Psychologist Cindra Kamphoff recently published four strategies to overcome the jitters before a high-stakes event. But what if that crippling fear of failure is the only thing protecting the rest of us from your mediocrity?
Every week, the wellness industrial complex produces another guide on how to trick your brain into feeling good about a situation you are wildly underprepared for. The latest offender is a widely circulated piece by confidence coach Cindra Kamphoff, which offers readers four creative strategies to battle performance anxiety before a big race or a job interview. Kamphoff suggests that the cold sweat, the racing heart, and the overwhelming desire to flee into the woods are merely mental hurdles to be cleared on the path to success.
As a clinician, I find this perspective not just medically irresponsible, but societally dangerous. We have pathologized a perfectly healthy biological response. Performance anxiety is not a disorder to be cured; it is a highly evolved, deeply necessary warning system designed to alert you that you are about to do something you are fundamentally not good enough to do.
When your hands shake violently before a major job interview, that is not a rogue nervous system acting up. That is your cellular intelligence correctly calculating that you lied on your resume about knowing advanced data modeling. To suppress that vital somatic feedback with positive self-talk is essentially evolutionary fraud.
Kamphoff recommends that nervous individuals reframe their anxiety as excitement, telling themselves that the physiological symptoms of terror are simply their body preparing for peak performance. I recently discussed this over a magnificent branzino at the Aspen Ideas Festival with the chief medical officer of a major investment bank, and we both shuddered at the implications. If we teach every unqualified applicant to successfully mask their deep-seated inadequacy with a few deep breaths and a power pose, how are the gatekeepers of our institutions supposed to know who to immediately discard?
We are already suffering the downstream effects of this unearned bravado. A recent JAMA paper highlighted a disturbing surge in corporate structural damage caused by mid-level associates who, bolstered by wellness apps, confidently volunteered to lead strategy sessions they had no business running. The researchers found that hacked confidence directly correlated with millions of dollars in misallocated third-quarter budgets.
If a candidate isn't visibly vibrating with the fear of imminent ruin, I have no way of knowing if they will respect the hierarchy when I inevitably claim credit for their work.
The historical record leaves no room for debate. If an early hominid experienced a sudden spike in cortisol and a tightening of the chest before attempting to wrestle a saber-toothed cat, they did not need to step behind a bush and repeat a power phrase. They needed to run away, because their arms were weak. Today, the saber-toothed cat is a panel of unimpressed venture capitalists, but the biological imperative remains exactly the same: your body is begging you to surrender before you get hurt.
Yet Kamphoff and her peers advise individuals to focus on their past successes to build confidence in the moment. It should be glaringly obvious that dwelling on the one time you successfully parallel parked a sedan will not help you navigate a high-stakes corporate merger.
I recently had a patient—a lovely, thoroughly average man—who used a confidence coach to prepare for a local marathon. He repeated his personalized mantra, visualized crossing the finish line, and completely suppressed his natural, protective urge to stay on the couch. Because he had bypassed his body's alarm system, he failed to realize he had only trained for three days. He subsequently shattered both patellas at mile two, an entirely preventable tragedy caused entirely by believing in himself.
The epidemic of unchecked self-belief has also infected the tech sector. Last week, I sat on a panel alongside a senior software executive who confessed that his biggest operational hurdle is junior developers who have conquered their imposter syndrome. Without the paralyzing dread of deploying bad code, these coders are now confidently pushing updates that routinely crash entire payment gateways. The dread was the only quality control mechanism the company had.
Instead of listening to wellness influencers, we should be codifying panic into our public health guidelines. If the CDC were truly interested in national well-being, they would mandate a baseline level of professional dread. I routinely instruct my corporate clients to deliberately induce anxiety in their subordinates before major presentations—withholding key metrics, heavily implying imminent layoffs, or simply staring at their shoes while the employee speaks. The results are undeniable: the truly capable rise to the occasion, and the unqualified mercifully develop a sudden migraine and excuse themselves from the room.
Ultimately, societies function best when the vast majority of people are slightly too terrified to speak up. The nervous energy you feel before a high-stakes event is your DNA desperately trying to save you from public humiliation. To silence it is to disrespect millions of years of natural selection.
So the next time you find yourself battling the jitters before a daunting task, please, for the sake of public order, lay down your weapons. Cancel your session with the confidence coach, step away from the podium, and take deep, comforting solace in the fact that your body has correctly identified your exact place in the world.