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Mental Toughness in Sport Culture
A look into how student athletes can apply this concept to their mental health
The concept of mental toughness is heavily ingrained in sport culture. Athletes are supposed to find the strength to push past exhaustion, barriers and injury in order to win.
University of Ottawa PhD candidate Krista VanSlingerland says that this idea of mental toughness could be feeding the stigma around mental health in sport.
“They are taught to push through pain and injury. In order to do that, we sort of ignore pain and we don’t differentiate between good pain and bad pain,” she says.
While that mentality is commonly applied to physical injuries, VanSlingerland says athletes can also apply it to emotional and psychological distress.
“We don’t even realize when we’re not well,” she says. “I think that idea can be very harmful.”
Nakisha Slavin, who is the captain of the women’s field hockey team at Western University, admits that she has used negative self-talk in the past as motivation. For example, someone using negative self-talk may tell themselves that they're not good enough during practices or doubt their abilities during a game.
“It’s very debilitating in that it affects my understanding of how mentally tough I have to be,” says Slavin, who is in her fourth year of studying media, information and technoculture at Western.
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Nakisha Slavin playing field hockey. She says has used negative self-talk
to motivate herself to succeed in her sport. (Photo credit: Nakisha Slavin)
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Slavin says the pressure she put on herself to succeed caused her to become very depressed.
“I developed these little idiosyncrasies,” she says. “I had maybe 15 routines that I had to do in a warmup and if one of them was a little off, I would kind of say ‘that’s it, I’m going to play horribly today.'”
In fact, she says her mental health was so debilitating that it made her quit playing competitive sports all together in high school.
“Even when I was stopping every single puck or scoring a hat-trick, it was never enough. It just took over every other aspect of my life. I started to resign myself from social life and school all together and just spend days on end in bed,” she says.
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Nakisha Slavin says she her mental health was so debilitating
that it made her quit playing ringette, hockey and field hockey
in high school. She eventually returned to playing field hockey once she
felt comfortable with her mental health again. (Photo credit: Nakisha Slavin)
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But Slavin says meeting with therapists and opening up to her family and friends allowed her to work through the idea that she had to be mentally tough all the time. She says she began to play field hockey again during the summer before she started at Western.
“I’m very thankful that I was able to get the help that I did,” she says. “That carried me through to university to the point where I felt comfortable enough with myself and with my mental state to play at university.”
Angelica Galluzzo is another student athlete at Western who has struggled with her mental health. Galluzzo, who is the captain of the women’s soccer team, suffered from depression and anxiety for several years, but she says sport helped her find herself despite her mental illnesses.
“I used that as a way to learn more about myself and to find more strong things about myself from my teammates and my coaches,” she said.
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WATCH: Angelica Galluzzo talks about how her four knee surgeries
impacted her thoughts about the concept of mental toughness.
(Video credit: Shannon Coulter and Michael Marti)
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But Galluzzo has come face-to-face with the idea of mental toughness as she battled through injury. In fact, she has had four major knee surgeries over the past few years, which can be hard for an athlete like Galluzzo who says she played soccer since she was three-years-old.
“I think a lot of people tend to ask, ‘how’s your knee doing?,' but they don’t tend to ask how you are doing. That’s a huge thing in terms of returning to sport,” she says. “Sometimes you need that mental support.”
Galluzzo says she learned that recovery means that there will be some bad days.
“It’s just reminding yourself that you don’t need to be at your best every single day,” she says.
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Angelica Galluzzo (in purple) says mental support
is also important when healing from a physical injury.
(Photo credit: Angelica Galluzzo)
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