Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Day 4 – What Are Elite Athletes Teaching Us About Mental Health? | The Game Inside The Games

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

Are elite athletes a good population to teach us about mental health?Despite what coverage in the media might suggest… YES! Elite athletes have so much to teach us about how to work from the inside out.On Day 4 of The Game Inside The Games, five-time medalist Nastia Liukin and high-performance psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais explore the topic of mental health in the context of one of the biggest sporting events on the planet.They discuss the importance of mental skills training, the evolving conversation around mental health in sports, and how athletes like Simone Biles have influenced this dialogue.The topic of mental health exists on a large spectrum – and right now, the conversation is focused on dysfunction, not health. It’s time to flip the script._________________This episode is brought to you by Capgemini and Microsoft. Capgemini is building a human-centric AI-driven workplace with Copilot for Microsoft 365._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Day four from Paris. What can we learn about mental health from Olympians? Welcome back, or welcome to The Game Inside the Games on Finding Mastery. I'm Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training, a high-performance psychologist. And I'm Nastia Lukin, Olympic gold medalist. And we are here in Paris, and in this special series,

we unlock the psychology of pivotal, often unseen moments that can make or break an athlete's dream. What's it like to focus a lifetime of experience into one performance, a single moment? What goes on inside the minds of the brightest stars while the whole world is watching? Welcome back to Paris, and let's dive into The Game Inside the Games. Welcome back to The Game Inside the Games, presented by Microsoft Co-Pilot. I am performance psychologist, Dr. Michael Gervais.

And I'm Olympic medalist Nastia Lukin. And together we're bringing you an inside look at the athletes like never before. Are Olympians a good population to teach us about mental health? Flat out, yes. Despite what all the media coverage suggests, we can learn a lot from them about how they approach mental health. Okay. So that might disrupt the current narrative, but let's go. Okay. So I'm in a mood about this. This is how I spend most of my time thinking about supporting and challenging athletes to be their very best. And the way that we talk about mental health is pretty lame. It's good. We're

on the right path. We're getting there. But it's still not good enough. So if you think about a continuum, you've got, I'm in crisis, I'm suffering, struggling, and then thriving. Right now, the way that we talk about mental skills and we talk about mental health in general is like down in that in crisis, struggling framing. And we're not yet talking about the best practices for people to be at their very best on a consistent basis. So I just think that there's good things happening right now, but it's still we're still caught on our heels when we say the word mental health. When I say to you mental health, let say the word mental health. When I say to you mental health, let's talk about mental health. Where do you go with that? You know, I think that's like the perfect question because up until a few years ago, maybe I think it was almost a

scary, daunting word or phrase. If somebody brought it up, like you hear it and it's almost, you're not quite sure if they're okay. Like you don't really even know because there wasn't a lot of education about it at the forefront. I think with a lot of athletes now talking about it more in competitions, in, in, in media, in events, it almost makes it feel normalized and feel like it's okay. Now I think there's so, and you are the perfect person to kind of explain a little bit more of that, but there are so many different tiers and elements to mental health and everybody's mental health

is at different levels with different things. A hundred percent. So, so the, that sensitivity that you're pointing to is, is it's the hangover from the taboo of talking about psychology. Like almost like you don't want to, you don't talk about it, you know? Okay. So that was, let's call that five, six years ago. Absolutely. That was in, and then, you know, we have incredible athletes that are now talking about it. So it is creating air cover. There's something that's happening right now in the village, which is there's the gym where athletes are doing their physical fitness.

Great. And attached to it in a very large room, there's a meditation, mindfulness, mental health. That's huge. Yeah, it's great. I don't think that's ever been done before. No, this is the first time that this has happened. And it is a response to Simone Biles. Absolutely. Saying, listen, my internal world is not okay. And I'm not in the right framing.

And if we back up, we've, we've had in the NBA, we had DeMar DeRozan and Kevin Love that were very public about anxiety and depression. And to kind of simplify it, think about those as the struggling, suffering, kind of below the line conversations. Like I don't feel great. And that's where mental health, that phrase is tagged. Above the line is when you're talking about the way that you are on your front foot of mass, the way that you are training your mind to be mass, the way that you are training your mind to be your very best. It can happen below the line and above the line, but it's a different narrative when you're talking about what are you doing to be great? Right. The visualizing all of that side of it is important, right? To be your best. But like you said, what Simone did a few years ago, it kind of made everybody believe it's okay to not be okay.

