The neuroscience of cracking under pressure

Summary

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Short Wave — "The Neuroscience of Cracking Under Pressure"

Date: February 18, 2026
Host: Camila Domonoski (filling in for Emily Kwong and Regina Barber)
Guest: Dr. Vikram Chib, Biomedical Engineer & Neuroscientist, Johns Hopkins University

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Camila Domonoski delves into the neuroscience of pressure, exploring why people—including Olympic athletes—sometimes excel and sometimes "crack" when the stakes are highest. With the Winter Olympics as a backdrop, Dr. Vikram Chib explains how our brains process rewards, experience pressure, and fall victim to choking under intense scrutiny. The episode also offers science-backed practical tips for performing better under pressure in everyday life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Nature of Pressure & Subjectivity (00:23–01:39)

• Camila reflects on the universal nature of pressure, relating Olympic-level anxiety to the nerves of everyday tasks, like workplace performance.
• Dr. Chib emphasizes the subjective experience of pressure:

  “Doing an interview on the radio could feel as stressful as that person trying to get the gold medal for their figure skating competition... For me, it could be the same thing as an Olympian in their gold medal event.” (00:58 — Dr. Vikram Chib)

• Everything we do—in sports or daily life—involves the brain’s reward system.

Fatigue and Motivation in the Brain (03:13–05:20)

• Fatigue manifests cognitively (mental tasks) and physically; both involve brain regions that sense internal state and motivation.
• Dr. Chib’s research shows that motivation (“a bit of extra reward”) can help us push past perceived fatigue:

  “What we found is that...offering a little bit of reward can push you out of that fatigue state a little bit.” (04:39 — Chib)

The Olympics and the Power of Rewards (05:20–06:06)

• High stakes, like Olympic medals, can motivate athletes to surpass normal limits.

  “You see a lot of Olympic and world records broken in the Olympics...that little added reward pushes them beyond their limit.” (05:34 — Chib)

Choking Under Pressure—Neuroscience Explained (06:06–09:34)

• Dr. Chib describes “choking” (underperformance under high stakes) as a response to heightened incentives.
• In the lab, increasing rewards (monetary incentives) improves performance up to a point, but extremely high stakes cause a drop (“choking”) due to loss aversion.

  “When you give them $100, they tend to choke under pressure. Their performance goes down.” (06:26 — Chib)

• The ventral striatum plays a pivotal role—activated by high rewards, deactivated by potential losses.

  “They would view it as a loss...that worry about loss was related to how they choked under pressure.” (07:21 — Chib)

• The brain reframes big rewards as potential losses, impeding motor and cognitive skills.

Cognitive Reframing as a Solution (08:46–09:34)

• Training yourself to adopt a broader perspective (thinking about a series of events rather than the individual trial or event) reduces anxiety and improves performance.

  “If you train yourself to reframe the task...and think about the portfolio of all the trials...you don’t focus on that loss as much...you tend to do better under pressure.” (08:46 — Chib)

Brain Regions Involved in Pressure & Performance (09:34–10:40)

• Reward Pathways: Ventral striatum, nucleus accumbens, prefrontal cortex.
• Motor Areas: Motor cortex, cerebellum (especially for athletic tasks).
• Cognitive Regions: Prefrontal cortex, working memory areas (important for strategy-based sports like curling).

  “Those areas respond to reward...But you can also think about cognitive areas...prefrontal cortex...higher order cognitive function.” (09:44–10:40 — Chib)

The Effect of Social Attention (10:40–11:47)

• Being observed (social approval) acts as an additional incentive; moderate amounts can boost performance, while large audiences create pressure that may lead to choking.

  “A couple people watching you can get you to boost your performance...when crowds are really big...that social incentive...can get you to do poorly.” (10:57–11:47 — Chib)

• The effect mirrors the reward scenario, with social feedback acting as a powerful motivator or stressor.

Takeaways for Everyday Life (11:47–13:01)

• Practical advice: Use cognitive reframing—think big picture, not just about a single “make-or-break” event.

  “You have a big event happening...you could just think to yourself...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.” (12:23 — Chib)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Relativity of Pressure:

  “Doing an interview on the radio could feel as stressful as that person trying to get the gold medal...” (00:58 — Chib)

• Reward Offsetting Fatigue:

  “Offering a little bit of reward can push you out of that fatigue state a little bit.” (04:39 — Chib)

• Explanation of Choking:

  “Their performance goes down...they would view [the reward] as a loss...that worry about loss was related to how they choked under pressure.” (06:26, 07:21 — Chib)

• Reframing Helps:

  “If you train yourself to reframe the task...you tend to do better under pressure.” (08:46 — Chib)

• Social Pressure Mirrors High Stakes:

  “When crowds are really big...that social incentive...can get you to do poorly.” (11:26 — Chib)

• Advice for Listeners:

