I was fine, then I wasn’t - why prevention can’t wait for a warning.

The truth is that we live in an incredibly reactive society. 
And that makes sense. 

But it’s about time the narrative shifts a little bit.

That begins, much like anything else, with awareness. 

It's hard to talk about prevention without acknowledging the stigma that still exists around mental health, and the narrative of seeking help means that you are “weak” or there is something “wrong”. 

That’s certainly not it. Hiring a coach in sports (or life), a personal trainer, a physio, or seeing a nutritionist is celebrated. It means you want to get better. And it does take some vulnerability to admit that you do need help and don’t have all the answers on your own. But the negative connotation is saved for mental health. 

For athletes, getting a specialized coach is normalized, working out is normalized, eating healthy is normalized, but working with a mental performance coach might be terrifying. And I completely understand that. It can take work to dig up some suppressed emotions. It’s easier to just put your head down and grind it all out. I know it, I’ve lived it. But I can tell you with total certainty, going through the hard stuff and finally feeling our feelings is incredibly freeing and produces remarkable change and results on the other side. 

So let’s reframe this. Seeking help does not mean anything is wrong with you, and it does not mean you are weak. It means you seek growth, you seek wisdom, you seek expansion and want to do anything to help you become a better person and athlete, on and off the field. To that, I, and the world, applaud you. 

We are all human, and that’s what makes this life messy and chaotic but beautiful and curious at the same time. Our lives have been filled with the insecurities and projections of others speaking into our lives, and that may be the source of any apprehension we may have when working on mental health. Often, when someone has a negative reaction, such as being defensive, anger or calling something ‘stupid’ or feelings of envy or jealousy, are often invitations to dig deeper. Some people accept those invitations, and others don’t. 

I’ll meet those people where they are at and simply say to myself, “that’s for you, not for me.” 

For example, if someone laughs at an idea I have or a goal of mine. I respond, to myself, “that’s for you, not for me.” And that helps me not internalize their doubt, energy, guilt, shame, fear or whatever it is from wherever it's coming from. 

Now, let’s get back to prevention. 

Most people wait until something happens to seek help – “choking” (I hate that term), burnout, plateauing, injury. 

This is fine for now, as I’m just happy working with mental coaches is becoming more popular, but in time, I would love to see the field expand enough that mental health is just as normalized as technique coaches and physical health. 

I would love to see young athletes as they approach the professional leagues adding a mental coach to their team, just as they do other coaches.

Why? 

Because performing at the highest levels comes with added pressures and emotions that can dig up old patterns. But we don’t realize these are patterns that have been sitting in us for years, if not our whole lives. 

I’ll use my story as an example.

I had my first panic attack in 2nd quarter of chiropractic school during a practice exam (Motion Palpation I to be exact), at that point I had been all throughout undergrad dealing with some anxiety and pressure on myself, but nothing that caused a total blackout like this. After that, every single test (27-30 credits per quarter, 4 quarters a year for 3+ years, plus 4 board exams, you do the math) became an emotional and physical chore and completely drained me over time. 

If only I had any awareness or tools in my arsenal back then. 

Looking back now, 10 years removed from this situation, experience, five years of IFS therapy, and another masters degree in sport and performance psychology on top of this, I realized that one of the biggest issues was that my worth was tied to my grade. I was only worthy if I got an A or a B, which led to a lot of defensive studying and my body viewing every time I opened a textbook, attended a class, practiced adjusting, did labs, or looked over my notes as a threat. Which again, you do the math. I was in fight or flight, constantly, for years. 

For me, it was grades; for athletes it could be stats or scores. When your livelihood depends on performance it is hard. 

And this experience is not what everyone goes through, it's just an example of what can come up. 

A belief of “I’m only worthy if I win” or “my worth depends on how I perform” does not stay limited to performance. It becomes an identity belief, meaning every outcome gets processed as data about whether the person is fundamentally okay, not just data about how a game went. A missed putt isn't just a missed putt, it's evidence being fed into "am I good enough." That's why athletes with this pattern tend to either collapse or become inconsistent. 

