The Breaking Point
Lessons from Mardy Fish's story of mental breakdown
Recently I watched a documentary on Netflix called Untold: Breaking Point. The documentary was about former No. 1 US tennis player Mardy Fish and was the story of his career and how his choices led him to develop serious mental health problems.
The story reminded me of my own story of burnout and made me reflect on how things can go wrong if you’re pushing too hard and ignoring the warning signs.
In this article I’ll talk about Mardy Fish’s story, how his choices lead him to develop a very strong anxiety disorder and what we can learn from his story.
Esemplatory Grind
After an “average” career in professional tennis, in his late 20s and at the “decay” of his career, Mardy realized that he hadn’t given everything he had to become the best tennis player he could’ve become. He then made a vow to himself to become one of the top 8 players in the world and to participate in the 2011 year-end tournament in London.
He committed to the goal and went to work. He worked out harder, ran more, did more gym work, had multiple training sessions a day. He cut out junk food and started eating super clean in order to lose weight. He went to bed every day at 7:30pm so he would get enough sleep and have an early morning training session. He stopped going out and hanging out with friends and losing time and energy.
Every decision he made was in favor of becoming the best tennis player he could become.
The strategy worked. In a few months Mardy lost 31 pounds, gained a lot of aerobic capacity, was more flexible and more mentally tough than ever. He started to win match after match, tournament after tournament, and good results enabled him to take part in the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals 2011 in London, which was his dream come true.
As the plot in the documentary reached the 2012 season, you could sense something bad was about to happen.
As Mardy continued with a suicidal rhythm of playing in different parts of the world and travelling through different time zones, his body started to suffer and started giving him warning signs that something’s wrong and that he should’ve slowed down.
But Mardy couldn’t slow down and his breaking point happened during the US Open.
The Breaking Point
Before and during the US Open, Mardy was under a lot of stress and pressure: he played in front of a home crowd, he was still the no.1 US tennis player and the American press was expecting results from him after “a disappointing start of the season”.
During the night match that brought him the ticket to play against GOAT (“Greatest Of All Time”) Roger Federer in the quarter finals, Mardy’s mental health broke and he had to cancel the match against Federer which was a huge shock for anyone.
Mardy later discovered that he’d developed very strong anxiety disorder and it took him years of therapy and medication to get well.
Don’t Ignore the Warning Signs
You can see in Mardy’s story that there were some warning signs that his body and mind had been sending him, especially in the beginning of the 2012 season.
Bad form and poor results in the first tournaments. Tiredness and body’s fatigue. Racing thoughts and anxiety. His body and mind had been whispering to him that they’re fatigued and that he should have slowed down and rested.
We’ve all experienced the early warning signs but most of the time we ignore them. Because of that, our body will start to talk to us louder and louder until it starts screaming or something breaks.
If we’re attuned to our body’s signal, we can either honor the whispers, or ignore them. If we ignore the whispers for too long, the body will say “Enough!”, will stop us and take a break and rest. If that happens, we’ll be forced to take a step back and rest.
When the balloon gets too bloated, it’s going to burst somewhere
“If we don’t know how to say “no” ourselves, the body will say it for us.” ~ Gabor Mate
Always On Mode, You’ll sleep when you’re dead, Suck it up p**** . We’ve all seen and heard these grind motos in our current society and sport culture.
But the grind that is so glorified in today’s society often isn’t without consequences: going over your body time and time again can leave huge consequences.
As Emily Fletcher, world-renowned meditation teacher, and founder of Ziva Meditation, a meditation practice that changed the lives of thousands of people, explains in her book Stress Less Accomplish More, our body holds onto the memory of every stressor we ever experience in our life: every inflammatory food we ever ate, every all nighter we’ve ever pulled, every time we mentaly overrode our fatigue and grit our teeth to complete a workout, project, or long fatiguing week at work. It’s all stored in our cellular and genetic memory.
But it’s not just physical stressors that our bodies hold on to: it’s also mental and psychological stuff that we accumulate.
In his book The Body Keeps The Score, Dutch professor of psychiatry Bessel A. Van Der Kolk explains that symptoms of underlying emotional problems manifest in our body. He encourages to see the body as a “kind of score sheet of the emotional experiences that his owner has been through.”
All this accumulated stress from years of grinding, hard work and ignoring our body’s whispers and signals can show and manifest themself as problems in the present: as daily stress we experience, our ability to handle less stress, digestion problems, food intolerances, autoimmune disorders, anxiety, depression and other mental health problems.
It’s also important to keep in mind that as the fatigue will accumulate and fill our stored stress threshold, eventually our body won’t be able to take it any more and something is going to break.
The chain is as strong as the weakest link
The analogy you can think of here is the one about the chain. A famous proverb tells us that
“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link”
When put under too much force and pressure, the chain will break where the link is the weakest.
It’s also true for the body and mind: when we put them under too much stress and fatigue for too long, something is going to break. What will break in the body depends on multiple factors which we don’t quite understand. It can be genetic predispositions, history of illness or injury, areas in your body where you’re the weakest.
Most people will get sick with a cold or flu. Athletes will get injured or burn out physically. Some people will develop mental health problems. Some can develop autoimmune disorders. Some people will burn out or, In some extreme cases, even develop chronic fatigue syndrome, get sick with cancer or get some other life threatening disease.
The body will eventually slow you down, get the rest that it needs to recover and process all the things and stresses that has been accumulating and storing.
In Mardy’s case, the thing that broke was not something in his body but, but his mind and mental health. Mardy’s body was so strong, fit and tough that it was able to bear the immense pressure and stress. In Mardy’s case the weakest link was his mind and his mental health.
The Healing Process
As athletes we have the mindset that when something breaks, we work hard, focus and dedicate all of ourself to fix the problem and come out on the other side better.
But with chronic injuries and chronic diseases it’s not that simple. If hard work, dedication and extreme focus brought us to the disease, we can’t heal by doing the things that brought us there — it’s counterproductive.
If you’ve burned out due to working too hard, being too dedicated and grinding too much, you can’t recover and conquer the burnout by working hard and going all-in on recovery — it just won’t work.
Trust me, I know! Since I first burned out, I became super focused and worked hard to fully recover, but by pushing and going all-in I made things worse.
If you break your leg, you don’t heal it by working hard on making it stronger — it would just make things worse. You give your leg some time and space so it can heal naturally a bit and then slowly start working on making it stronger again.
We have to accept the condition we’re in. We have to honor our body and its needs, work for it not against it. In some cases we even have to make peace with the fact that the condition might stay with us for the rest of our life.
Like I wrote in my article Burnout as a “Chronic Injury” some injuries and conditions start out as acute and overtime become chronic due to complications and poor treatment and recovery.
At the end of documentary Mardy said:
“Look, I will always deal with some sort of mental health. I used to say to my doctors, ‘I can’t wait for this to go away and be behind me.’ He’s like, ‘I hate to tell you, but this is always gonna be part of your life.’ And still, you know, six, seven, eight years past, it’s still a daily battle, but I win every day.”
So to conclude this article: from Mardy Fish’s story we can learn that we can’t keep going against our body and mind forever, that we have to watch out for early warning signs and whispers, honoring them and act accordingly, before something breaks and it’s too late. And if, unfortunately, we have already experienced a breaking point, we should have to accept it, make space and honor our body and its needs to heal successfully.
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Love and take care of yourself, forget about worries and enjoy life! ✌
~ Jani ❤