The neuroscience of cracking under pressure

The 2026 Winter Olympics are unfolding in Milan and Cortina, and we can’t look away: We’re watching athletes fly down mountains on skis and glide — sometimes slipping and falling — on the ice. Vikram Chib https://chiblab.jhu.edu/ studies performance and how the brain responds to rewards at Johns Hopkins University. And he says rewards aren’t just for Olympians; they’re baked into basically everything humans do. But those rewards and the pressure that comes with them can come at a cost to people’s brains. And even Olympians are human. Sometimes, we crack. So, today, Vikram dives into the science behind choking under pressure. Interested in more Olympics science? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] – we may cover it in a future episode! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Google Workspace with Gemini, one subscription that does it all. Personalized AI and premium business versions of Gmail, Google Docs, Drive and more. Try it free for 14 days at g o o dot G L E slash Workspace with Gemini.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  Hey, Short Wavers. Camila Domonoski here, filling in for Emily and Regina. The 2026 Winter Olympics are underway in Milan and Cortina, and I don't know about you, but I know I'm holding my breath watching them fly down mountains on skis or slip and fall on the ice. So I can only imagine how the athletes must feel competing with the whole world watching.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  And yet, I feel like no matter what we do, whether we're attempting quadruple axels on the ice or just showing up to work, we all experience pressure, right?

• 0:59Speaker 03

  Doing an interview on the radio could feel as stressful as that person trying to get the gold medal for their figure skating competition or whatever event they're in. It's subjective, right? So for me, it could be the same thing as an Olympian in their, you know, gold medal event.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Vikram gets me. Vikram Chib is a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins. His lab studies performance and how the brain responds to rewards. And he says reward is baked into basically everything humans do.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  And that could be getting a gold medal, right? Or it could be, you know, reaching for a cup of water.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  The stakes just vary a lot. So today on the show, what happens in athletes' brains when those stakes are at their highest? And what science tells us about how our brains respond to rewards, pressure, and millions of people watching you strive for gold? You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  This message comes from ProLon with their five-day fasting-mimicking diet, a clinically-developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Learn more at prolonlife.com/NPR.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  This message comes from International Medical Corps. When crises strike, every second matters. And that's why International Medical Corps moves fast. From the flooding in Nepal to earthquakes in Venezuela, they deliver lifesaving medical care and supplies around the world while training local health workers to ensure care continues long after the emergency ends. This giving season, your generosity saves lives and builds resilience for tomorrow. Learn more or donate today at internationalmedicalcorps.org/NPR. This message comes from Google Workspace with Gemini, one subscription that does it all. Personalized AI and premium business versions of Gmail, Google Docs, Drive, and more.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Try it free for 14 days at goo.gle/workspacewithgemini.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  All right, we are talking to Vikram Chib, a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University. You have studied people's brains to understand how they respond to rewards like gold medals or whatever your own personal gold medal is. And you've also looked at what happens, what's going on when people feel tired. And I wanted to ask you to tell us about that. Like, what's actually happening in the brain when we are fatigued?

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Right, so there are different types of fatigue that you could have, right? There's cognitive fatigue. Maybe you're doing, you're sitting at your desk and you're doing a lot of, you know, spreadsheets or something, right? Or writing. And then there's physical fatigue, which is, you know, running, you know, walking up in a long flight of stairs, things like that. And what we found is that there are areas in your brain that are involved in sensing your internal state.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  And when those areas interact with motivational areas, that's kind of what gets you to feel fatigue. So you sense that your body can't produce any more output, any more effort, whether that's cognitive or mental. And that gets you to sort of shut down and feel tired.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  And does that fatigue, does it look different inside the brain when the stakes are higher or lower for somebody? When that reward is more on their minds?

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we haven't directly looked at higher or lower stakes. What we do know and what we're starting to see is that offering a little bit of reward can push you out of that fatigue state a little bit. So reward can sort of counteract the cost of effort that you have to do, right? So you can think of any action that you're doing is like a trade off between the effort costs that you're putting in and the reward you're getting out. So if I boost up that reward a little bit, right? It might motivate me more to overcome some of that feeling of fatigue and do the task that I'm set out to do.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Right, so like thinking of everybody at the Olympics right now, maybe an athlete might be totally exhausted, but if they know that if they push a little more, they could win gold, maybe they're more likely to actually be able to overcome that fatigue?

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. So like you would think about like a speed skater, right? You see these people getting their Olympic records or gold medals, right? And, you know, they, for four years, they do their World Cup events, you know, and they do okay, right? Sometimes they break world records. But you see a lot of Olympic and world records broken in the Olympics, right? And so one way to think about that, I mean, this is just speculative, could be that like, okay, that little added reward pushes them beyond their limit.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  That makes perfect sense, right? You have this offering of a reward and you sort of do something superhuman. You can do better than you've ever done before. What about the flip side? What about when Olympians choke and they mess up on something that they've been able to do before? Just fine. Is that is that related to mental fatigue? Or is there something else going on?

