aHEAD IN THE GAME

There are two things we are obsessed with in sport: physicality and competition. I mean yeh it’s kinda obvious. Our physical performance is the only way we can express our hard work and skill; competition provides the motivation to continue to expend ourselves physically, and the metric by which to compare our hard work and success. As a result, athletes and coaches are continually looking to push the limits on what they can do and endure to outdo their opponents. Mental toughness is often touted as this ability to endure, to be resilient in the face of obstacles. Research supports that it can be bolstered by overcoming challenging situations. I think the issue is that we mainly interpret those physical sacrifices and hardships as those contributing to mental toughness. Therefore, I would argue that mental toughness has become synonymous with the physical side of sport. Namely, how far can we push our bodies to achieve success. There’s this idea that as athletes we must champion our physicality and performance at the expense of almost everything else; it can almost feel like we’re pushed to sacrifice anything deemed unimportant to those physical aspects of sport in the name of mental toughness.

I guess we’re all just sadists and masochists, constantly inflicting and enduring pain for the sake of competition. Take collegiate athletics; I remember my freshman spring season being hell. You wake up for lift at an absolutely ungodly time, and weather a workout most likely full of heavy squatting, push ups, (everything you see on gym bro tik tok) and wash it all down with running stadiums at the steepest part of Dowdy Ficklen. Next, you move over to a training full of sprinting, fitness testing, pretty much everything and anything asthma attack inducing. Keep in mind, you’re doing this every single day. Until finals, when you get to keep doing it, but the workout just has the word “optional” in front of it now. Make it through the spring, and now what you have to look forward to is preseason which was an absolute blur. We were in the North Carolina heat and humidity, throwing med-balls, running non-stop stadiums, and sprinting with literally no idea how long the torture would last. Girls were getting dizzy and showing signs of literal heat exhaustion. I remember our coach literally telling us he was, “breaking us down to build us back up.” He told us it was character building, how we were becoming mentally tougher. Cmon you can’t tell me that anyone in collegiate athletics doesn’t have a similar story, like really. As athletes, we sit there, we complain, we bitch and guess what? We get on the line and keep going because a part of us, maybe a little bigger than just a part, really believes that this is building our mental toughness. To some degree that’s not wrong. I think in athletics we have this notion that pain and sacrifice really are the foundation to success because hard situations can breed adaptability, endurance, resilience, focus, coping etc. Taken together, these are attributes of mentally tough competitors.

There has to be some limit to what we push ourselves to do, don’t you think? Some point where the pushing is really doing more harm than good. I think for the physical side of sport the limit is clear. In college, I had the beginnings of a stress fracture. So, for everything except for games and practices, I was in a boot. There were never any real rumblings of, “maybe she should just sit out,” or “maybe we should shut her down completely for a few weeks.” It was just expected that I would continue to play through this certain amount of pain. Truthfully, I didn’t have a problem with it because it was understood that this certain level of pain is fine, and almost a given at a high level. However, there was always another side to it. It was also expected that I go to treatment, rehab, and work with my trainer for like 2 hours every day to prevent my problem from getting worse. As athletes, we often tow the line between pushing ourselves and overexerting. Coaches are always telling us to do more, more, more. But, hopefully, our coaches are also always telling us to recover as well. So in this way, the whole “no pain, no gain” attitude is fine. It’s fine when the pain actually leads to proportional gains. It’s fine when the pain is temporary, and it’s fine when following the pain there is an immediate and adequate recovery. The “no pain, no gain,” “break em down to build em back up” attitude is fine when it’s not negatively effecting performance or competition, the two most important tenets of sport. However, I think the limit for the physical side of sport, what our bodies can handle, is clear. There are clear and indisputable physical consequences when we overdo it. Look at me, I pushed it too far and now I’m nursing a meniscus tear. There are supposed to be safeguards in place to police when our bodies are at our limit. I mean thinking back to when I was wearing the boot at ECU. I had an advocate, my athletic trainer. They were the person to police the line between doing too much and when I could give a little more. It’s easier for athletes and staff to patrol this boundary when it comes to physical problems. Physicality and performance are hailed as the most important things in sport so taking precautions to protect them are easily digestible. However, there are other variables, such as mental health that can also effect these critical ideals. The tricky part is the line for how much we can budge on something like mental health isn’t nearly as obvious.

