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Key points
- Our societal pursuit and praise of grittiness and greatness may be fueling a deep sense of unworthiness.
- Anxiety, depression, and numbness are natural, adaptive responses to chronic feelings of danger and distrust.
- The pressure to perform may motivate us to achieve greatness, but at a cost to our own self worth.
Feeding our bodies a daily dose of tough love in combination with the praise and promotion we get for attacking, fighting back, never giving up, and winning at any cost starves our biology of what we need most—the nutrients of safety, trust, acceptance, and belonging.
What looks like a recipe for developing a tough and gritty resilience may take us out of our bodies, away from connection, and prime us to attack, defend, and protect. What fuels an unstoppable drive to be the best and an insatiable hunger to prove ourselves worthy may ignite a physiological state of threat and spiral into self-destructive beliefs of inadequacy regardless of our efforts and achievements. This insidious cycle may lead to an endless pursuit of money, power, perfection, status, fame, and success while creating feelings of fear, worry, dissatisfaction, angst, and unworthiness within.
Our Collective Pursuit of Greatness
By nearly every metric of greatness in men's professional tennis, Novak Djokovic stands alone. Yet, when asked if winning gold in the 2024 Paris Olympics was the missing piece that now completes his puzzle, Djokovic hesitantly responded, “Yes. It is. It is. I am telling myself, always, that I’m enough because I can be very self-critical, and I don’t know. That’s probably one of the biggest internal battles that I keep on fighting with myself, that I don’t feel like I’ve done enough, that I haven’t been enough in my life, on the court and off the court."
Like Djokovic, we can find it challenging, if not impossible, to believe we do enough and are enough. The struggle we face doesn't necessarily stem from the truth but rather from the expectations of a culture that dictates that we must demonstrate our value. We are constantly pressured to prove our worth, meet and exceed societal standards, and be good enough to be seen, accepted, picked, recognized, included, liked, and loved.
A contributor to this collective pursuit of enoughness is our culture's messages and reward systems. The better we are at something, the higher we climb in status, the more we earn, and the more powerful, praised, and valued we become.
However, a second significant component fueling our relentless motivation for enoughness resides within our bodies, through the adaptive, individual, and collective physiological shifts into states supporting threat reactions and behaviors. As we move through this world feeling evaluated, competing against those around us, and under pressure to perform, we signal to our bodies that we aren't safe.
When we don't feel safe, our adaptive response, wired into our nervous system, diverts resources from supporting the regulation of our organs and healthy relationships and shifts toward attacking, defending, and protecting. Instead of feeling relaxed, at ease, and comfortable in connection with others or resting in stillness, we inhabit bodies biased toward threat, on guard, hypervigilant, constantly moving, and prepared for who or what might harm us. Over time, this metabolically costly biobehavioral state can't hold up and gives way to disconnection, withdrawal, and numbing.
Metaphorically, we no longer trust that it's safe to feel safe. We no longer trust that it's safe to trust others. We no longer trust that who we are is good enough to belong.
We aren't doing any of this deliberately. We aren't anxious, depressed, or numb because we want to be or because we aren't good enough. We are reacting to the cultural context, repeated violations of trust, and bodies around us signaling competition, angst, and uncertainty.
A Quest for Safety
"We are on an enduring lifelong quest to feel safe," says Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D., developer of polyvagal theory. This feeling of safety reflects a physiological state supporting the homeostatic processes of health, growth, and restoration. The problem isn't our inherent biological search for safety (i.e., homeostasis, trusting relationships) but rather what we seek this feeling of safety from.
We spend so much of our lives expending energy and resources toward accumulating money, power, status, and stuff, competing against, proving ourselves, and battling our thoughts and bodily feelings to find and grab an elusive sense of safety, belonging, and enoughness. From a polyvagal perspective, this is the rat race, the bridge to nowhere, and the ladder to success, leading to feelings of discontent, disconnection, and distrust emerging from bodies locked in states of threat.
In a 2023 interview, basketball legends Michael Jordan and Steph Curry questioned whether they hate losing more than they love winning. “Losing is just the worst feeling in life, at anything. Cards, golf, basketball, whatever it is,” says Curry. "I hate losing. I mean, it's not even a question,” echoes Jordan.
Tom Brady shares their deep aversion to losing, saying, “You never get over losses. I’ve never gotten over one loss I’ve had in my career. They always stick with me." Considered one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, winner of seven Super Bowls over a 23-year career, he talks about his defeats as the primary fuel for his motivation, relentless drive, competitive spirit, and commitment to improving.
When our leaders, champions, and heroes describe losing as "the worst feeling in life" and winning as the primary motivation for achieving greatness, how can we expect our children to feel safe enough to play with, versus compete against; OK enough to aspire to yet fall short of; or good enough without being the best?
When we rally behind, celebrate, and elevate the gladiators who annihilate everyone and everything standing in the way of winning, how can we relax, be confident in who we are, come together, collaborate, accept our differences, listen to one another, and share our authentic voices?
When we recognize how evaluation, uncertainty, rapid change, and combative competition trigger bodily states of threat and conflict with our biological quest for safety, trust, acceptance, and belonging, we can appreciate the inherent challenges we face, individually and collectively, to be generous, kind, compassionate, inclusive, understanding, patient, relaxed, and still.
Competition isn’t bad, and participant trophies for everyone aren’t the solution. And, of course, at times, we must attack, fight back, defend against, protect, get back up, and even give up.
But we must recognize the consequences of playing in such high-stakes, competitive, and combative games. "That which does not kill us makes us stronger" might instead reorient us to experience and express threat, reshape us for disconnection and distrust, and drive us toward greatness without ever feeling good enough or having done enough.
References
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a German philosopher, is credited with saying, "What does not kill me makes me stronger" ("Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker") in his 1888 book Twilight of the Idols
