If you play sport seriously, you have probably felt the pull in two directions. Train hard enough to perform, and your mental health takes the back seat. Protect your mental health, and you worry your results will slide. I hear this from athletes constantly, and I used to think the tension was simply the price of competing.
On a recent episode of me&my health up, sports psychologist Dr Erin Ayala made a compelling case that it is a false choice. Her research suggests athlete mental health and athletic performance are built on largely the same foundations — and when you get those foundations right, you don't have to pick one.
Dr Ayala is a licensed sports psychologist who works with adolescents, collegiate athletes and professionals, and she is a serious endurance athlete herself — nine marathons, an Ironman, and ultra-distance gravel cycling events of 200 miles. So when she talks about the pressure to choose between wellbeing and winning, she is describing something she has lived from both sides of the consulting room.
Her point is that in clinical psychology, tracking a client's wellbeing over time is considered best practice. Sport psychology has a harder job, because it has to account for wellbeing and performance. Rather than assume those pull against each other, she set out to find what actually feeds both.
Dr Ayala's team recruited 43 athletes, coaches and sports medicine professionals spanning collegiate, amateur, professional and Olympic levels, representing around 17 different sports. They asked one open question: what are the thoughts, feelings and behaviours that contribute to optimal performance and mental health in athletes?
Over 300 responses came back. After cleaning the data down to 113 distinct behaviours, participants rated each one twice — once for its importance to mental health, once for its importance to performance — then sorted them into groups. What emerged were seven clusters.
What I love about this approach is how deliberately interdisciplinary it is. It isn't a psychologist's model, or a coach's model. It is a holistic picture built from everyone who surrounds an athlete, which is exactly how I think about health generally.
The seven clusters Dr Ayala described are: stress management (sport–life balance and directing your energy into more than one area of life); embracing challenges (resilience and a growth mindset, where mistakes become learning rather than failure); self-awareness with a thread of self-compassion running through it; team relationships; social support more broadly, being valued as an athlete and as a human; mental skills such as motivation, focus, goal setting, mindfulness and imagery; and commitment to sport.
That last one surprised me. Commitment to sport isn't about forcing workouts. It is about being intentional with a training plan and then actually following it — including the rest, the recovery, the nutrition, the sleep, the mobility work. For endurance athletes especially, that is the hardest part of the plan to honour.
When participants rated the clusters, social support and embracing challenges came out as the two most important for mental health, closely followed by self-awareness and stress management. For performance, the order largely flipped — except for embracing adversity, which stayed at the top. If you want the most return for your effort, that resilience piece appears to be where it sits.
Perfectionism came up repeatedly in our conversation, and Dr Ayala's approach to it is the most practical thing I have heard on the subject. She draws on acceptance and commitment therapy, and she describes the usual strategy — drowning out negative self-talk with forced positivity — as a tug of war you cannot win. You exhaust yourself pulling on the rope, and you don't believe the positive line anyway.
So her instruction is: drop the rope. Acknowledge the critic without arguing with it. She teaches athletes to respond to the voice with a light, almost sarcastic "thanks brain, really helpful today" — the same tone you would use with a sibling offering unsolicited advice. You are not dismissing the thought; you are turning the volume down on it.
A second technique is to layer distance onto the thought itself. "I'm not good enough" becomes "I'm having the thought that I'm not good enough," then "I notice I'm having the thought that I'm not good enough." By the third version, it has become a passing thought you observed rather than a truth about who you are.
What about the athlete whose preparation hasn't gone to plan, standing at the start line full of doubt? Dr Ayala starts with behaviour, not feeling, because the research suggests behaviour comes first. She asks an athlete to describe what a confident version of themselves would look like — eye contact, posture, racing their own race rather than reacting to everyone around them — and then asks them to act that way before they feel it.
She is equally prescriptive about the hours beforehand. Focus only on what you control: sleep, nutrition, hydration, electrolytes, mobility, packing your bag, checking the weather. Then carve out five to ten minutes alone before you compete. Hoodie up, favourite song on, nobody around. Deep breathing here is one of the most effective ways to settle an overactive sympathetic nervous system so you aren't throwing a frantic body into the event.
And if you use that time for visualisation, make it vivid. Engage all five senses — the smell of chlorine, the temperature of the water, the feel of the tile on a flip turn. That richness is what makes imagery work.
Dr Ayala explained motivation through self-determination theory, which proposes three ingredients. Autonomy: having genuine choice in your events, training structure and routine. Relatedness: feeling you belong to the team and the community. Competence: believing you can do it and deserve to be there, which specific, frequent feedback from coaches builds far better than criticism does.
When those three are present, motivation follows. When they are absent, you get the opposite — the robotic, going-through-the-motions feeling that signals burnout. Her team's early findings point to a significant negative relationship between scores on these seven clusters and burnout: the stronger the foundations, the lower the burnout.
Her final caution is the one I would underline hardest. Seven clusters and 113 behaviours is overwhelming, and nobody is meant to maximise all of them. Think of them as seven levers that will sit at different heights depending on your season, your relationships and your form. The work is noticing where they sit, not pushing them all to the top.
What strikes me about this research is how closely it mirrors what I see at me&my wellness with people who have never pinned on a race number. Sleep, nutrition, movement, boundaries, relationships, self-awareness — the foundations of performing well in sport are the foundations of performing well as a parent, a professional, a human being. We just notice them more clearly when there is a finish line involved. My approach has always been holistic for exactly this reason: you cannot optimise one lever while ignoring the other six.
Want to go deeper on this? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Anthony at meandmywellness.com.au