What Can the Moon Teach Us About Performing Under Pressure?

What happens when a capable person has to keep performing when the pressure becomes very real?

It is a question I have spent much of my professional life thinking about in relation to athletes, performers and people dealing with anxiety. Recently, though, I found myself considering it in a rather different setting: the surface of the Moon.

NASA's Human Research Program has issued a Request for Information asking what we can learn about human health and performance from astronauts living and working on a future Moon Base.

I have submitted a response.

NASA is looking ahead to sustained human activity on the lunar surface and is inviting ideas that could help shape future research into astronaut health and performance. One of the areas identified is Human Factors and Behavioral Performance, which includes behavioural health, cognitive function, sleep, team performance and psychological readiness.

That immediately caught my attention.

My background combines more than two decades of therapeutic work with anxiety and behaviour change with my more recent academic work in sport and performance psychology. Although astronauts operate in an environment unlike anything most of us will ever experience, some of the underlying questions about human performance are surprisingly familiar.

What happens to attention when anxiety suddenly increases? And, perhaps more importantly, how does someone regain effective performance afterwards?

Performance under pressure is not about eliminating anxiety

One of the recurring themes in my work with athletes and performers is that anxiety is not necessarily incompatible with good performance.

Some arousal can provide energy, urgency and focus. Problems begin when attention starts moving away from the task and towards threat, mistakes, consequences or what might happen next.

For a golfer, that might mean standing over a short putt thinking about missing it.

For an actor, it could be becoming acutely aware of being evaluated during an audition.

For somebody giving an important presentation, it might be the moment their mind suddenly goes blank and attention turns inwards.

The situations are different, but the psychological challenge has something in common: attention is no longer fully where it needs to be.

The Moon takes the performance environment to an extreme

NASA plans to establish its Moon Base near the lunar South Pole, an environment involving extreme temperatures, difficult lighting, rugged terrain and abrasive lunar dust.

Technology will obviously be central to making sustained lunar operations possible. Human performance matters too.

NASA's Human Factors and Behavioral Performance work already examines factors including cognitive function, sleep, team cohesion and psychological readiness because these can affect whether astronauts are able to perform mission tasks effectively.

This raises an interesting distinction between preparing somebody for pressure and helping them recover when something unexpected disrupts performance.

Preparation matters enormously. But real life does not always give us the situation we prepared for.

Recovery may be as important as preparation

A psychologically skilled performer is not necessarily someone who never experiences anxiety.

Sometimes it is the person who notices what is happening, prevents the response from completely taking over their attention and finds a way back to the task.

That principle extends well beyond spaceflight.

It matters to an athlete immediately after making a mistake. It matters to an actor when something goes wrong on stage. It matters to somebody whose confidence suddenly disappears during an important presentation.

And potentially, it matters enormously when people are working in an environment where the consequences of impaired performance can be much greater.

My response to NASA's Request for Information explores this broader territory of psychology and human performance.

It is important to be clear about what that means. NASA's current Request for Information is being used for research-planning purposes. It is not a funding solicitation, and submitting a response does not mean that NASA has endorsed or selected the ideas within it.

For me, however, contributing to the discussion has been a fascinating opportunity to think about performance psychology beyond the environments where we normally expect to find it.

We often talk about performance psychology in terms of confidence, winning or achieving our best.

At its most fundamental level, I think there is another question worth asking:

When pressure disrupts us, how do we regain enough control of our attention to do what needs to be done next?

Whether that happens on a sports field, on a stage, in a boardroom, or one day on the Moon, the underlying human problem is worth understanding.

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About the author: Neil Sunley is a therapist and performance psychology practitioner at My Soul Coach. His work draws on more than two decades of experience working with anxiety, behaviour change and performance, alongside postgraduate study in sport and exercise psychology.