Elite Athletics and the Social Nervous System

One of my favorite moments from the Paris 2024 Games was early in a qualifying round match in a full-contact sport, played by two longtime rivals. The US team had given the ball up twice, back to back. The score was tied. The tension was high.

A marquis athlete—a captain and a legend—approached his teammate. He approached him with no haste, only intention. You could see it in his eye contact. There was no smile per se, but a softness. An acceptance. The captain held out his hand. "Hey," and he said his teammate's name. "We're good. All good."

His teammate did smile. His shoulders lowered. He went all in on the next play. Success! And then another. And another. And another. The game remained close. Again and again, the US athletes dispelled each other's tension. They won.

We all know correlation does not equal causation. And yet, there is something important about what those athletes were doing—communicating acceptance of what is in the right here right now: acceptance of each other, acceptance of the moment, acceptance of whatever this task is that they would presently do together (even if it wasn't the task they'd hoped it would be).

Talk with anyone in the highest level of sport, and you'll find that the nerves never go away. Especially not when the stakes are high.

The key is working with our nervous systems—which are social nervous systems—as we train ourselves for high performance.

That's what we're going to talk about here in months to come: our nervous systems—our social nervous systems—which are mammalian nervous systems, evolved to operate in the context of relationships of care.

Our nervous systems—which exist throughout our bodies, in our brains, our spinal cords, and our sense organs, all throughout our skin and our fascia—are tuned to relationships and social interactions. That's how we evolved to survive. It stands to reason, then, that what helps us survive can also help us thrive and perform at the highest of levels.

We'll apply the interdisciplinary bodies of research known as interpersonal neurobiology and social neuroscience to sport and performance to explore how athletes and those who support them can work with our mammalian nervous systems—and especially (but not exclusively) strategize about how we can work with the vagus nerve, our tenth cranial nerve, that wanders from our brain stem through our faces and throats, into our chest, our heart, and our digestive organs—to achieve performances beyond what you might have even dared to imagine.

One of the most fascinating features of the vagus nerve is that eighty percent of the information traveling along it comes from our body up to our brain. So we have much less top-down control than we do body-up. And our interactions—what we see, hear, feel, and experience of each other’s faces, voices, touch, and energy—account for a massive proportion of the information traveling along this nervous system superhighway.

We aren’t as separate as we like to think we are. And post-game stats can never adequately reflect this, but excellent performances don’t happen in isolation. They happen in context and in relationship.

We are—physiologically, emotionally, socially, psychologically—a part of each other. Whether you’re a rookie or a GOAT.