London: Jotting down anxieties before a stressful situation like an exam or speech boosts your performance.

The technique is so powerful that students taking an exam showed a 20 percent improvement in their marks if they used it just before sitting down.

"People are in stressful situation and they worry about it and the consequences," said Sian Beilock at the University of Chicago.

"These worries are taking up resources that should be dedicated to the task. Putting pen to paper appears to offload these worries," said Beilock, the journal Science reports.

He had previously shown that pressure-filled situations can deplete a part of the brain's processing power known as working memory, according to the Telegraph.

Working memory is lodged in the prefrontal cortex and is a sort of mental "notepad" that allows people to "work" with information relevant to the task at hand. But the notepad can also be filled with anxieties - thus losing brain power.

Beilock is one of the leading experts on "choking under pressure" - a phenomenon in which talented people perform below their skill level when presented with a particularly challenging experience. IANS