• 6:33Speaker 03

  Well, we've sort of looked at that in terms of the heightened reward aspect of it as opposed to the fatigue aspect of it. So what we've done is we've kind of set up these like choking scenarios in the lab where we where we use incentive and the incentive we've used is money. So we pay people like a lot of money. We tell them, OK, you're going to do a single trial like of a skilled motor task, essentially playing a video game. And on certain trials, we're going to give you $100 to do this trial. And what we find is that people do, you know, as the incentives increase, you know, 25, 50, people get better. And when you give them 100 bucks, they tend to choke under pressure. Their performance goes down.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  And we looked in the brain when that happened. And what we found was that there's this area deep in your brain that's responsible for reward processing called the ventral striatum.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Ventral striatum?

• 7:28Speaker 03

  The ventral striatum.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  OK.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  And so it activates when the rewards are high. And it actually tends to deactivate when you have potential losses. And what we found was that what would happen is when people were playing a task and really high incentives were on the line, they would begin, they would see that incentive. They'd be like, oh, wow, I have $100 to win. They would see that really high incentive and they would view it as a loss. They would get worried about actually losing the really high incentive. And that worry about loss was related to how they choked under pressure. So the people that tended to worry more about that loss tended to choke under pressure more. They essentially reframed this positive thing, the $100, as, oh, my gosh, I could lose that $100, right? So it's in their mind, right?

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Now, what's interesting is the ventral striatum not only does reward processing, but it also does motor processes as well. So it initiates motor action. And so what we think is that there was some cross talk between those reward signals, or those worry of loss signals, and the motor signals, and that's what got people to do poorly when the stakes were high.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if you're thinking that you might win the gold medal, that's great. And if you're thinking, oh, my God, if I mess up, I don't win the gold medal and I lose, then suddenly your, your brain can't work the same way?

• 8:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. So essentially, it's, it's like a reframing, right? So your brain is reframing that incentive, and that reframing can get you to do poorly. Now, we've also found that if you train yourself to reframe the task in a different way and say to yourself, okay, I'm going to go into this trial, and I'm not going to think about this individual trial. I'm going to think about the portfolio of all the trials I have to do. So like, for example, the portfolio of all the races I have to, have to skate. If you do that, you don't focus on that loss as much. And you see less brain activity associated with this fear of losing, and you tend to do better under pressure. So cognitive reframing can sort of get you to overcome that, that

• 9:37Speaker 03

  choking behavior. Or at least, we've seen that in the lab.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. You mentioned the ventral striatum. Are there other big parts of the brain that are at play when someone's under pressure or having performance anxiety going on that you look at?

• 9:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you can think of the reward areas. So ventral striatum, nucleus accumbens, prefrontal cortex, those areas respond to reward. So the brain sort of activates when the rewards are very high. You can also think about the motor areas if we're thinking about Olympic sport. So, you know, motor cortex is an area that's responsible for coordinating your, your arm movements and your leg movements, or the cerebellum, that's another motor area. But you can also think about sort of cognitive areas, because some of these Events are very cognitively taxing. For example, like you see people doing curling, right? There's a lot of strategy and mental effort into saying like,

• 10:36Speaker 03

  how do I place this rock in the right place? Right? And so you could even think about working memory areas or prefrontal cortex again, that not only does reward, but does sort of higher order cognitive function.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I'm watching them do it on TV. What is attention from other people do to someone's experience of trying to do a difficult task? Like having millions of people watch you on live TV as you're taking your shot?

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that can be another incentive, right? Social approval is an incentive. And so we've actually done studies in the lab where we've put people in the scanner, had them be watched while they're doing different tasks. And it's very similar to the reward scenario that I gave you before, right? A couple of people watching you can get you to boost your performance and actually like enhance performance a little bit, right? But we've seen when crowds are really big, we haven't been able to do this in the lab because I don't know how to get thousands of people in the lab. But when there are a lot of people in the crowd, right? That social incentive can be really high. And in the same way that the reward value, when it's really high for just monetary rewards can get you to do poorly,

• 11:47Speaker 03

  that can happen in the social context as well, right? And we see that time and again.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  So a little, a medium sized reward, a few people watching, really helpful. A lot, a giant reward, a ton of attention, like can actually make it really difficult to do something. Olympians have to be able to compete with the most pressure that I can imagine. So what can the rest of us learn from them in our maybe lower stakes, personal gold medal events? How do we shift our focus, reframe our thinking so that we can do better under pressure?

• 12:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think using these cognitive approaches is helpful. Thinking about things in terms of the big picture as opposed to smaller, you know, smaller events that you get really myopic about and then worry about doing poorly on them. I think, you know, you have a big event happening, you have to give a big presentation at work, for example, and you worry about it for days and days and days. Whereas you could just think to yourself like, oh, I'm gonna have, you know, a bunch of presentations over the year and like, it's okay if I don't do as well on this. I can sort of, I'll have other chances to do well. So I think reframing is something that we can do to get us to do well when the stakes are high for us.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  All right, awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming to chat about the Olympics and pressure and rewards with us. This is something I know I'm going to be thinking about as I watch the rest of the games and fingers crossed that those athletes can keep their mind on the big picture.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  All right, great. Thank you for having me.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  If you liked this episode, follow us. It really helps the show and means you never miss another episode. Also, check out our episodes on sled head, a condition affecting bobsleigh and skeleton athletes, and the physics powering the cool feats of other Olympic sports like ski mountaineering and the ski jump. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson, edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Kwasi Lee was the audio engineer. I'm Camila Domonoski. Thanks for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.