Breathe rhythmically to improve your thinking and performance

If you are under pressure and your Heart Rate Variability is too high, your body goes into fight-or-flight mode and shuts down the brain's frontal lobe, which handles sophisticated thinking. This leads to poor thinking and hence to poor performance.

Although this is an unconscious automatic process, you can control it. You have to notice such stressful situations and control your breathing rhythm. You want a smooth rhythmic breath with a fixed ratio of inhale to exhale (e.g. 4sec in, 6sec out). This regulates your HRV, making your brain's frontal lobe work better and helping you think better.