  “It’s okay if I don’t do as well on this, I’ll have other chances...reframing...can get us to do well when the stakes are high for us.” (12:23 — Chib)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:23–01:39 — Introduction to universal pressure and Dr. Chib’s perspective
• 03:13–05:20 — Discussion of fatigue and how rewards counteract it
• 06:06–09:34 — Choking under pressure: lab results and the ventral striatum
• 09:34–10:40 — Brain regions involved in reward, motor, and cognitive function
• 10:40–11:47 — Social attention as a double-edged sword
• 11:47–13:01 — Reframing and science-backed strategies to manage pressure

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Overall Tone

The conversation is accessible, curious, and encouraging—mixing relatable humor (“showing up to work as our own gold medal event”) with clear, engaging explanations of neuroscience. Dr. Chib consistently grounds cutting-edge research in real-world situations, and Camila’s questions reflect the listener’s perspective, making the science personal.

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Key Takeaways

• The brain’s reward system plays a critical role in both extraordinary and everyday performances under pressure.
• Fatigue can be influenced by boosting perceived rewards, motivating individuals to overcome tiredness.
• Extremely high incentives can cause anxiety about loss, triggering a neurological response that impairs performance (choking).
• Cognitive strategies—particularly reframing the situation and focusing on a broader perspective—can help mitigate choking and improve performance in high-pressure situations.
• Social incentives (like being watched) have similar effect patterns to rewards: moderate attention helps; excessive scrutiny can hurt.

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For further learning, the guest recommends reframing nerve-wracking events in a broader context—a science-backed tip applicable from the Olympic arena to the meeting room.

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Transcript

[A]

This message comes from Mint mobile. Starting at $15 a month, make the [e-mail] switch $45 upfront payment for three months. Five gigabyte plan equivalent to $15 a month. Taxes and fees extra first three months only. See terms. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

[B]

Hey, Shortwavers. 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. 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 more pressure, right?

[C]

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

[B]

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.

[C]

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

[B]

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 Shortwave, the science podcast from npr.

[D]

This message comes from WBUR Podcasts. No other organ brings together science and spirituality quite like the human brain. Our thinking is very different from what we have imagined. Studies about the brain are at heart studies about ourselves. So why, even after centuries of research, has the brain still remained such a stubborn and elusive mystery? Listen to On Point for the special series Brain Waves.

[A]

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[B]

All right. We are talking to Vikram Chibb, 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, right?

[C]

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 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. And when those areas interact with motivational areas, that's kind of what gets you to feel fatigued. 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.

[B]

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?

[C]

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, right?

[B]

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.

[C]

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've for four years, they do their world, World cup events, you know, and they Do. Okay, right. Sometimes they. They. They break world records. But you see a lot of Olympic and world records broken in. In the Olympics.

[D]

Right.

[C]

And so what? One. One way to think about that. I mean, this is just speculative. Could. Could be that, like, okay, that added. That little added reward pushes them beyond their limit.

[B]

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?

[C]

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, okay, 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, as the incentives increase, 25, 50 people get better. And when you give them 100 bucks, they tend to choke under pressure. Their performance goes down. 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.

[B]

Ventral striatum.

[C]

The ventral striatum. 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 hundred dollars, as, oh, my gosh, I could lose that $100.

[D]

Right?

[C]

So it's in their mind right 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 crosstalk 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.

[B]

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.

[C]

Yeah. So essentially it's. It's like a reframing. Right. So your brain is. 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 choking behavior, or at least we've seen that in the lab.

[B]

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?

[C]

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 motor cortex is an area that's responsible for coordinating 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, you know, cognitively taxing. For example, like you see people doing curling. Right. You know, there's a lot of strategy and mental effort into say, like, how do I place this rock in the right place.

[D]

Right.

[C]

And so you can even think about working memory areas or prefrontal cortex. Again, that not only does reward, but does sort of higher order cognitive function.

[B]

Yeah. And, you know, I'm watching them do it on tv. What is, what does 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, you're taking your shot.

[C]

Yeah. So, you know, that can be another incentive. Right. Social approval is, 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 people watching you can get you to boost your performance and actually like enhance performance a little bit. Right. But we've seen, you know, 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.

[B]

Of people in the lab.

[C]

But when, 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, the reward value, when it's really high for just monetary rewards, can get you to do poorly, that can happen in the social context as well. Right. And we see that, we see that time and again.

[B]

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 part 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?

[C]

Yeah, I think using these cognitive approaches is helpful thinking about things in terms of the big picture as opposed to smaller, you know, bigger, smaller events that you get really myopic about and then worry about doing poorly on them. I think, you know, you, you have a big event happening, you have to give a big presentation at work, for example, and you, 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.

[B]

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, can keep their mind on the big picture.

[D]

All right, great.

[C]

Thank you for having me.

[B]

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. Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer. I'm Camila Domonosky. Thanks for listening to Short Wave from npr.

[D]

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