There's a phrase I used to say with quiet pride.

"I work well under pressure."

I used to say this with unwavering pride.

I said it with such conviction and used it like it was a superpower.

Why worry about deadlines and time constraints when I had cracked the code to performing when the stakes were high, and the clock was running out?

And it doesn’t help that I had evidence for it.

In 2025, I was working full-time, studying and building this newsletter on the side. Though I wanted to do all three at a high level and consistently, I’m no superwoman, and something had to give.

Most of the time, it was the newsletter.

I’d miss posting here or there.

In the weeks when I posted consistently, a lot of those newsletters were done last-minute.

Sometimes, they were done merely hours before posting.

Other times, I posted them later than their scheduled delivery time.

Sometimes they weren’t the best work I could produce.

Other times, I genuinely surprised and impressed myself.

All of this added a rock on the side of the scale that said: “I work well under pressure”.

(I wrote a letter on how belief systems work and the belief scale. If you want to know more, read it here).

The problem is, beliefs aren’t neutral or static.

When you give a belief, emotion or create evidence for it, it gains energy and manifests as a behaviour. And the more you repeat a behaviour, the harder it becomes hardwired in your brain and becomes a habit.

Slowly, without meaning to, working under pressure stopped happening here or there. It became how I operated.

And not just with the newsletter.

It bled into my university assignments. More late nights. More sleepless nights. More stress-and-panic-induced work sessions.

The cocktail of cortisol and adrenaline became familiar and my favourite rush during that time.

It felt good. It worked.

Until it didn’t.

Close to the end of 2025, I knew exactly where I was headed if I stayed on this path: high stress, declining health and burnout waiting for me around the corner.

I didn’t want to go there again.

This is the reason I stepped back from writing to focus on my final exams.

Coming into 2026, I knew I couldn’t repeat that same pattern.

I had to do things differently. And that involved questioning what I prided myself on for so long and challenging my beliefs.

“Do I really work better under pressure? Or have I just built a very convincing story around a self-defeating habit?”

So I slammed the brakes hard and got out of the car.

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

Something urgent lands in your lap.

Or that thing you were given weeks ago is due in two days.

A deadline. A last-minute presentation. An assignment worth 50% of your semester.

You lock in, and you work.

Nothing else matters, just this.

You scramble and get it done.

And the result is... fine. Actually, it’s better than fine considering how little time you had to complete it.

Your brain registers: pressure = output.

Then it happens again. Same result.

There’s more evidence. More emotional charge behind the idea.

And quietly, it hardens into a belief: I work best under pressure.

Beliefs aren’t passive things. They don’t lie dormant in your mind. They govern your reality. They influence what you do and what you don’t do.

And this particular belief is especially seductive because it does two things at once:

Your ego gets to say: I’m not procrastinating. I’m just waiting for the right conditions. I work better under pressure.

But here's what's actually happening underneath that belief.

When a deadline closes in, your brain sounds an alarm.

Your adrenal glands flood your system with cortisol and adrenaline.

Your heart rate rises.

Blood is redirected to the parts of your brain built for execution.

The noise of everything else — the dishes, the notifications, the messy room — suddenly falls away.

You feel locked in. Laser-focused. Almost superhuman.

And this is the part that tricks you.

What you’re experiencing isn’t your brain at its best.

It’s your brain in crisis mode.

Psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson mapped this in 1908, and their findings have held up ever since. Performance and arousal follow an inverted U.

As pressure/stress increases, performance improves — you become alert, engaged, motivated.

But push past the optimal point and performance collapses.

Anxiety takes over.

Decision-making deteriorates.

Creative thinking shuts down.

The threats feel real.

Now you’re no longer in flow.

You're in survival mode.

And here’s what survival mode actually costs you cognitively: under pressure, you can hold less information in your working memory at once.

Complex reasoning becomes harder. Comparing multiple options, seeing the full picture, tracking nuance — all of it degrades.

Your brain, sensing that resources (time, information, help, etc.) are constrained, shifts from flexible goal-directed thinking toward habitual, efficient responses.

It prioritises speed and efficiency over quality. Immediate relief over the best long-term decision.

Your brain is prioritising survival over everything else.

