Column | Is performance pressure really that bad?

Do I experience pressure to perform while writing this column? Certainly. That pressure comes from the deadline, but also from myself. The column has to meet my standards, and if it doesn’t, it’s, in its own humble way, a disaster.

Is it bad that I experience performance pressure? I do not think so. If you say to me ‘let’s see if it works’, then I simply do nothing. If I think ‘I’m putting something together’, then I don’t enjoy writing. Without pressure to perform, I wouldn’t be able to do my job.

Yet performance pressure has had bad press lately. This became clear again when a report from the Trimbos Institute was published in mid-June, for which 32 students and 29 education experts were interviewed. “Performance pressure kills students”, headlined Fidelity. “Students are incited and overburdened,” said researcher Jolien Dopmeijer NRC. Their lives are too full, and that leads to stress.

Another example was last weekend’s article about Ali Niknam, the boss of digital bank bunq . “If you don’t perform here, you better go,” Niknam told NRC. He sets high standards for his employees, which for some leads to crying spells in the workplace, or stomachaches from the stress. Social media reacted with horror. “Unsafe”, “sick”, “modern slavery”, according to some tweeters.

In both cases, performance itself had become something negative, and stress the proof of border crossing.

Only twelve years ago the country was in turmoil because of the book Battle song of the tiger mother by the Chinese-American Amy Chua, who called Western parents weak educators. She herself forced her children to excel by threatening to burn their cuddly toys if the results were disappointing. There were nerves in the Dutch media: should ‘we’ raise our children like this? Were we too weak and in danger of losing the race with China? “However much Western parents worry about and care about their children’s happiness, the chapter ‘making demands’ hardly figures in their thinking,” wrote Beatrijs Ritsema in NRC.

That fear of weakness has now disappeared: young people, and for that matter also non-young people, are now victims of the performance society. If you search for ‘performance pressure’ in the LexisNexis newspaper archive, you will suddenly see many more articles about it from 2016 onwards.

How did that happen? It seems strong to me that much higher demands are suddenly being made in our society; this is not reflected in the performance. And many of the causes mentioned, such as stress of choice, full lives or ‘the meritocracy’, have been around for a while.

I think two factors play a role. The first is a cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less true: digital technology has completely changed our lives. The combination of smartphone, social media and the number cult, in which everything is measured and ranked, is a gigantic social experiment. Suddenly we are ‘on’ every moment of the day, and also connected to both the competition and the public.

At the same time, our tolerance for discomfort has greatly diminished. Only recently, when Generation X ruled the roost, it was cool to take a beating. That hard approach is over, partly due to the rise of a generation that likes to show its vulnerability. You are no longer a wimp if you say you suffer from work or study pressure; no, you are then good at listening to your body and indicating your limits. stress in itself is seen as something bad.

Then people are caught between both factors. They are constantly overstimulated, and at the same time think that a stress-free life is the norm.

The tendency is then to lower the bar: to make the binding study advice less strict, to say that ‘higher is not better’. I don’t think this is the right reflex. There is nothing wrong with (trying to) perform in itself. It’s fun to surpass yourself or others, and enjoy the result. It becomes problematic when ‘having to perform’ extends to all areas of life: when performance is constantly measured and compared, when failure says something about you as a person. Yes, then pressure to perform becomes unhealthy: no longer a disaster, but a disaster.

Interestingly enough, the Trimbos Institute itself also warned against “negative framing” of pressure to perform and stress: the interviewed students appeared to find the reporting about it “not helpful”. The institute called for “normalizing (the conversation about) pressure to perform and stress”. Little has come of that conversation.