How to Stay Calm Under Pressure (and Think Clearly When It Counts)

Your heart is going, your hands feel wrong and the thing you rehearsed has gone fuzzy. If you're searching how to stay calm under pressure, you probably have a meeting, a match, an exam or an interview coming and want something you can do in the minutes before it. The tactics below come from published studies with real numbers behind them. Each one takes between ten seconds and ten minutes, and none needs an app.

Breathe out for longer than you breathe in

In January 2023, a Stanford team led by Melis Yilmaz Balban and Andrew Huberman published a study in Cell Reports Medicine comparing three breathing patterns with mindfulness meditation. 108 adults practised for five minutes a day over 28 days. The pattern called cyclic sighing produced a bigger rise in positive mood and a bigger drop in breathing rate than meditation, and the gap grew the more days people kept at it.

Cyclic sighing goes like this:

1. Breathe in slowly through your nose.
2. Take a second, shorter sip of air on top to fill your lungs.
3. Let it all out slowly through your mouth, for longer than the two inhales took.
4. Repeat.

The study used five minutes. In a corridor you may get three rounds, so keep the long exhale.

Say "I'm excited" out loud

Most people tell themselves to calm down. Alison Wood Brooks at Harvard Business School tested that instinct and published the results in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General in 2014. Anxiety and excitement feel almost the same in the body (fast heart, sharp focus), so she had people relabel one as the other.

In her karaoke experiment, 113 people sang a rock song after saying a single sentence about how they felt. Those who said "I am excited" scored about 80% on pitch, rhythm and volume. Those who said they were calm, angry or sad scored about 69%, and those who said "I am anxious" scored about 53%. In a math test with 188 people, the group told to get excited scored 8% higher than the group told to stay calm. In a public speaking test, the excited group gave longer speeches that raters judged more persuasive.

Brooks found that saying it out loud worked even when people didn't believe it at first. It costs you two seconds.

How to think clearly under pressure

Pressure eats working memory, the mental scratch pad you use to hold a sum, a sentence or a game plan. Sian Beilock at the University of Chicago spent years measuring this. In a 2011 paper in Science with Gerardo Ramirez, students sat a stressful math test with money, videotaping and teacher review on the line. Students who spent 10 minutes beforehand writing about their worries improved their accuracy by 5%. The group who sat quietly dropped 12%.

The same team ran it in a ninth grade biology final. Highly anxious students who wrote first averaged a B+. Highly anxious students who didn't averaged a B minus. Getting the worry onto paper leaves more room in your head for the task.

If you're wondering how to think under pressure once you're already in the room, narrow your attention to the next single step: the next question, the next point, the next play. Skilled people tend to stumble when they start checking their own technique mid-task, so trust what you've practised.

Athletes use the same routine every single time

Michael Jordan bounced the ball three times before every free throw. In 2021, Anton Rupprecht, Ulrich Tran and Peter Gröpel at the University of Vienna pooled pre-performance routine studies covering about 800 athletes in 15 sports, published in the International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology. Athletes who used a routine performed better than those who didn't, under pressure and without it, in the lab and in real competition. Age, gender and skill level made no difference to the result.

Keep yours short and physical, and do it the same way every time, in the same order, before every high-stakes moment.

How to stay calm under pressure at work

Work pressure arrives with less warning than a race start. A manager pulls you into a call or a number on a slide turns out wrong. Some ways to use the research at a desk:

• Before a big meeting, write your worries in a notes app for five to ten minutes, then close it.
• Walking to the room, do three rounds of cyclic sighing.
• When someone asks how you feel, say "excited" and mean it as a description of the energy.
• Keep one short routine you repeat before every presentation or call that matters.

For a step by step plan for the day of a talk, see what to do before a presentation.

Dragon Breath as a pre-moment ritual

A ritual works better when it has a sensation attached, something your body notices every time. That's why some people add one spray of Dragon Breath to the routine before a pitch, a set or an exam.

Dragon Breath is a 50 ml mouth spray of chilcuague (Heliopsis longipes), a root from Central Mexico also called golden root. Mexican ethnobotanists record it chewed and used as a spice. You can read more about the plant in our guide to chilcuague.

Within seconds of one spray, a bright electric buzz runs across your tongue and mouth. It tastes earthy and a little peppery for a moment, then the tingle takes over, your mouth floods, and a clean fresh feeling lingers. You come out of it present and switched on, in the zone for whatever is next.

One customer's first words on camera were "Oh wow, the saliva flow." Another, in a reaction video moments after one spray, said "Definitely energized."

It lives in your pocket. Start with one spray and go up to five once you know the feeling. A bottle holds 250+ sprays, and the extract stays sealed in Miron violet glass, away from air and light, which adds significant longevity to the quality of the extract.

Put it at the end of your routine. Write the worries down, do your three sighs, say you're excited, then one spray as the last thing before you walk in.

Questions people ask

How do I stay calm under pressure in an interview?

Spend ten minutes beforehand writing down what you're worried about, then do a few rounds of long exhales in the waiting area. In Ramirez and Beilock's 2011 study, writing about worries before a stressful test raised accuracy by 5% while the quiet group dropped 12%.

Is it better to calm down or get excited before a big moment?

In Alison Wood Brooks's 2014 experiments, people who said "I am excited" sang, spoke and solved math problems better than people who told themselves to stay calm.

What is the quickest breathing technique for pressure?

Cyclic sighing: two inhales through the nose, then a long, slow exhale through the mouth. The 2023 Stanford study used five minutes a day, but a few rounds fit into the walk to the room.

How many sprays of Dragon Breath should I use?

Start with one spray into your mouth. Once you know the feeling, you can go up to five.