer keeping Germany alive by saving two Paraguay penalties. As they moved into the sixth attempt on each side, it was essentially do or die.

For the higher-ranked German squad, they weren’t supposed to be in this situation. They were supposed to comfortably handle a Paraguay team that, a week earlier, had been outplayed by the U.S. But here they were, staving off elimination. Still, you’d think a side from a historic footballing nation, filled with players from the top leagues in Europe, would handle the pressure. Yet, in deciding who would take that sixth kick, the cracks showed.

With it all tied up, no one wanted the sixth kick. According to reports, players “hesitated and dodged.” Germany’s manager asked one player twice whether he’d step up; he declined. The man who finally stepped forward had never taken a penalty in his professional career. And he missed. Germany lost. Knocked out by a squad everyone had written off a week before.

These were stars, men who play for some of the biggest clubs in the world. Yet when the moment came, they shied away. They didn’t want the spotlight, or the pressure.

This piece isn’t about calling out those players. It’s about what their hesitation shows us about pressure: that even the best of the best, people who have trained their whole lives for the moment, can crumble. And more importantly, what we can do about it, so that when the lights are brightest, we step forward with confidence.

The Science of Pressure

Stress is messy. Even the best of the best can be pulled toward avoidance. In fact, too often, it’s the default. Psychologist Geir Jordet has spent his career studying the ultimate pressure platform — penalty kicks — and his work helps explain what happened to Germany, and what happens to the rest of us.

Our brain hates uncertainty. One way it tries to reduce that is to “just get it over with,” or to avoid experiencing the situation at all. The more pressure that’s felt — whether from history or internal expectations — the more we’re nudged toward avoidance.

In his work, Jordet found that kicks where a miss means you instantly lose produce far more avoidance behavior. Players look away, their eyes dart around, they speed up the run-up “to get it over with.” And they miss at a much higher rate: about 92% are converted when scoring wins it, but just 62% when missing loses it. Similarly, players from teams with a history of shootout failure perform worse, rushing the shot and looking away from the keeper far more often. This holds even when the player taking the kick had no part in those past struggles. And he found that higher-”status” players performed worse. The public expectation increases the weight the player feels.

Penalty kicks are the ultimate display of how pressure distorts us. It takes a typically confident, competent maestro of the sport and reduces him to someone who sends the ball sailing over the bar, looking more like a U8 player than a professional.

How does this happen?

Stress causes us to narrow. It’s a system that evolved to help us survive situations where our life might be at risk. Do we fight, flee, or freeze to handle the snake in the bushes or the bear in the distance? It’s designed to nudge us, and sometimes force us, toward a response.

But stress isn’t a single response. It’s multifaceted. We can see this at the hormonal level: the mixture of adrenaline, cortisol, and testosterone shifts depending on the context and our reaction. The way I like to think of it is that stress is our body’s best guess at how to prepare for the moment. Sometimes that guess tells us we can’t handle the situation, and our best tactic is avoidance — or even preparing for injury (our immune system ramps up when we sense damage is imminent). Other times, the guess is to take the situation on: a jolt of energy, the fear subsiding just long enough for us to press forward.

Which way we go depends on our brain’s inner calculus. That best guess varies based on:

• Past experiences in similar situations

• Our appraisal of the demands we face and our ability to handle them

• How we define success and failure

• Our interpretation of the feelings, emotions, and mood we’re experiencing right now

• Our level of support

• Our identity — whether it’s fully on the line, or secure even in a loss

All of that information shapes the bet our brain makes on how to handle the moment. And if the stakes are high enough, it’s really hard to overcome the pull toward avoidance. The fear of failure — of embarrassing ourselves, of letting down our country — is incredibly powerful. Because it’s not just a win or a loss on the line. It’s our identity, what we’ll be known for the rest of our lives. That burden is heavy, even when it’s your job.

When the weight of the world is on you, it pushes you toward protection. And one of the simplest ways to protect yourself is to say, “Not me.” Which is why many of the German players chose avoidance. Decades ago Kahneman and Tversky showed that the failure you chose stings more than the failure that merely happened to you. While work by Ilana Ritov and Jonathan Baron found the pull toward inaction grows even stronger when you know you'll have to stand there and watch the result. So in the moment, letting someone else take the kick feels safer, because missing one you chose to take is one of the most painful types of failure.

It’s the protective ego at work. The instant failure and embarrassment show up as real possibilities, our ego starts looking for an out. “Not me” makes rational sense to a protective brain. It’s the same instinct as the student who doesn’t study so he has his excuse ready before the test is even handed out. We’d rather protect the story of who we could have been than risk finding out who we are in that moment.

Which is why it's worth pausing on Jonathan Tah, the man who stepped forward. He had never taken a penalty in his career. He had, in a way, the least reason to volunteer and the most reason to hide. And he was the only one willing to walk into the arena knowing he might fail in front of the whole world. That is a rare thing. Even at the highest level.

So how do we deal with this? It isn’t easy.

In psychology we call this approach versus avoidance motivation, prevention versus promotion, or experiencing a situation as a challenge versus a threat. In challenge or approach mode, we interpret the pressure more favorably, which means a bit more testosterone and adrenaline and less cortisol. But it’s not as simple as telling yourself “these nerves mean I’m excited, not stressed.” Reappraisal works for manageable stress. When you can’t BS your brain, when it really is the world watching, you need something deeper.