It's okay to actually take care of yourself and your mental health, even when the world is expecting so much else of you. So the, the research is not crystal clear here. Are elite athletes more protected from mental health issues and conditions or disorders, or are they at greater risk? And so let's just think about protective factors and risk factors for a minute. What are those? Protective factors are all the things that help you be buoyant in life and, you know, have that sense of flourishing. So athletes have a team,

they have teammates, they have coaches that are connected to them. They have the resources of nutrition, um, sports psychology. Uh, they've, they've got, um, an environment that is taking care of them, whether it's sleep or recovery, fill in the blanks. All of that is really important for living what I would say, a good life, a great life. There's also risk factors. They're in a high intense, high volatile, pressure packed environment. Identity is often fused with their performance. I am what I do, which is problematic. I felt the same way for many years. And if I don't do well, what happens? Absolutely. I mean, everything from people aren't going to love and support me to this contract might be voided. So it's, you know, it's all one thing. It's very enmeshed. Identity

with performance can be, it doesn't have to be, but it can be. And then you've got the social pressures. You've got the performance pressures, as we talked about. And college athletes have academic pressures. And so those create a highly electric, sometimes volatile, very intense environment. And there is clear research that elite athletes in college, so college athletes struggle a bit more with mental health. And you say, okay, even framing this whole conversation, again, we're talking about mental health as if it's below the line, that it's, there's some sensitivity and, and it's not like, let's celebrate it. And let me pull on this thread a little bit more. When I say, how's your physical health?

What do you say? Or how does that, how do you respond to that? I kind of do like a check around, like to know if anything's sore or my back hurts or if I slept weird on my neck and no, not really. I feel good. I feel good. Yeah. So first you check to see if there's something wrong and then you say, no, I'm good. So we're doing the same thing on the mental health side. How's your mental health? Am I struggling? Do I have depression? Is my anxiety high? No, actually I'm okay. But health does not mean an absence of disease or disorder. So health is like, there's a freedom from dealing with the, with the things that pull us down that are, oh, I don't, what's the right word here? That are, that create a sense of focus to try to solve something that is like looking for relief.

Yeah. So same, okay, so let's do it one other level. When I say, how's your dental health? You do a little check and you're like, yeah, I hope no cavities. Like, yeah. And then at the same time, like when you think about physical and mental in a general, or let's do dental, let's stay with dental. Is that imagine a world where nobody brushed their teeth.

Imagine a world where nobody flossed. Our teeth would be falling out of our head. We'd be really struggling. Imagine a world where nobody did physical fitness, where nobody did any sort of kind of attunement to building their body. Or even taking it to another step, school, right? You go to school as a child and you learn how to read and you learn how to write and you're putting that attention into the details that you have to learn how to then move on and go to the next level. You're putting the same way you brush your teeth. You're teaching your brain how to read, how to write, how to all of those things.

Okay, so you're pointing right to what I think the heart of the challenge is, is about building skills. So if you want to get better at something, there's skills to build. And what elite athletes are teaching us is that they are very clear about their purpose in life. They've made a fundamental decision. I want to go there. This is how I want to live my life. You did that maybe before you even know what you're doing, but because you got there so young. But the idea that purpose is clear is a very important takeaway. The second very important takeaway is that for athletes to be great, they have to become aware. They need to know how their body is working, how their emotions are working, how their thoughts are impacting their emotions, how their emotions are impacting how their body moves. So that awareness is a skill

that can be built. And there's a third leg to the stool. So we've got purpose, awareness building, and then mental skill building to know how to use your mind, to know how to use your inner dialogue to help create a sense of confidence or calm. I can keep going with this. So there's three legs to the stool, purpose, awareness, and a whole host of mental skills. Not one of those alone does the trick. Purpose without awareness, without skills, you're going to reach some sort of adversity or challenge where you won't have the requisite skills to adjust and adapt awareness alone is not enough either i can be aware that i'm struggling inside but not have the skills to navigate so we need all three basically it's not to bring it back to sport or gymnastics or anything but

i'm going to for a second because in the all around competition, there's four events. You can't just be great at one or two or three. You have to be great at all four if you want to win the all around gold medal. Right. That's exactly. So that's basically what we're talking about. But we need to dive deeper into that. And as you said, even being aware of that, even being aware that you have to be good on all four, but then you have to put in the work. And that's what we're

not talking about yet in, in the zeitgeist. I can imagine at one point in time, when we say the word mental health, people will attach that phrase with, oh, there's a sense of thriving, but it's not about the outcome. Mental health is about working a process day in and day out, hour in, minute in, minute out. It's working a process where you're highly aware of your inner state. You're making micro choices to be just a little bit better, to be okay with how you're working in a present moment, how you're being in a present moment. Mental health is not an outcome. It's a set of skills that is deeply ingrained in a process to understand how to be yourself in any environment, your best self.

