5 Ways to Stop Overthinking Before it Wrecks Your Performance

5 Ways to Stop Overthinking Before It Wrecks Your Performance

“I can’t do this!”

My nephew was mid-tantrum, both fists balled up, frustration steaming out of his nostrils like a cartoon bull about to charge.

The impossible task standing between him and the front door?

Tying his shoes.

I crouched down, ready to be the cool auntie who fixes everything in under a minute.

“Easy, bud, let’s slow it down and break it down. Watch.”

I cradled his laces and started narrating in my best flight-attendant voice, the one used when walking someone through an emergency landing.

“Make a loop here. Now wrap this loop around your thumb and pointer finger. Now use—wait—which finger pushed this lace through the loop? Let me start over.”

The humiliating part?

The more steps I added, the further backward we traveled.

My fingers, which have tied laces something like four hundred thousand times without incident, suddenly forgot what a shoelace was. I fumbled the loop. I second-guessed which finger pushed the loop through and which pulled the loop. I looked like I was defusing a bomb, not lacing my Nikes.

And the clock was ticking.

Three…two…one…

I had to stop. Untie the mess in front of me and tie my own shoes again, fast and thoughtlessly, the way I have since I was his age, just to remember how I did what I did so I could slow it back down and show him.

Try it. For real. Picture every step of tying your shoes. Do you do the loop-and-swoop, or bunny ears? Which lace goes first, left or right? Which finger loops where? How do you pull it through? Feels clunky, doesn’t it?

Mental Lesson: As thought increases, performance decreases

That clunky feeling has a name, and it’s the reason grown adults with championship rings choke in front of a crowd the same way I did trying to teach my nephew to tie his shoelaces.

It’s called “explicit monitoring,” which is basically thinking your way through a skill your body has already mastered.

Tying your shoes. Driving a car. A free throw. A putt. A serve. All are skills drilled and stored in your brain to the point where no conscious thought is required to perform.

Then pressure shows up, and your brain—trying to be helpful in the most unhelpful way possible—pulls that skill back into the forefront of your mind and starts narrating it step by step. Right when you need it most to run on autopilot.

As thought increases, performance decreases.

Conscious thinking is essential while you’re learning a skill—it’s exactly what beginners and novices need. Once you’ve developed real mastery, that same conscious thinking works against you, breaking apart the automatic execution mastery creates. Elite athletes frequently describe their best performances as happening when their mind is quiet. Neuroscience backs that claim.

In flow states, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for analytical thought, shows reduced activity, letting well-trained skills run on autopilot with more efficiency and accuracy than conscious effort could ever manage.

Pressure flips that switch. It yanks experts out of automatic, implicit performance and into conscious, step-by-step control. In other words, the decades you’ve trained your body to go from A to Z suddenly become clunky as you break down each step from A all the way to Z. Once you’ve developed real competence, your greatest performances come from trusting your training and thinking less.

Next Rep: 5 Ways to Stop Overthinking Before It Wrecks Your Performance

When you catch yourself narrating your own free throw form, overthinking a presentation or business pitch, or explaining your own shoelaces to yourself mid-crisis, here are five tools to get your brain out of the way.

1. Sing a song in your head, or hum it. Pick your “pressure” song before you need it. Don’t leave that decision for the moment you’re already overloaded.

2. Count backward from 20.

3. Equal breathing or Navy SEAL breathing. Breathe in for a count of 5, hold for 5, breathe out for 5, hold for 5. When the body is freaking out, the mind usually is, too.

4. Color visualization. This is a client favorite. Imagine yourself breathing in blue or green—confidence, composure. Breathe out red or black—frustration, doubt.

5. Skill stack. Stack your breathing with your color visualization, or stack singing a song with your equal breathing.

These five tools occupy the same part of your brain that explicit monitoring hijacks. The part that would have you overthinking and deautomating a skill you’ve already mastered.

What we are doing here is shifting your focus to something specific and unrelated to the skill you are trying to perform. When a coach tells you to “trust your stuff,” this is what they are trying to tell you. Get your brain out of the way so your muscle memory can automatically perform the skill you’ve trained it to master for years.

Final Buzzer

If you’re a novice in a skill, conscious thought is required to build the skill. If you’ve already mastered that skill, that same conscious thought will likely do more harm than good.

My nephew was thinking his way towards mastery while I was thinking my way out of mine.

New at something? Break it down. Talk yourself through every step. That’s when conscious thought works for you. But when you’ve put in the time to develop the mastery and competence, breaking it down step by step and narrating it in your head is one of the fastest ways to unravel the years and decades of trust and preparation.

So, when you’ve mastered a skill and notice your thoughts begin to hijack your muscle memory, give your brain something else to focus on and obsess over. Grab one of the five tools above and put it to work.

Challenging you head-on and always in your corner,

​— Coach VJ

This is the work I bring into locker rooms, boardrooms, and team environments.

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