Day 4 – What Are Elite Athletes Teaching Us About Mental Health? | The Game Inside The Games

Nastia Liukin (0:00)

Day 4 from Paris. What can we learn about mental health from Olympians?

Michael Gervais (0:05)

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.

Nastia Liukin (0:14)

And I'm Nastia Liukin, Olympic gold medalist, and we are here in Paris for the Olympic Games. 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?

Michael Gervais (0:32)

What goes on inside the minds of the brightest Olympic 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.

Nastia Liukin (0:48)

And I'm Olympic gold medalist, Nastia Liukin, 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?

Michael Gervais (0:58)

Flat out, yes. Despite what all the media coverage suggests, we can learn a lot from them about how they approach mental health.

Nastia Liukin (1:08)

Okay, so that might disrupt the current narrative, but let's go.

Michael Gervais (1:11)

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.

Nastia Liukin (1:29)

We're getting there.

Michael Gervais (1:29)

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's talk about mental health. Where do you go with that?

Nastia Liukin (2:11)

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 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.

Michael Gervais (3:03)

100%. So that sensitivity that you're pointing to is the hangover from the taboo of talking about psychology.

Nastia Liukin (3:13)

It's almost like you don't want to talk about it. You know?

Michael Gervais (3:18)

Okay, so that was, let's call that five, six years ago.

Nastia Liukin (3:20)

Absolutely.

Michael Gervais (3:22)

And then 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.

Nastia Liukin (3:42)

That's huge.

Michael Gervais (3:43)

Yeah, it's great.

Nastia Liukin (3:45)

I don't think that's ever been done before.

Michael Gervais (3:47)

No, this is the first time that this has happened. And it is a response to Simone Biles saying, listen, my internal world is not okay, and I'm not in the right framing. And if we back up, we've had in the NBA, we had Damar 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 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.