Do You Freeze When You’re Under Pressure?

Sometimes a look is enough to make you lose your concentration and judgment completely. The pressure you feel when a supervisor, teacher, boss, or other powerful person is watching you can cause you to instantly freeze with fear. Suddenly you’re doing everything much worse. You drop things, you don’t know what to say or how to respond. Your words and actions simply begin to waver.

Sometimes these reactions are not evoked in you by being watched by a powerful person, but an aggressive or intimidating message can cause you to react that way. For example, when someone asks you an aggressive question or criticizes something you’ve done in an almost cruel way. Which renders you unable to respond, and which paves the way for insecurity and even paralysis.

When you think about what happened later, it seems almost incomprehensible that, as an adult, you were unable to respond in a coherent way. You annoy the situation, it makes you angry and frustrated, and in the end you completely blame yourself for what happened. However, if a similar situation were to arise again, you would be stunned again and the whole cycle would complete again. 

You become stiff when you experience inner or outer pressure

There are two forms of pressure: inner and outer. Outward pressure is the kind of pressure we described above when someone who has power in a certain way tries to influence your words and actions.

Outward pressure occurs when someone tries to influence you with the aim of intimidating or limiting you. These people usually don’t make their intentions clear; they justify their own actions on the pretext that they want to increase quality, make better use of time, improve your training, etc.

However, this type of pressure is only successful when combined with yet another type of pressure: inner pressure. The most obvious form of inner pressure is the urge to please the person in power.

This inner pressure is often expressed in the form of fear of being able to live up to one’s expectations. And may be accompanied by other forms of inner pressure, such as the urge to uphold the image of a competent person, or simply the urge not to appear ridiculous to others. In other words, the urge to avoid putting a dent in your ego.

You get nervous because these two different kinds of pressure come together. This happens in just seconds, and you are completely unaware of all the factors that come into play in this kind of situation. A demand is simply expressed by means of a glance, a question or a comment, and you spontaneously do not know how to respond to this. You seem like a child who has been scolded, who can neither live up to the other’s expectations nor have the strength to respond.

In situations like this, you may just be trying to put yourself in a good light. As your pen falls and your hand trembles when you pick it up, you put on a nervous smile and, without knowing why, admit that the other person was right and apologize for your awkwardness. Or you simply remain silent and begin a whole process of self-punishment inside.

You’re stiffening because you have a wound that hasn’t healed yet

Psychological limitations do not manufacture defects. They stem from insecurity, or they reflect a particular fear you have. There’s probably an unresolved event, or a bunch of different unresolved past events that whisper to you that you can fail, that you can fail.

One explanation for this bewilderment you experience when you are under pressure is that your life began in an environment of contempt, humiliation, and devaluation. Your family, school, or the place you grew up in has probably been plagued by criticism, and this has likely followed you to several places. Or perhaps you had to go through a traumatic experience in your youth that left its mark on your identity: the loss of one of your parents, an illness, a physical disability, etc.

So, according to this statement, you actually get stunned and stiffened in situations where you feel like that dependent and scared child you once were. Behind all these mental blocks are two things: fear and guilt.

Is there a way out? Of course. In fact, it can be a very fascinating journey, a great challenge where you can use reality itself to grow. You have to reach that place yourself, before someone takes you there, you have to make yourself stronger. Don’t wait for circumstances to put you in a situation that can paralyze you. Do it yourself, in such a way that you have enough control over your environment, so that you can get the situation under control little by little.