How to avoid becoming stressed while playing endurance games? [closed]

Although I am asking for Super Hexagon, I've noticed there is a multitude of games (rhythm games in particular) where the more stressed I am, the worse I play and/or are more likely to make a mistake. Often then the games are designed in such a way to induce stress, such as various ways of telling me how far I am, which also is telling me just how much it would suck if I were to fail right now.

This leads to a stress cycle, where I am noticing I am stressed, and I am aware of this being a bad thing, which makes me more stressed, over and around until I eventually fail.

This often means that I probably could've done <some new level I just unlocked> just fine, except I saw that it was new, got stressed about it and started the stress cycle.

So how can I:

• Avoid getting stressed while playing
• Defuse the stress cycle once it has inevitably started
  • One thought I had for this is simply taking deep breaths, but particularly in Super Hexagon, there is no way to pause and taking deep breaths is distracting enough to make me fail.