[jongjong]

Yes pressure affects people differently. Under stress, my communication skills and creativity improves but my mathematical thinking and problem solving abilities decline (slow down).

Creativity gets in the way of leetcode... Leetcode requires focus; you need to recall only the most relevant techniques for the problem, if you're being too creative and see too many possible solutions and you try to identify the most optimal one, it will slow you down and you will run out of time.

I tend to do better if the problems are more difficult with more time given. I'm built for solving difficult problems without hard time constraints. I'm bad at solving easy problems within limited time slots.