Shift 1: Take Responsibility
by Charles Barnard
The first shift in thinking by its very definition is an action step. To take responsibility means you must actually do something. It has been said by some that John F. Kennedy became a true leader when he publicly took responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The action he took was going before the American people and saying it was his fault. He owned it. Taking responsibility is not just about owning mistakes.
Regarding mastering your mindset, taking responsibility means you own where you are in your life and you take steps to identify what is great and what you would like to be better. Now, I come from the belief that nothing in life is ever perfect, so I am not talking about identifying things that are “perfect”. Great does not imply perfection. Great simply means some particular aspect of your life is something you might describe as great. The next action is you take steps to make what could be better, better, and what is great to remain great. It is quite amazing how many people just accept what is not great as that is just the way it is.
Let me use high school and college athletes as a model. There are hundreds of thousands of high school athletes who want to play college sports. The vast majority will not. Parents of these high school athletes, and often freshmen and sophomores in college, fork over thousands of dollars each year to help their child get recognized, get better, and check all the boxes on the intense college recruitment trail or try to climb the depth chart on their college team or increase national recognition in some cases. This happens for every division, but is especially intense at the D1 level. Most of these high school athletes are self-motivated. They have daily routines established. They are taking action to reach their goal of playing in college or improve while in college. Yet, they haven’t taken responsibility for perhaps the most important aspect of this pursuit. They haven’t focused on their mindset.
There are startling statistics regarding teenage mental health and the mental health of college athletes. Let me provide some relatively recent numbers. First, from “The Johns Hopkins News-Letter” there was this,
“According to the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), around one in five adults experience a mental health condition at some point during their life. Among student athletes, however, approximately 30% of women and 25% of men report having anxiety. Only 10% of all student athletes with known mental health conditions seek help from a mental health professional. Furthermore, about 25% of elite athletes experience disordered eating, burnout, depression or anxiety.
“Last spring, at least five college athletes across America took their own lives: Katie Meyer, Robert Martin, Jayden Hill, Sarah Shulze and Lauren Bernett. Their deaths have triggered widespread concern that colleges are not doing enough for their student-athletes.”[1]
Here are some recent 2022 statistics:
- 15.08% of youth (age 12-17) report suffering from at least one major depressive episode (MDE) in the past year. Childhood depression is more likely to persist into adulthood if gone untreated.
- The number of youth experiencing MDE increased by 306,000 from last year’s dataset.
- The state prevalence of youth with at least one major depressive episode (MDE) ranges from 11.36% in the District of Columbia to 18.62% in Oregon.
- 60.3% of youth with major depression do not receive any mental health treatment.
- Youth experiencing MDE continue to go untreated. Even among the states with greatest access for youth, 1 in 3 youth are still not receiving the mental health services they need.
- The state prevalence of untreated youth with depression ranges from 30.0% in Maine to 73.1% in Texas.[2]
Here is more data:
- The Pew Research Center reports concerns about mental health outweigh the concerns about teen pregnancy and bullying that all students deal with on a daily basis. This study led to the discovery that nearly half of Americans ages 13 to 17 are battling some form of mental illness, and the research found that 12 percent of these students experience bouts of depression.[3]
- A recent study found that 1 in 3 college students experiences significant depression and anxiety.[4]
- About 30 percent of the 195,000 respondents to a recent American College Health Association (ACHA) survey reported having felt depressed in the last 12 months, and 50 percent reported having felt overwhelming anxiety during the same period.[5]
- Statistics show that 76% of students feel high levels of stress about the college application process.[6]
It is important to understand that stress is inevitable. You cannot eliminate it from the life of teens, nor should you try. It is important to take responsibility for how you manage it. That means taking action to manage it. As indicated in these statistics there are many highly driven students and athletes who do not know how to manage their mental health. Many seem to. In reality, they don’t. Part of taking responsibility for mental health is taking action to identify symptoms of high stress.
According to the American Institute of Stress, the symptoms of stress include mind racing, heart racing, inability to sleep, fatigue, anger, mood swings, depression among many others. Symptoms can be physical and psychological. Physical symptoms could be something as innocuous as a skin rash or something more debilitating like migraines or even back pain. Sometimes the metaphors we use describe the physical ailment that is created by the stress indicated in the metaphor. For example, doing all the college applications is such pain in the neck. That stress my literally lead to soreness in the neck and trapezoid region. Maybe, a person chronic lower back pain says things regularly like they just don’t get any support. Again, the stress may lead to the physical ailment.
The taking responsibility action steps include to begin to identify what triggers negative emotions in your life, in particular the primary negative emotions of fear, anger, sadness, hurt, guilt and the secondary negative emotions of frustration, worry, emptiness, inadequacy, helplessness, hopelessness, loneliness, overwhelm, resentment, and envy.
Next, if you think about past events can you still feel these emotions when you associate to a memory? It is not just knowing you felt that emotion, but you can still actually feel it in your body.
A third step is to identify your daily routines and ask yourself if the purpose of any of those is to alleviate stress and if so how effective do they seem to be. These steps will lead you toward shift #2.
[1] Van Atta, Grace. “A Quiet Crisis in College Sports.” The Johns Hopkins
News-Letter, 8 Sept. 2022, http://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2022/09/
a-quiet-crisis-in-college-sports#:~:text=Among%20student%20athletes%2C%20however%
2C%20approximately,%2C%20burnout%2C%20depression%20or%20anxiety.
[2] https://www.mhanational.org/issues/2022/mental-health-america-youth-data#:~:text=15.08%25%20of%20youth%20(age%2012,%25)%20from%20last%20year’s%20dataset.
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/02/20/most-u-s-teens-see-anxiety-and-depression-as-a-major-problem-among-their-peers/
[4] https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/college-students-and-depression
[5] https://www.ncaa.org/sports/2014/10/8/mind-body-and-sport-depression-and-anxiety-prevalence-in-student-athletes.aspx
[6] https://blog.prepscholar.com/why-are-college-applications-so-stressful#:~:text=A%20totally%20normal%20(but%20totally,%2C%20you%20aren’t%20alone!\