And it's a constant effort. You know, I think different from you're training for a competition and there's that end goal, you know, there's, you're always working on your mental health. It's not something that you just like achieve one day, you wake up one day and you feel great and you stop thinking about it. You stop working on it. When you were competing, what were the years that you were competing? I would say 2002, I made the national team for the first time through 2012. So about 10 years so before 2012 there was not a lot of conversation did you have a sports psychologist or a mental health provider as part of your team no um my dad my parents both of them you know my dad was my coach he they were also world olympic champion gymnast but i wouldn't say that they were like professional like they were, but they didn't study that for 25 years. Like they had, they were loving kind.

Absolutely. And they knew very like great techniques to, you know, help, help me achieve what it is that I wanted to, but professional help. No. So imagine, imagine what it would be like now if you had, I told you that the first conversation that we had, I was like, where were you my whole career? And yes, it ended up working out okay for me in terms of results. It worked out pretty good. Right. But I can imagine what it, how much greater it could have been or how much less.

I don't even know what the word is. If I had you on my team during the time of training, if I didn't have to constantly search my brain that wasn't educated like you are in the, in that category, how much easier maybe my trainings would have been if I was just able to focus on the physical part when the physical part was happening. And then when the mental training was happening with you or whatever, like to be able to divide those and then bring them back together. That's what I think about. I love this because that's what elite athletes, when we watch them on the podium and there's tears and the national anthem is happening and it's big smiles, whatever it might be. I think it's a fundamental mistake to watch them and say, man, look at that, but they're kind

of different than me. And just to celebrate the physicalness of what they do, because what they're teaching us is a fundamental commitment to be your very best day in and day out to reach the edge, physical training, technical training, and mental mental training and then recover intelligently that is the recipe for whatever it is that you want to be in life what are the physical what are the physical skills to build on so your carriage is strong what are the technical skills so you can be great with your craft whatever that might be versus gymnastics and what are the mental skills to be able to be in the present moment and eloquently adjust to whatever the demands are when we see them on the podium i think that's what we should celebrate fundamental commitment great awareness and they're incredibly committed to building the skills

required to be their very best yeah i absolutely agree and i think that's in the last few years especially i think people are becoming more aware of celebrating that whereas in the last few years, especially, I think people are becoming more aware of celebrating that. Whereas in the past, and I even remember after, you know, I won, it was very, well, that's not relatable. You know, we're, we're never going to be able to go, um, compete on the level that you did. And like, you're so strong physically, mentally. And it's like, wait, but I also struggled too. Two ways. We didn't see you do your first tumble, right? We see you do, you know. The fairytale moment.

Yeah. All the fundamentals. We didn't see that 20 years earlier. And so that gets missed, all of the, and all the mistakes. And we also don't see when it comes to the mental part, we don't see the process that you worked to be able to do the physical thing that's amazing left my own devices i was down a path where i was really hard on myself i was very critical i knew what i wanted

to do and then when i couldn't get it done i was and i had an unhealthy amount of anxiety that was sitting right underneath of it. And my identity was all meshed up with like, I'm not okay if, if other people are going to be judging me. And so, I mean, same because of the sport, especially being judged 24 seven. And so then you step outside of that world and you know, all of a sudden I would be not even in a gymnastics setting and feel like I was being judged. Oh, yeah. You were translating. Everything. So this is called the mental model.

The way that you see your world is usually crosses boundaries. So whether you're in gymnastics, it's like the glasses you put on. A hundred percent. And I wasn't able to take them off. to normally don't take those glasses off when you go into another environment, they actually, um, there's a transference there, which is actually quite scary. Um, and it can be awesome. It can be if you, if you train. So what we don't see is you, let's just say you for a minute. Did you have death by a thousand cuts did you you could do the double triple whatever you could do um but did you love yourself did you feel great about yourself did you and i think you know what buoyant in life i don't think i thought that even mattered

in that moment because i was so driven to achieve one dream and one goal that I didn't even think about that. This is, so this is where, when I say elite athletes have a lot to teach us, they also have a lot to teach us about the pain of not attending to the inner life. Let's call that, for the most part, let's be overly simple and 80-20 rule. 80% were not really deeply tuned prior to maybe 2012. And maybe 20% were like, no, like I'm using this and I'm going to, I've got a sports and I'm reading books about it. And I've got mentors that really helped me take care of myself.

And then now it is shifting. It's just not fast enough. This is not where we need to stop. It's not good enough to just have a mindfulness place inside the gym. Great. A hotline is not enough. A hotline is like, if you're in crisis, that's what a hotline, if you're really struggling, but it's, it's lumped in to only part, a very small part of the continuum of what the living the great life is about.