The prefrontal cortex — responsible for your most sophisticated thinking, your creativity, your discernment — goes offline.

So yes, you finish the work. But it’s rarely your best work. It’s your most pressurised work.

Then there’s the effects of cortisol.

In short, acute doses, cortisol is useful.

It mobilises energy, sharpens focus, and gets you moving.

But cortisol in chronic doses is corrosive.

It impairs memory.

It weakens the immune system.

It erodes the very cognitive capacity you need.

The more you use pressure as your trigger to work, the more cortisol your system needs to produce the same effect.

Your baseline rises.

Your allostatic load — the cumulative wear and tear of repeated stress on your brain and body — builds up.

You need bigger deadlines to feel the same spike. The waiting period gets longer. The panic gets more intense. The crash gets deeper.

You create a pressure-performance paradox:

You only work when there’s pressure, but you need more pressure to do the work each time.

This isn’t productivity.

It’s a stress addiction parading itself as productivity.

I mapped out my own pressure-work cycles, and this is what it typically looks like:

Stage 1: The Delay-Denial Period

This usually happens a week before the deadline.

You know the deadline for the task is coming up. Maybe you’ve looked at it a few times. You have a vague idea of what’s going on.

But you’re not doing it.

You tell yourself it’s not that much. You can do it. It’s easy.

But your nervous system is activated.

You get a little tense and uncomfortable when you think about it, so you avoid it.

You’re going to bed thinking about it and tossing and turning, dreaming about it.

You’re getting a little snappy, but you’re not sure why.

You’re not visibly stressed, but there’s dread running in the background of your mind.

This stage is particularly insidious because it’s invisible.

You tell yourself you’re fine.

You tell yourself you’ll handle it.

You tell yourself you work better under pressure.

But your body is already paying the price.

Stage 2: The Panic Phase

The deadline is close enough that denial breaks down.

Adrenaline kicks in.

Now, you can focus.

And you mistake this for proof that the system works.

Here's the cruel trick: the work you produce in this window is often decent. Not because pressure made you better, but because you're finally doing the work at all.

Any focused work done with a clear brain would be good. You're just doing it under conditions that are actively harmful to your health.

Stage 3: The Crash

You finish the task and ship it.

The pressure lifts.

Your nervous system crashes.

You sleep more to make up for the days you didn’t.

You feel flat for days. You catch whatever illness was waiting in the wings. And then, in a week or two, it starts again.

With each cycle, the pattern deepens. With each cycle, your nervous system becomes more sensitised to stress, more dependent on urgency as the only cue to act.

One researcher puts it plainly: “the completion of the work is coming from a negative space — fuelled by shame, guilt, and the physiological hit of cortisol and adrenaline.”

This cycle isn’t peak performance. It’s a dependency on pressure and stress.

Here’s the reframe that changed how I think about all of this.

When you work under pressure, you’re not unlocking your hidden genius.

You’re doing two things: 1) you’re finally eliminating distractions and excuses, and 2) you’re experiencing something close to a flow state.

The intense focus, the sense of time moving differently, the challenge of the work meeting your skill level eye-to-eye and that cocktail of neurotransmitters?

That’s flow. And it’s real.

But the misconception is believing that pressure is the only door into that room.

Parkinson's Law tells us that work expands to fill the time available.

Give yourself a week for something that takes two hours, and it’ll take the week.

Give yourself two hours, and it gets done in two hours.

The reason deadline pressure appears to unlock peak performance is simpler than we think: it finally creates a container. It cuts off the expansion. It forces the start.

I realised that to do the work, maybe you don’t need more pressure.

Maybe you need better containers and systems.

Once you’ve built yourself, before the urgency and pressure arrive.

In a previous letter on creativity, I researched Twyla Tharp, and what she said in an interview with Dr Andrew Huberman really stuck with me.

She said,

The goal isn’t to stop working under pressure altogether.

Challenges beyond our skills will find us.

Urgent things come up.

Life is unpredictable.

Emergencies happen.

The ability to perform under pressure is genuinely valuable — for those moments.

But it shouldn't be your mode of operandi.

It should be your backup plan, not the strategy.

