UHCL : Elite Athletes Can't 'Tough It Out' When It Comes To Stress: UHCL Expert Explains

Press release from University of Houston-Clear Lake:

August 20, 2021

Simone Biles isn’t the first Olympic elite athlete to compete through extreme stress.
But by stepping back from her events on the world’s most watched stage, she has forced
a spotlight on the issue of how mental health affects even elite athletes’ performances,
and how their coaches, teammates and fans respond when the “star” athlete doesn’t
feel able to compete. 

In this Q&A, Clinical Director of University of Houston-Clear Lake’s Health and Human Performance
Institute Joe Hazzard discusses how and why elite athletes find themselves overwhelmed by stress, anxiety
or depression. 

Q: How is the stress faced by elite athletes different from other athletes’ stress?A. All athletes in competitive environments deal with stress, but just because they
may outwardly appear to have dealt with it doesn’t mean it’s true. Either they have
inadequate skills to deal with stress from the beginning, or they have developed an
inappropriate way of dealing with their stress. 

That means, they can simply get tired of processing their competitive stress, in the
same way they can get tired of training. There’s a balance between the stress force
placed upon an athlete and how poorly or how well they perform, and that is about
figuring out coping mechanisms. Ultimately, the amount of stress athletes feel from
external forces, like coaches or parents, and the fear of constant evaluation by a
significant person or group, is what elite athletes must process all the time. 

Most times, they deal with this effectively. But sometimes, they’re asked, “What’s
wrong with you today?” Maybe they’re just tired. Or maybe they’re just tired of trying
to cope. 

This is clearly what Simone Biles said. Her statement was, “I truly do feel like I
have the weight of the world on my shoulders at times.” This is not made up. In that
moment, she no longer had a strategy to cope with that weight. 

Q: These athletes have been training most of their lives to compete at the highest
level. Isn’t it their job to “tough it out” when the pressure becomes intense?A: Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympian of all time. He said his frustration
and agitation with the level of scrutiny directed at him was because he was “being
gawked at, like an animal in a zoo.” There is no greater way of expressing the feeling
of being dehumanized than that. 

When an athlete feels this, they’re saying they don’t feel as though they are connecting
with others as normal human beings anymore. Our society says people who can succeed
in this arena are superhuman, but in the end, they’re still human. They can’t meet
all these expectations. As a society, we enjoy our famous actors and athletes as long
as they’re meeting our expectations. There’s a fine line between loving the sports
and hating the athletes.

Q: What exactly are the “twisties?” Is this real, or is this just in the athlete’s
head?A: You’d think this was an inner ear or vestibular problem, but it’s not. Simone Biles
has practiced her routines thousands of times. She went to the Olympics and was about
to perform them, and she lost her ability to remember the physical movements she needed
to do the routines successfully. 

Consider a musician who goes out on stage and suddenly can’t remember the words to
a song they’ve performed a hundred times. In the world of athletics, physical and
mental exhaustion is the same. There was something about performing in these Olympics
that was just too much for Simone, and it was enough to trigger her being unable to
successfully cope with a situation she’d faced hundreds of times. 

Twisties are triggered by stress or anxiety. It’s the principle that the expectation
for the demands far outweigh the ability to cope and meet those expectations, and
as the importance of the event elevates itself, it becomes even more important. 

Q: Do you think Simone Biles’ experience will change the way mental health problems
are handled in elite athletics?A: After all the talking we’ve done, there’s still such a stigma around mental health.
You can see an athlete wearing a cast. We understand broken bones or torn ACLs. If
you’re suffering from depression, no one will see it until it shows up in behavior,
and even then, it might not be acknowledged. Simone Biles’ withdrawal did cause a knee-jerk response from the Olympics. I think
they’re going to decide they need to develop a better program to prevent these kinds
of breakdowns — but that’s not how this works. 

Coaches are accustomed to controlling every element of training their athletes to
get to success. This can’t be controlled by developing a program. All they can do
is prepare and create awareness so people can get help before they have a crisis.
It’s always a crisis by the time it’s addressed, and in Simone’s case, she had hers
on the world’s biggest stage. There should have been no reason for it to happen that
way. Whatever was stressing must have been ongoing—she did not show up in Tokyo and
suddenly have a breakdown. 

Athletes have to be able to initiate a request for help. Mental health needs to be
seen as an issue that is as legitimate as any medical problem they’ve ever had. 

In this recurring feature, University of Houston-Clear Lake faculty answer questions
about current events that impact our community. For more information about UHCL’s
Health and Human Performances Institute, go online.

This press release was produced by University of Houston-Clear Lake. The views expressed here are the author’s own.