There's thriving and there's, there's struggling in there too, but not suffering in crisis only. Yeah. And I think it, it goes to show you, you go to gymnastics training and then from there you go to lunch and you eat, you're fueling your body. And then you go to the physical therapy room and you're, you know, working on anything that you need there. And then it's missing that, that next stop. That's right. And so, okay. So let's talk about like the tactics of how this fits. Ideally, ideally your coach, the technical coach would have some sort of accreditation or training in basic mental skills. They're not a psychologist, but basic mental skills. They know, they would know how to teach clear goal setting, breathing, self-talk, how to let go of mistakes, pre-performance routines, mental imagery, and they would fold

it in to the work environment. That's a tall order. I think we'll get there one day, but it's a tall order. The second is that your ATC or physical therapist would also be able to talk about mental skills, but not dive into the realm of psychological processes. Leave that to the highly trained expert that has taken 20 years of education, 13 to 20 years of education, and are recognized by a federal or state body. And it would be woven in and it would be a separate stop. And it's not taboo. It's not weird.

It is your daily commitment. And OK, now I'm in a mood. Like I said, I think that coaches mean so well. They dedicate their life to helping other people. It's a beautiful commitment. There is a little bit of themselves in it. And there's an anxiety for many coaches. Hey, Nastia, we need to do that again. I need to see it again. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again. A hundred percent agree.

The anxiety in coaches, I think can hurt athletes through overtraining. There's a control thing. I love coaches. I've learned more from coaches than I think can hurt athletes through overtraining. There's a control thing. I love coaches. I've learned more from coaches than I think I have in, um, in many cases, the grounded research because they're, they're actually applying some really incredible. And how do you get somebody that's not prepared for something to prepare for something? It's incredible. Learn so much. Absolutely. So my, I think the main point I want to make on this is that their anxiety asks for more for the athlete. Cool. Okay, good. Without maybe honoring the recovery and the inner dialogue that's taking place. And then,

so now we find ourselves with small little knickknack injuries, overtraining, under-recovered. And I think that if it's integrated in a way where mental skills, technical skills, and physical skills, and recovery and nutrition practices are like, look, this is part of the program. And we're listening to each other. And I've been able to be part of elite sporting environments that have that. And it's amazing. And that's where I was lucky. I didn't have you on my team during that time of my training, but with my coach being my dad, he saw it. I'm not saying anything was everybody or anybody's perfect, but he knew me more as not just an athlete, but as a human than anybody could ever get to know me. So he was the one that we got

home from training. He was the one making sure that I had enough on my plate and that I wouldn't leave the dinner table until I finished my plate. Like maybe nobody else could because he gave your life to you. Since day one. And mom, of course. Yeah, since day one. And so I think that's when I look back on it. I can't even imagine.

I wouldn't have been half the athlete that I was if it weren't for him because he knew me more than anybody could ever get to mentally, physically, emotionally. Yes. And I knew that if he told me to do one more, another beam routine, sure. My teenager self was, you know, maybe rolling my eyes inside because I didn't want to do another one. But I knew that if he was telling me that, that meant that I needed that. Yeah, exactly. I love, I love that's a success story. Absolutely. And I know that's rare. You know, it doesn't happen all the time that somebody, a coach could really tell you to do another one because they really know that you need that other one, not just because of the anxiety or the frustration or whatever it might be in that

moment. I think we're on the right path. I just don't want to settle for what's happening now. It's not good enough. Elite athletes have so much to teach us about how to work from the inside out, how to organize our lives to be our very best. And a big part of that is mental skills training. And this is something you can train your mind just like you train your body, just like you train technical skills with sets and reps and knowing how to do that and putting them into play, whether it's breathing or meditation or mindfulness work, fill in the blanks. They are necessary for us to be our very best. There's more to come. So let's hope for more. Yes. Let's hold a standard for more. Let's help provide solutions for more.

And let's love up all of the athletes that are vulnerably committing to being their very best. The courage to really let go. I have a tremendous regard for what you've done and what all of the athletes that are really applying their very best. So with that, thank you again. This was awesome and a very much needed conversation. Yeah, it's awesome. Thank you. All right, now it's time for AI Insights brought to you today by Capgemini and Microsoft. Capgemini is unleashing a new era of work with Copilot from Microsoft 365.

Let's test our premise. Hey, Copilot, can you tell us what words are coming up most often in media and conversations around mental health? Based on recent media and conversations around mental health, here are some of the most frequently mentioned words. Stigma, support, awareness, anxiety, depression, burnout. Yeah, I mean, that's it. We're, we're talking about dysfunction, not health. It is time. It's time for us to flip the script here. Absolutely. Great. Thanks, Mike. And it's great to be here in Paris and we'll see you guys tomorrow on the game inside the games.