My concern is when our physicality isn’t an athlete’s limiting factor. Do we have the same precautions and advocates for athletes? Truthfully, I don’t think so. In athletics, we still do not quite equate physical and mental health, despite a recent push. Recently Sydney Leroux and Bethany Balcer have decided to take a break from soccer for “mental health reasons.” Athletes that take hiatus from sport under these conditions are often called “brave,” “courageous” etc. Not to say they aren’t all of those great adjectives, but when ACLs are torn or girls end up on the season ending injury list they aren’t applauded for their bravery. Despite sport leaning more mental-health-friendly it’s still slightly taboo to talk candidly about it, nevermind to take prolonged time off sport because of it. While it’s a no brainer that we take time off to heal from physical injury, recovering from mental ill health isn’t as common. What we lack in sport is consistency in equating physical and mental health. What I notice is we don’t normally see athletes take mental health breaks until they come out later and say they were in one of the worst times of their lives. However, I see someone sitting out in the NBA for “left knee soreness” or due to “game management” like every week. We love to sing the praises of mental toughness when it comes to an athlete pushing through pain or persevering through an observable challenging situation. However, an athlete who shows signs of mental hardships, I don’t know if the athletic population really sees it the same.

The line between what is too much mentally isn’t as clear line as the line concerning our physical health. I think back to my own issues with anxiety. When it was at its worst I was going to the field everyday for 4-5 hours, I wasn’t allowing myself to eat certain things until I was sure I worked out enough, and I was watching my practice and game film over and over. I was only functioning as an athlete not as a person and to make it even crazier, I was actually performing well. I was even being praised for my dedication and hard work. I was being applauded for literally ignoring my mental health, whether people knew it or not. I think back to the times when I wasn’t playing well AND I was struggling mentally. No one even noticed my mental anguish until my physical performance dipped, but I can assure you the problem was bad long before. Then, when I would talk to coaches about it they always suggested taking more time on the field, more training, more lifting, and my favorite line, “that I needed to get mentally tougher.” I’m not mad at my coaches for applauding my destructive behavior, or even calling me out when I was underperforming. My point is that we spend so much time studying an athlete’s performance we forget that there are more than just physical factors that contribute to it. As a result, we have forgotten about these other important variables or maybe its become too hard to name, train, or identify when they’re lacking. Either way, I think as athletes we have become so used to the idea that sport is full of sacrifice. We are always told we will have to do things that we don’t always want to do to be successful. I think that can often lead to being ignorant to the signs and symptoms of mentall-ill health with athletes written off as lazy or even lacking discipline, or my personal favorite, as lacking mental toughness.

Ironically, I believe, we have taken a phrase like mental toughness and weaponized it to almost justify surrendering mental health. A 2015 editorial by James Bauman posed that the rivalry between mental toughness and mental health is actually born from stigma that pervades athletics. He reports that within sport culture seeking mental health help makes athletes susceptible to loss in playing time, position, and lucrative contracts. Not to mention open them up to public scrutiny. Further supporting his claims, research has shown that stigma remains a major barrier to athletes seeking mental health help. There are different types of stigma, some is concerned with our internal beliefs and other is concerned with our perception of public beliefs. Taken together, research has shown that these aspects of stigma effect 66% of variance towards mental health help-seeking. Stigma from athletes themselves isn’t the only thing that sways the decision to seek help. When important figures close to athletes such as athletic trainers, coaches, and/or administrators  have negative views of mental health and help-seeking, athletes are more likely to have higher levels of stigma and less likely to utilize mental health resources should they have an issue. Which is crazy because if we look at the other side of it, a good coach or athletic trainer would never let an injured or overworked athlete go without help. Athletes who struggle mentally are injured and overworked just the same, but their issue just isn’t as obvious.