So far, having changed my approach to work, things have drastically changed.

The work I need to complete doesn’t feel less important. But I feel less rushed.

I don’t feel like I’m working to avoid some consequence. Instead, I feel more intentional and in control of my work and schedule.

I’m no longer sprinting to get to the finish line.

I’m completing work with greater intention and freedom because I’ve created the conditions that make progress inevitable.

The biggest difference I’ve noticed is this:

Pressure-as-a-default is reactive. It waits for an external force.

Pressure-as-a-tool is deliberate. It honours and supports you when you need it.

So, how do you stop depending on pressure as a default and use it as a backup tool?

1. Create artificial urgency (on your terms)

Use Parkinson’s Law intentionally.

Set your own deadlines before the real ones arrive.

If something is due Friday, your deadline is Wednesday.

Break large projects into smaller milestones with mini-deadlines.

You’re not removing urgency — you’re distributing it across time instead of compressing it all into the final hours.

The container still exists. You built it.

2. Build pre-work rituals that create the ‘locked in’ feeling

The focus you feel under pressure — phone away, tabs closed, fully engaged — doesn’t require a crisis to access.

Build a ritual that signals to your brain that it’s time to lock in.

Same space. Same cues. Same sequence.

Over time, the ritual becomes the trigger, not the looming deadline.

You’re training your nervous system to associate the environment with focus, not fear.

3. Regulate and find your optimal arousal zone

One reason pressure feels productive is that it temporarily silences the internal noise. But you can create that quiet deliberately.

Before you sit down to work, take slow, deep breaths.

Or a physiological sigh (a double inhale through the nose, long exhale through the mouth).

This actively engages your parasympathetic nervous system, shifting you out of fight-or-flight and into a state where your best thinking can actually occur.

You arrive ready for the task, feeling calm, not cornered.

Too little pressure and you drift. Too much and you collapse.

Your job is to find the middle: enough stakes to care, enough time to perform.

4. Shift from external pressure to intrinsic motivation

Working under pressure means the completion of your work is driven by an external force — a deadline, a fear of consequences, or someone else's expectations.

That's a fragile engine.

Intrinsic motivation — working because you care about the work, because it means something, because it's connected to who you're becoming — is a far more durable fuel source.

This requires self-management: getting honest about why you're doing what you're doing, keeping small promises to yourself consistently, and building a track record of following through when there's no external pressure forcing your hand.

Start small. Write for 20 minutes before the deadline shows up. Ship the thing before the panic arrives.

Each time you do, you build evidence that you are someone who acts from intention — not emergency.

5. Design your weekly architecture

Pressure thrives in the absence of structure.

When there's no plan, urgency fills the vacuum.

Every week, block time for your most important work before the week begins.

Treat those blocks like appointments you can't cancel. Know what the two or three things are that must move forward — and schedule them before the chaos of the week decides for you.

You’re not waiting for the deadline to tell you what matters. You already know. The architecture is just you acting on that knowledge before the emergency makes it unavoidable.

6. Recover between sprints

High-performance isn’t a straight line.

It oscillates. Output and recovery, intensity and rest.

If you’re using pressure as a performance tool, you have to account for what comes after.

The post-deadline crash isn’t a weakness.

It’s your nervous system asking for what it’s owed.

Schedule the recovery. Protect it with the same energy you use to meet the deadline.

Working under pressure will always be part of life.

Deadlines happen. Urgent things land. Emergencies don't check your calendar first.

The ability to perform under pressure is a skill worth having.

But if pressure is the only condition under which you work, you’re not a high performer. You’re someone who has outsourced their motivation to stress, and is slowly paying the cost in health, quality, and creativity.

The best work — the work you're proud of, the thinking that surprises you, the ideas that compound — doesn't come from a cornered brain running on cortisol.

It comes from a regulated one. A rested one. One that showed up before the deadline forced it to.

The real, valuable skill is being able to build a system that makes pressure optional.

Design an environment where focus is the default, not the exception.

You don't work best under pressure.

You work best when the conditions are right.

Your job is to build those conditions — and stop waiting for a deadline.

Thank you for reading.

I hope this helped

See you in the next one.

— Shana