No days off. Go hard or go home. Give it all or nothing.
These are just a few of the phrases that I have seen perpetuated in athletic culture my entire life; the idea that you must give your everything to your sport or training in order to be the best. With the rise of mental health advocacy in our generation, I’ve been thinking a lot about the various stigmas and struggles that athletes face concerning their mental health and wellbeing.
As a runner who has been running track since I was in seventh grade, I’ve always believed that the best athletes take no days off. If I want to be a better runner, I need to train until I am the best. Who cares if I am going through something in my life? When it’s time to practice, I need to ignore my feelings and have an amazing workout.
After all, there’s no crying in baseball (or running in this case).
Every time I have tried this, I shock myself when the things happening in my personal life affect my performance athletically. Why can’t I just be like the amazing athletes that don’t let anything affect them?
Newsflash, athletes have struggles just as everyone else does.
In an interview with People magazine, tennis star Naomi Osaka shared that she refused to take questions during the 2021 French open tennis tournament in order to preserve her mental health.
“I’ve often felt that people have no regard for athletes’ mental health, and this rings very true whenever I see a press conference or partake in one,” Osaka said.
In 2018, basketball player for the Miami Heat, Kevin Love, wrote a piece for The Players Tribune about his personal struggles with mental health.
“For 29 years, I thought about mental health as someone else’s problem. Sure, I knew on some level that some people benefited from asking for help or opening up. I just never thought it was for me,” Love said. “To me, it was a form of weakness that could derail my success in sports or make me seem weird or different.”
After a panic attack at a basketball game, Love struggled to share his experience.
“I’d never heard of any pro athlete talking about mental health, and I didn’t want to be the only one. I didn’t want to look weak,” said Love.
After this experience, he founded the Kevin Love fund, an organization that seeks to create equity between physical and mental health.
These are only a few examples of athletes breaking the stigma behind mental health struggles, but, isn’t exercise supposed to make you happier?
According to Professor Erika Langley, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Whitman, exercise has some significant positive impacts on mental health.
“Exercise improves mental health not just by releasing endorphins, but also other ‘feel good’ neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. These work in combination to elevate our mood, while other hormones implicated in stress are reduced. Regular exercise has been shown in research to reduce anxiety and depression symptoms, even improving symptoms of ADHD,” said Langley. “Exercise serves as a healthy coping strategy when under increased stress, leading to greater resilience. And, I think most importantly it helps regulate sleep; getting in the habit of getting better sleep can often improve mental health.”
Although exercise can make you happier, that does not mean that athletes are immune to mental health challenges, Langley shared.
“Exercise can lead to poor mental health when it becomes an obsession, like overtraining,” Langley said. “Perhaps, in some cases, students might focus on exercise as a way to gain control when under a lot of stress, but by focusing too much and overtraining they not only can get burnt out by all of the excess cortisol but also might ignore their other responsibilities and fall even further behind, perpetuating a negative cycle of avoidance through exercise.”
Whitman Cross Country and Track runner Rowan Bienapfl herself has struggled with mental health challenges, and she shared her various thoughts on mental health in athletics and how this has impacted her journey.
“For me, exercise has always been a way of expelling any negative energy and any negative emotions. I need to be able to exercise in some form in order to be happy. Running has gotten me through a lot of things. I have a long history with suicidal ideation, and for me running has been a way to put that from active to passive and put me in a much safer place. When I got injured my Junior year of high school, it was a mental struggle that became very physical. I started developing skin issues and my body felt heavy and my arms ached when I couldn’t run. A runner’s mental state is very, very important for the sport. Being able to push your body so far, it’s really difficult to do,” Bienapfl said. “Especially in distance running, your body will give up because your brain, whenever you’re uncomfortable, kind of shuts itself down, and you have to be able to push past that. So when you’re already in a mentally fragile state it makes the sport a lot more difficult to do. And it can create a pretty toxic relationship with it. I have a lot of good friends on the team and it’s definitely helped me see running in a different way because I’m around people that actually care about me. Because I love my team and the people I’m around, I’m afraid of letting people down if I need to take a step back. I’m unable to express my love for the sport properly if I’m not actively participating in it.”
At Whitman’s first track meet of the season, Bienapfl was unable to race due to being “physically and mentally not ready.”
“It was truly heartbreaking watching everyone race. Yes, I love my team, and I’m so glad I got to support them, but it was like watching people do what I love the most and not being able to show everyone how passionate I am about it, it was like a stab in the heart. In high school, I just felt like I couldn’t go to my coach because I wasn’t the fastest person. It made me feel like I couldn’t reach out and I was alone in my running which kind of trapped me,” said Bienapfl. “You need to have a good relationship with your coach in order to succeed. When I opened up to my coach about some terrible things that have happened to me he actually listened and was willing to accommodate and make sure that I was okay. He wanted me to feel as safe as possible. Mental health is not talked about enough in my sport or in any athletic space. I think everyone’s so focused on being mentally strong that they forget it’s sometimes okay to be mentally weak. And that doesn’t mean that you yourself are weak. It just means that you need to take some time for yourself and get better and get healthy again. You can’t succeed if your mind is turned against you.”
Campuses across the nation are becoming more aware of athletes and mental health, including Whitman. A new group of students have started a chapter of the mental health advocacy group, The Hidden Opponent. The organization’s mission statement is as follows.
“The Hidden Opponent is the leading non-profit organization for athlete mental health advocacy, education and support. We provide accessible resources and unite a global community to empower athletes to prioritize their mental health and shatter the stigma within sports culture.”
Through advocating for openness about mental health, The Hidden Opponent is working to shatter the stigma that many student athletes face; that showing you are struggling means you are weak.
The idea of mental health in athletics is not just a collegiate or high school issue, it goes beyond and includes olympic athletics as well.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) gathered in 2018 to analyze scientific literature concerning mental health in athletics and create a consensus statement for clinical, individual and systemic interventions in order to improve mental health among elite athletes.
The committee consisted of 23 individuals from 13 nations, and according to the British Journal of Sports Medicine, “the final work group included psychiatrists, psychologists, primary care and orthopaedic sports medicine physicians, exercise scientists, a neurologist, a neurological surgeon.”
Throughout the consensus, the committee addresses anxiety, depression, eating disorders, sport related concussion and many other factors that significantly impact athletes mental health. The consensus addresses the stigma surrounding seeking help for mental health struggles.
“Elite athletes may not recognise or acknowledge depressive symptoms or may not seek support, in part related to stigma,” the committee said.
In addition to this, the consensus mentions that different sports are associated with different risks for depressive symptoms.
“Among North American athletes, track and field athletes had the highest rates of MDD compared with those in other collegiate sports. Depressive symptoms may be more prevalent in individual sport athletes compared with team sport athletes,” the committee said.
In May 2022, 9808 college athletes were surveyed. When asked to rate their level of agreement with multiple statements including, “I would feel comfortable seeking support from a mental health provider on campus,” Women athletes voted 48% and Male athletes voted 46%.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help. On campus we have a system of resources for anyone, not just athletes, who are struggling or just need a helping hand.
The Welty Health and Counseling Center offers drop in hours and appointments with licensed mental health counselors.
To any athlete out there, remember, you are not alone. Struggling with mental health does not make you weak. Every athlete has struggles but they do not diminish your strength.
