How I’m Re-Learning to Love My Sport After Burnout
An imperfect battle against perfectionism in search of balance
When I watch professional athletes, I can’t help but wonder what balance of talent, grueling hard work, environment, and love for the sport propelled the athlete to their place on my TV screen.
The exact balance of those facets may be complex, but I’d bet that on some level, people who excel at a sport are driven by a love for some part of the sport — sunrises, sprawling stadiums, the flow state of mastery, the camaraderie of a team with a singular, united goal.
For some, the love of the sport propels them through the hard times. The sport is an escape. A mix of mastery, play, and strategy — an almost otherworldly experience. I can’t say in good conscience that I’ve experienced mastery, but I certainly have experienced moments when playing tennis or heading out on a steady state row in a single scull felt effortless, where I could sink into a semi-meditative state along the rhythmic lub-dub of the tennis court or the metronomic swish-tap of my oars.
But for many, something quietly happens when the driving force moves outside of the individual. In a world that values scholarships, achievements on paper, the eye of college recruitment scouts, the approval of coaches, spots on starting lineups — playing a sport just for one’s own enjoyment and energization seems not only insufficient, but even misdirected.
You should go for what really matters. Make your hard work worth it. If you love the sport, you should make the most of it.
Here, the “most” suggests that you should employ that love for some external gain. And those “shoulds” come from what society values — status, fame, winning. There’s a rabbit hole to unpack here, but if we don’t examine those external factors carefully, we risk conflating them with our own personal drivers.
And so starts the chase. Championships won, recognition acquired, an athlete finds herself in an unfamiliar and unlikely place — in the face of burnout. Burnout from the sport she loves, from part of her identity. Where did she go wrong? How could loving something too much lead to fulfillment and joy moving farther and farther out of reach?
It’s important to note that this phenomenon isn’t limited to sports. Our world is full of people who pursue a passion, only to find their “why” sneaking away toward something external — the approval of a boss, the attention of a romantic interest, or the lure of money. What’s something that you love that got “ruined” when you lost sight of what truly energized you in favor of some external reward, however necessary that refocus may have been for your financial or emotional well-being at the time?
Thankfully, answering that question seems to be the first thing that needs to happen to put back the spark. Calling attention to something that happened subconsciously neutralizes the insidious reason why you came to that conclusion at all.
It’s up to the athlete to recognize that a change has occurred. It’s tough to unravel years or even decades of conditioning that sports are about achievement. But I believe it’s possible for this new, raw experience to heal into something different. Something sustainable.
What would it mean to remove all expectations of performance, uncouple sport from achievement, and do just what felt right for your body? As someone who has always been goal and achievement oriented, I struggle to even use this framing, much less answer the question. I’m simultaneously worried I’m not doing enough to be “effective” and annoyed that I’m putting in effort if it doesn’t “count” for anything.
If the right mix of people and expectations come together, a new opportunity can appear. A burnt-out athlete, with the skillset and athletic intelligence developed through years of training, reemerges with the goal of just trying to have some fun. It’s a baby giraffe learning to walk, except that the baby giraffe was a collegiate speed-walker in a past life and has exceedingly high expectations for itself. For the athlete, the muscle memory is there, but the headspace is uncharted territory.
If it’s not clear, this stage is where I find myself now. I see that there is an opportunity to solidify this new relationship with rowing or tennis. But trying out these new thoughts is proving difficult. I go an “easy run,” but can’t take my eyes off my time. I set out on a long, steady state row, but wonder constantly if I’m working hard enough. I’m wondering what the perfect people I envision in my head are doing — the ones who have it figured out enough to have a perfect workout where they feel perfect afterward and manage to steadily improve their performance in a beautiful, steady fashion every time. News flash (for myself, not for you): these people don’t exist.
When that voice starts commandeering my mind, there are two words that I try to consciously bubble up to the surface.
It counts.
Getting myself up to start already counts. This workout counts. This accomplishment counts. It all counts.
According to Dr. Andrew Huberman, professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, creating this subjective reward for ourselves stimulates a release of dopamine, the chemical that our brain uses to signal reward. Contrary to what that voice in my head might say, letting ourselves celebrate small wins doesn’t make us complacent. It empowers us. It tells us, this is exactly where you’re supposed to be right now.
Subjective reward isn’t about earning something in return for achieving a huge end result. It’s about giving yourself a chance to call out meaningful steps toward a goal even though the end result isn’t yet certain. Evolutionarily, that hit of dopamine kept spirits high when survival became tough. In the context of achievement and self-worth, drawing attention to small victories — not over-celebrating them, but just registering them — is often enough to combat disappointment and begin to neutralize thoughts of low self-worth.
It appears that all we want to know is that we’re on the right track. And years of conditioning to seek external reward have taught us that that right track often comes at our own expense. But when the goal is relearning to love your passion, the right track looks different than we’re used to. The right track is wherever we are. Whatever feels good. Genuinely good. And we need to reward when we’re doing something for ourselves that feels genuinely good, instead of beating ourselves up for not doing enough. Luckily, we possess the ability to create that reward for ourselves.
Equipped with some wisdom rooted in neurobiology, I wholeheartedly believe that despite the difficulty I’ve had doing so, it’s possible to relearn to love your sport.
It’s vitally important to me that I keep working at this Gordian knot, because I know what it’s like to love the sports I’ve played. It would be such a tragedy to lose those moments because I can’t manage to heal from the mindset that I used to claw my way to externally-defined success. I’m embarking on this unlearning and relearning because to me, this feels like the ultimate way to make all of the work I’ve put in — the hours, the sweat, the sacrifices, the training — actually “worth it”. I want to enjoy my passions, and I want that for you, too. We deserve it.
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