Transcript

DR JOSIE PERRY:

So your identity as an athlete is really important. Around transitions it can really come into play. So we talk about it like a piece of rock that you buy from the beach. If you chopped a person in half, would it say athlete, or runner, or footballer all the way through you. If it would, shows you're really focused, you're determined, you love what you do, you've got a great motivation for it. But it's also very dangerous because if you suddenly can't play, if you're suddenly injured, you get dropped from a team, who are you? What are you? Everything you thought you knew about yourself changes. You can feel really, really lost.

There was a piece of research a couple of years ago that the BBC did, and they looked at professional athletes and how they felt after retirement. And 50% of them had symptoms of depression. And often that comes because they haven't prepared to retire, they haven't got a passion for something else.

So when I work with an athlete one-to-one, we will look at the different self-identities they've got. And if they are too wholeheartedly just a sporting identity, we'll try and bring other elements into that. So I have a lot of athletes that will end up doing quite a bit of baking, or they'll be computer gamers as well, or they love certain Netflix channels. And it's not because we're trying to get them not to focus on their sport, but it's trying to give them other things so that if they can't do that sport for a while, they still feel like themselves.