The link between one’s body and mind is a crucial part of everyday life.
For Olympic-level athletes, athletes who require absolute synchronicity between body and mind, a breakdown in that link caused by stress, anxiety, changes in diet or sleep schedule can alter an athlete’s mental health and potentially cost them the millisecond, small degree of rotation or inch they need to perform at their peak.
Instead of suffering in silence, athletes today are speaking out about their mental health struggles, shining light on the important bond between mental health and athletic performance.
After withdrawing from Thursday’s individual all-around competition, four-time Olympic gold medal gymnast Simone Biles spoke about her battle with the “twisties,” the inability to gain control of your body while spinning in the air.
“(I) literally can not tell up from down,” Biles said on a story posted to her Instagram account Thursday. “It’s the craziest feeling ever, not having control over your own body.
“I didn’t have a bad performance and quit. I’ve had plenty of bad performances throughout my career and finished the competition. I simply got so lost my safety was at risk as well as a team medal.”
Dealing with the “twisties” is another form of the “yips” a term used when a sudden loss of motor skills prevents an athlete from performing basic skills. Biles said she’s experienced the twisties before and they usually last two or more weeks. Biles added that all she can do is take it day-by-day, but the twisties are likely a symptom of something that is impacting her mental health, says Notre Dame sport psychology Joey Ramaeker, Ph.D.
“We recognize that the things that are happening psychologically or emotionally are going to affect the body and vice versa,” Ramaeker said. “And so these can be viewed as these extreme pieces but I think just on a general level, I love what Simone said about this idea of the mind and body being disconnected.
“I think that’s such a powerful way of talking about the fact that it’s so important from a performance standpoint and a wellbeing standpoint, to have the mind and body in sync and connected and kind of in unison, and that’s when we see people be their best.”
Playing in her first tournament since withdrawing from the French Open due to ongoing bouts of depression, four-time major champion Noami Osaka struggled in her third-round loss to Marketa Vondrousova at the Olympics.
“I definitely feel like there was a lot of pressure for this,” Osaka said after the match. “I think it’s maybe because I haven’t played in the Olympics before and for the first year (it) was a bit much.
“… I feel like my attitude wasn’t that great because I don’t really know how to cope with that pressure so that’s the best that I could have done in this situation.”
Ramaeker said it’s important to remember that athletes are still just people, people who happen to perform at really high levels. People who deal with all the same stressors as everyone else. How athletes handle these stressors varies from person to person.
IU sports psychologist Troy Moles, Ph.D., CMPC, HSPP, said performance-based anxiety is common among athletes. Some practice relaxation techniques such as deep breathing or positive reinforcement and imagery to work through the anxiety.
Indianapolis native and Pike graduate, Olympic sprinter Lynna Irby dealt with such severe performance anxiety she often broke into tears before a race. Irby said she began seeing a sports psychologist during her freshman year at Georgia. She left Georgia to turn pro during her sophomore season in 2019. She resumed seeing a psychologist in 2020 as pressure in her personal and athletic life started mounting
In a social media post May 11, Irby said therapy has taken “pounds of bricks off my chest and shoulders.”
Irby was at the center of a potential disqualification after receiving a handoff outside of the exchange zone during the mixed-gender 1,600-meter relay Friday.
Irby was shown weeping after learning of the disqualification, but the ruling was later overturned after it was determined an official did not show her where to stand during the exchange.
Olympic skier and Fort Wayne native Nick Goepper said he felt “deep drops” as he experienced severe depression after the high of partying and celebrating his bronze medal freeskiing slopestyle win at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 wore off.
Without training and other commitments to occupy him, Goepper said he began drinking heavily the summer after the Olympics. The depression led to thoughts of suicide, but his parents persuaded him to enter a rehab center.
Goepper said the support he felt at the rehab center allowed him to feel better and stop drinking.
“It just familiarized myself with a really supportive community of people who had inflicted the same things upon them,” Goepper said to USA Today in 2018. “I thought that was really uplifting and really cool to be able to talk about that.”
Athletes such as Biles, Irby, Goepper, Osaka and NBA players Kevin Love and DeMar DeRozan have all been vocal about how mental health can affect their ability to perform.
Their willingness to speak out sheds light on what they’re dealing with behind the scenes and may help erase some of the negative stigma surrounding issues of mental health.
“It gives people permission to talk about it, to really reflect on where they’re at sometimes and that’s something that, especially for elite athletes, can be really hard to say,” Ramaeker said. “There is a bit of a cultural lore around kind of powering through struggles and really working through it and sacrifice and all those things get kind of culminated and can sometimes make issues a little bit worse or certainly not be helpful in those situations.
“Just being able to see someone that is very well respected be able to talk about these things, I think it normalizes it and I think it really gives people permission to have some more conversation.”
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