I have a T-shirt from my senior year that says, “Mental health is health. Period.” I never really understood how much I resonated with this until my final two years competing in college athletics.
Being a student-athlete is difficult not only on your body but arguably, even more so, on your mind. Gymnastics in the broadest sense is a sport based on perfection, and you are judged from the time you are young until your last routine on how close to this mark you can get. More so than any of us realize, this mentality carries over into everything else we do.
As I started writing this, I began to think about how much I wish I could have told my younger self, “It’s going to be okay.” As hard as it is to come to this realization so many years later, I know I’ll never be able to go back; but, I can tell the people around me. Mental health is so deeply rooted whether you are aware of it or not, but my goal with this piece is to open up the conversation and show that it’s okay to feel the way you do, but there are ways to cope with these feelings.
In my own experience, I became the most aware of my mental health towards the end of my career. I know looking back, these feelings were always there, I just didn’t know what they were. There is so much pressure to perform the best, to be in the best shape, to fulfill the expectations of others; but, until you take a step back, you have no clue how much this mindset really impacts you.
I had the opportunity to talk with two athletes at my club gym that I have been able to watch grow up over the past five years and hear their experiences before even getting into the NCAA. The first question I asked both of them was when you hear “mental health” what comes to mind? Both answered, “mental health disorders like anxiety or depression.” A couple of years ago I would have said the same, but this is the perfect place for the narrative to change. When we hear about mental health, we shouldn’t immediately jump to the something is wrong with me conclusion, but rather ask, “What are the tools I have to take care of my mind?” As athletes, we focus every day on how to better our bodies and keep this part of us strong, but we need to pay an equal amount of attention to our minds and keep them as healthy as we can for all the demands of high-level sports.
Everyone has bad days, and as hard as it is to accept that fact, it’s unfortunately unrealistic to be at 100% every day for months at a time. One of my former coaches used to tell our team to give 100% of whatever we could that day, and that’s the way progress is made. This ideology changed so much for me in being able to give myself grace in ways I was not taught to before.
When you are a young athlete, you are expected to be able to take double the amount of turns and not run out of energy, and for a while this is true. As your body ages and the skills you are doing get more intense, some days this 50% is all you can give, no matter how much you want to be able to do more. Whether we realize it or not we seek approval, especially of our coaches in this environment, and on one of these days, this might be perceived as “not caring” or “being lazy,” which we know is not the case. The expectations of the people you want this approval from play into mental health so much, and they make you want to push past your limits, even if doing so may be detrimental to your mind and body. When I was told I wasn’t trying hard enough or I didn’t care about what I was doing, I started to believe it. These thoughts of “I’m not good enough” and “I’ll never be as good as they want me to be” did the most damage.
No one knows your mind or your body like you do, and understanding this early on is crucial. You do need to be pushed to know what you are truly capable of, but there are ways to go about this in a positive light. The athletes I spoke to said one of the most important things they have learned over the past year is to listen to their bodies and not push through pain to get this approval. This not only pertains to fulfilling expectations your coaches might have but also what you have of yourself.
As I look back, I expected so much of myself, regardless of whatever circumstances surrounded me. While I do think gymnasts as a whole have a strong, determined work ethic, there isn’t a lot, if any, leeway for mistakes to be made in our own eyes. During my senior year of college after having one of the best seasons of my career as a junior, I developed an eating disorder that made doing just about everything difficult. I expected my body to do things that I was able to do just a couple of months ago, even though I’d lost all my muscle, took an hour to get warm in the gym, and was in such a sad place mentally that it made it hard for me to just show up every day. Over the past two years, while I have been able to continue to heal from this experience and become aware of the causes of why my mind was going through what it did, I wish the pressure I put on myself wasn’t so substantial and that I allowed myself to heal in that moment.
Although it is important to hold yourself accountable to what you know you can do and strive for what you want to accomplish, knowing that being perfect every day is unfortunately not going to happen for any athlete. To enjoy these moments is equally important, and to understand how to not let the pressure completely consume you.
From a very young age, these feelings of pressure prevail. I remember always looking after I would get off the beam to my coach to see if she was happy or angry at how I competed or took a turn at the gym. I completely let the emotions of someone else dictate how the rest of my day went based on these reactions. This is probably one of the most common feelings as an athlete, especially as a gymnast where it is an “all eyes on you” type of sport. One of the questions I asked the younger athletes was, “How do you feel when you get told you do well?” One of them answered how I would have responded if someone asked me a few years ago: relieved. Hearing this made sense to me, but it also made me sad, asking, “Where does this joy go at such a young age?” How can we make sure we love gymnastics as much as we did when we first started, and not feel such weight that carries over into everything else we do?
I was someone who would let these feelings of anxiety, stress, or sadness build until it was too much to take, and I think this is common for many gymnasts. We don’t typically want to tell anyone we are in pain out of fear of being yelled at or being told we can’t train. We don’t want to admit we are fearful of a skill, or we are nervous to compete, even though both these feelings are valid.
Working with the older athletes at my gym sometimes, but primarily with the younger ones, one of the things I make sure they understand is to tell me what they are thinking. Even though the younger ones sometimes share random stories about their day, at least they are learning how to communicate with me and share their thoughts. Mental health and when you should begin paying attention to it doesn’t have a start and end date; it should just be all the time. We learn to hold onto so much, to internalize the emotions of others and dismiss our own, but this cycle in athletics has to change. While there is so much good being done in the mental health space, there is too much that goes overlooked, when all it might take for someone to communicate rather than bottling up emotions they don’t know how to identify from a young age is simply checking in.
The last question I asked both athletes was, “If you could go back even just a year and tell yourself something, what would you say?” Both said, “To stay focused on your own path and not put so much pressure on myself.” I think all of us would probably give somewhat of the same answer.
I probably have about 100 more things I could say on this topic but this might turn into a novel. Although I do wish I could tell myself two years ago I would be the happiest and the healthiest I’ve ever been after going through what I did. I cried every day after practice and was worried about too many uncontrollables, but I wouldn’t know what I do now. I don’t think I would have the platform I do to hopefully help other people know how important their feelings are; and how important they are. My biggest hope is that this opens up a conversation for anyone who reads this to know how loved they are and to know it’s the strong people who ask for help, not the weak ones.
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Article by Julianna Roland