Those in the athletic community who truly view mental health and mental toughness as adversarial don’t understand the definitions of either. The true definitions, not just what the masses have decided the definitions are.  The World Health Organization (WHO) defines mental health as “ a state of mental well-being that allows people to cope with the stressors of life, realize their abilities, learn and work well, and contribute to their community.” Now let’s take the definition of mental toughness as defined by Jones et al. in 2002, “it is the natural or developed psychological edge that enables you to generally cope better than your opponents with many demands (competition, training, lifestyle) that sports place on the performer & specifically be more consistent and better than your opponents in remaining determined, focused, confident, and in control under pressure.” When you lay out both definitions I think the similarities are pretty clear. For one, both mental health and mental toughness contain aspects of resilience and the ability to cope with stressors. Mental health and mental toughness are also similar in that they can be temporary states, it’s not an all or nothing situation. The Mental Health Continuum supports that mental health isn’t just the absence of clinical issues. Instead, we exist on a spectrum from diagnosable, debilitating mental health issue to perfect functioning unencumbered by any mental issues. We are constantly oscillating somewhere in between. Take the definition, mental toughness is, “a natural or developed psychological edge.” A study of soccer players found that athletes believed their mental toughness was bolstered by overcoming challenging situations, especially those early in their careers. This shows that mental toughness can be improved and almost learned; therefore, like mental health, our current state of mental toughness does not have to be permanent.

In my opinion, it’s clear that mental health and mental toughness are not adversarial. In fact, I would argue that mental toughness is simply a sport specific version of mental health. I mean when I think about the definitions themselves, mental health is our overall ability to cope with all aspects of our daily lives. Mental toughness is our specific ability to cope with the challenges of sport. Similar to how mental health is multifaceted in our general lives, mental toughness is the same. Jones et al. & Thelwell et al., both support that the mentally tough competitor is able to deal with obstacles that concern the overall athlete lifestyle not just those challenges dealing with performance and competition. When we look at the Mental Health Continuum created in 2008 it ranges from healthy, to mild, to more severe issues, to clinical issues that require immediate care. It also includes six different domains used to identify specific functioning. These include: physical well-being, performance and functioning, sleep, social well being, spiritual well being, and addictions. While these are used to describe our overall functioning in life, I think it’s pretty obvious that athletes are also looking to all of these aspects as they influence athletic performance. So, it would be fair to say that mental toughness considers all the same aspects of mental health but through the context of athletics. It makes sense why coaches and athletes alike are constantly trying to find ways to bolster mental toughness. I think the reasons we often undermine the importance of MENTALITY and mental health in mental toughness is because they aren’t the most attractive variables and possibly more difficult to train. It’s easy to train things like speed, endurance, technical ability, anything relating to physical performance and health, because it’s easier to see progress. However, when we take things like mental health it’s a continuum, it’s dynamic. It seems harder to train and even harder to see concrete results.

One of our issues in sport is we have a tendency to only believe what we can see. We put a huge emphasis on physical performance and competition because those are the two most obvious ways we can express what type of athlete we are. Coaches and athletes design trainings and sometimes orchestrate difficult situations that challenge physical abilities often saying that overcoming these obstacles boosts our mental toughness. There we have the cycle that has continued through athletics. Difficult situations, boost mental toughness leading to better performance. Perhaps in some ways we have lost the plot. Sometimes we are so eager to push ourselves, we forget that our struggles as athletes are not limited to the physical; however, it seems we only pay close attention to those physical problems. Everything else we seem to be satisfied in sacrificing. However, there is a limit to what we can give both physically and mentally; despite the latter having murky boundaries that are different for each individual. We have corrupted the true definition of mental toughness. It’s not just our ability to push ourselves physically, it’s our ability to cope with the athletic lifestyle in general. I think that if coaches, administrators, support staff, and athletes understood the totality of mental toughness we would understand the importance of treating athletes as people and not just performers. The problem with the “no pain, no gain” attitude is that it doesn’t consider athletes’ limitations physically and mentally, both of which should be respected equally.