1. Accept Reality. Don’t Deny It.

It’s about stacking as much information as you can on the side that nudges you toward approaching. That starts with acknowledging the reality you face. Denying it just feeds avoidance. Instead, accept that this is a big moment and the consequences are real. An accurate appraisal of the demands is paramount.

2. Stack the Evidence

When stress hits, we latch onto everything that could go wrong. We have a negativity bias. You’ve got to counter it with actual evidence. Have you done the work before? Have you been in similar spots? Build a way to remind yourself that you’ve trained for this, performed under pressure, and can meet the moment. You’re stacking evidence on the side of your capabilities.

3. Maintain a Sense of Control

When the situation feels out of control — like we have no agency — we default to panic. So grab onto the simplest things you can control. It’s why athletes have routines. The repetitive act of taking a deep breath, slapping your wrists, whatever it is, sends the signal: I’ve been here and done this before. Build a ritual for when you can’t control the outcome. High uncertainty and low control is exactly when the negative voice takes over. Anchor on the behavior you can run.

4. You Aren’t Alone

In research on penalty kicks, teams that celebrated their teammates performed better — and the next kicker from the opposing team was more likely to miss. We’re social creatures. Pressure tries to convince us we’re alone on the savannah, which once meant we were probably going to die. Reminders that you aren’t in this alone, that others have your back, win or lose, take the edge off the stress.

5. Respond Instead of React

Our instinct under pressure is to rush and close the loop. We want to react. As Jordet’s research showed, players try to rush the shot — and score far less. Often the move is the opposite: slow down. Take a deliberate pause, collect yourself with a deep breath, and then go. You’re creating just enough space to take wise action. A few tools:

• Name your feelings instead of suppressing them. “That’s my protective brain, the devil on my shoulder, trying to convince me…” When we name something, we can tame it.

• Shift how you talk to yourself. Using the second or third person creates psychological distance. We tune out the voice we always hear — but if it sounds a little different, like a coach, we tune in. “Come on, Steve. You’ve been here before.”

• Adopt a mantra. It might sound silly, but there’s a reason Aaron Donald repeated “controlled aggression” in big moments, or Tom Brady reminded himself he’s a multi-time Super Bowl champ. You’re reminding yourself that you belong here, and what to focus on.

• Focus and act. Field-goal kickers who pick a spot, focus on it, and tell themselves to kick it hard there perform better. Pressure scatters our focus, and darting eyes tell the brain we’re looking for an escape. Narrow your vision on what matters, then give yourself one external cue that reminds you what you’re trying to do.

6. Train It Before You Need It

Surprises are a killer in stressful situations. One of the baffling things about Germany is that they didn’t seem to have a plan for who would take kicks beyond the first five. That lets uncertainty creep in. You want clear instructions and clear roles. And before you reach the moment, you’d better train under pressure — to inoculate yourself against just enough of the stress.

Stepping Forward

While nowhere near the severity of a World Cup, one of my favorite coaching moments came when I was coaching college track and the conference championship came down to the final event: the 4x400. It was a virtual deadlock between three teams. Winner take all. In the chaos before the race, two legendary athletes and coaches on our staff at UH, Leroy Burrell and Carl Lewis, were debating who to put on the relay and who should anchor.

Much like Germany, we had runners who said they’d be on the team but made it clear they didn’t want to anchor. Then one athlete, Drevan Anderson-Kaapa, walked up to the legends and stated, matter-of-factly, “I can anchor.”

Anderson-Kaapa wasn’t even a 400 runner. He was a middle-distance guy — the 800 and the mile. He hadn’t run an open 400 all year. He was also the slowest of anyone on that relay. And his opponents were no slouches; they were champions. One was among the best sprinters in the nation, the other a conference champion at 400 meters. Yet he wanted it on his shoulders.

He got the baton in the lead — and then two sprinters, one a sub-10 100-meter man, came flying past. Oh my god, this is actually happening, he thought. His mind headed straight for panic. All he remembers is, Oh shit, oh shit. Then he tried to right the ship, steadying his inner world by talking to himself: Focus, Drevan. Lock in. It’s game time. Focus. Look for an advantage. When you see it, commit.

Time seemed to slow. His eyes locked on his competitors, hunting for any sign of fatigue. He moved onto the shoulder of the runner ahead of him so he’d have a clear path to strike when the opening came.

As he came off the final curve and entered the home stretch, Anderson-Kaapa seized his moment. He swung wide and roared past his opponents in the final 15 meters. It’s tempting to call him tough, to say he was blessed with some intestinal fortitude the rest of us lack. The truth is more complicated. Handling pressure, coming through in the clutch, it isn’t magic. It’s navigating our biology and psychology.

For Anderson-Kaapa, that meant an honest appraisal to set the stage. Zooming out to create perspective when his mind was spiraling toward an escape route, and zooming back in when he was in the thick of the action. Reflecting on it years later — having since traded his racing uniform for a military one — he put it simply: “Pressure causes us all to spiral. To doubt, to want to escape. Accept that. Then collect yourself, breathe, focus, and find the smallest thing that gives you some way to get through. It’s not magic. It’s facing reality and coming back to your training.”

It’s no surprise Anderson-Kaapa went on to a successful military career. Stress hits us all. Pressure can make even the most prepared of us shrink away. Denying that reality only makes it hit ten times harder. All we can do is set ourselves up the best we can: accept the realities of the arena, surround ourselves with good people, and stack the evidence in our favor.

-Steve

P.S. I’m actually conducting research on how performers handle pressure. Whether you’re a coach, athlete, musician, or anyone who’s stepped on stage, consider filling out this 5-minute survey. Thanks so much.