Keeping with this example, worth-outcome fusion is often installed early, usually through conditional attention or praise: love, approval, or attention that showed up when the person performed well and vanished or turned critical when they didn't. There may have been no room to make mistakes, or no teaching moment on having a growth mindset. The nervous system learns "outcome determines whether I'm safe/loved/enough" long before the conscious mind has a say in it. That's why it's subconscious rather than a belief someone can just decide to stop having.

That’s also why these things take time to see, become aware of, and change. 

My worth being dependent on my outcome did not stop once I graduated. But it followed me in my subsequent practice owning years as well. My identity was based on the amount of patients we saw and how hard I was working. Long story short, my own mental and physical health rapidly declined. I burnt out. My dad suddenly passed and I had the wake-up call that I needed. I sold. I took time to reflect and heal and here I am, happier and more free.

But what would I do with this 24 year old me? 

There’s a number of things, but let’s look at the moments leading up to this first panic attack. 

There were no signs that I was headed down this direction beforehand, or even leading up to it. Think “yips” (another term I don’t like), but heading into the exam. 

This can happen to anyone.

There was no warning. I was fine, then I wasn't. That's the thing about these patterns, they don't always announce themselves before they show up. You can't always catch them in the moment. Especially when they’ve never happened before. But overtime, you can know they're there before something triggers them.

If 24 year old me came to me for help, I’d listen as she described what happened. As she talked about school leading up to this point, both chiropractic school and undergrad. Worth-outcome fusion usually shows up in how someone talks about results, not in the results themselves.

I'd tell her that her worth was never actually tied to the grade, even though her body believed it was. I'd help her trace it back, notice where "A or B or you're not enough" got wired in, long before chiro school. Not so she could avoid the first panic attack. It already happened. But this wasn’t the first and only time it happened, it built up from there and became a regular occurrence. Stress induced headaches and migraines started happening regularly. This early intervention would have made the next ten years not have to run on the same pattern without her knowing it was there.

Eleven years later, I'm not waiting for the next panic attack. to tell me something's off. I know where worth and outcome used to get tangled for me, and when I notice it creeping back in, I get to choose differently. That's what prevention actually looks like. Not fixing yourself once. Knowing yourself enough that the pattern doesn't get to run the show unchecked.

That was just my story. But it could look different for you. Swap my grades for stats, chiropractic school for matches or game day, and it's the same pattern, just different setting.

Here's how I'd pinpoint it in an athlete, which is very similar to what I described before:  I'd watch the in-between, not just what happens after a big win or a bad loss, those reactions are too easy to explain away as normal emotion. It's more in how they talk about a mediocre practice, one that didn't go badly, just didn't go great. If a decent practice or game gets talked about like a failure, if a solid but unspectacular round gets picked apart for an hour after. Sure it could be perfectionism, but that's worth looking for reassurance they’re enough. 

Overcoming this starts with finding where the athlete learned that being good and being enough were the same thing, usually somewhere long before their sport got competitive, a parent who lit up at a report card and went quiet or berated at a bad one, a coach (or parent) whose approval came and went with the scoreboard. Once that's named, the work is teaching the nervous system that a bad outcome is information and data about a swing or a stat line, and nothing else. 

This doesn’t happen overnight. This is slow, it's a process, just like training, and it's felt in the body before it's believed in the mind, same as it was for me.

Worth and identity is just one example of how subconscious beliefs can affect performance, and this might look different for everyone. If you’re curious, follow me on LinkedIn or Instagram, and If you, or know someone, who would benefit from working together, please fill out an inquiry form on the Mental Movement website.

(This became more of a brain-dump and less about prevention, but hopefully one day in the near future, there will be less of a stigma around mental health and performance, so we can find these beliefs and rewrite them before it becomes a crisis.)