Tough Breaks

Sports broadcasters, pundits and writers alike bring up athletes’ ‘mental toughness’ with metronomic regularity. But what does that term actually mean?

Strength comes in many forms and has many sources. But what does it mean to be strong? We have a few ideas. Check back throughout the week for more.

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“Mental toughness” in sports is so overworked a concept that it feels like it’s been around forever. But it was only in the 1980s that performance psychologist Jim Loehr popularized the term. In the relatively short period since, what we talk about when we talk about athletes’ mental strength has been garbled into oblivion and, in many cases, used to wave away legitimate mental health concerns.

“If you turn on ESPN, you’ll hear that term at least five times per day in some way,” says Andreas Stamatis, an associate professor of exercise and nutrition science at SUNY Plattsburgh who studies the concept and works with other researchers toward a more universal understanding of the term. “Now, what do they mean by that? That’s another question.”

Illustration by Oliver Munday

Stamatis uses the following definition, though he recognizes there’s still some disagreement among his colleagues: “It is a resource that could give you the skills to fight any adversity as you’re moving from Point A to Point B.” As opposed to grit, which is a characteristic that enables you to push through small obstacles, like going to the gym every week until you can bench-press 300 pounds, mental toughness is a skill that can be cultivated and is applied to grander goals, like making the Olympics. Think of it this way: Grit is a building block in the bigger picture of mental toughness.

That said, most coaches, fans and media members either don’t know about or don’t agree with the work Stamatis and others have done defining the term. It is often used to signify anything from “coming through in the clutch” to bravely playing through an injury.

Deriding an athlete’s lack of mental strength has become a convenient shortcut for deeming them unworthy of competing on the biggest stages.

“Because we’re a 24-hour news cycle, because the monster of the sports machine is a lot about feeding opinions and feeding this machine, we often make very snap judgments about people we don’t know,” says Jemele Hill, a former ESPN personality who now writes for The Atlantic. “We tend to fall into tropes very easily of labeling people as soft or underperforming. And sometimes those labels stick.”

Stamatis reports that most strength and conditioning coaches he’s worked with agree that mental toughness is important, but not about what it is.

It’s also arbitrary which athletes we, as a society, apply it to: “Football players are tough. That’s what we say,” Stamatis says. “Nobody says that about divers. Why? That’s a good question. What does it mean if I choose to go for diving? Does that make me ‘mentally weak’?”

The problem isn’t just semantics, either. Taking the wrong lessons from mental toughness or using it as a guise to push athletes too far can also actively harm them. After a recent spate of high-profile Division I college athlete suicides, the North Texas soccer goalkeeper and former Vanderbilt football kicker Sarah Fuller tweeted, “Something has to be done to better understand and aid in student athlete’s [sic] mental well-being. What’s being done now is not enough and the continual pressure to be ‘mentally tough’ year after year is exhausting. It hurts to see all we have lost to this expectation.”

In 2020 resident Fox Sports hothead Skip Bayless notoriously shamed Cowboys signal-caller Dak Prescott for not being mentally tough—in the wake of his brother’s suicide. “I don’t have sympathy for him going public with ‘I got depressed,’” Bayless said. “Look, he’s the quarterback of America’s Team.”

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Coaches and fans are also guilty of pushing the “mentally tough” narrative. “It just gets beaten into you,” Fuller says. “If you’re struggling . . . it’s somehow related to maybe you’re not trying hard enough or maybe you’re not good enough, because your teammates are showing up and they’re working hard.”

Stamatis is quick to argue that mental toughness—as a tenet of positive psychology—is inherently a good thing. Studies, which largely measure the quality via surveys to athletes, show it’s positively correlated with having better mental health and more self-compassion. It’s also positively correlated with having more success on the field.

Mental toughness also serves as a good Trojan horse: Stamatis says that in sports, workshops billed as being about mental toughness often go over better than similar
workshops on how to cultivate good mental health, due to the intense stigma still surrounding the latter. Stamatis goes over with athletes how to work on building resources like self-efficacy, optimism, attention regulation and emotion regulation, in addition to how to face adversity.

At its heart, then, at least as properly defined, mental toughness is a helpful concept and a valuable resource—and something that media, fans and athletes should all be talking about.

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