Make Wellbeing
Part of Winning

Michael Phelps handed over his phone and went to his room. He had arrived at The Meadows, a residential treatment centre in Arizona, in the autumn of 2014. There would be no Olympic final to prepare for here, no lane assignment or qualifying time. The man who had spent much of his life becoming exceptionally good at one kind of challenge was entering a place where he did not know what to expect.

“It’s probably the most afraid I’ve ever felt in my life,” he later told Sports Illustrated. He was twenty-nine years old.

Two years earlier, Phelps had left the London Olympics with a career total of twenty-two medals, eighteen of them gold. Nobody in Olympic history had won more. If you wanted evidence of what relentless preparation, extraordinary ability and competitive determination could achieve, you could begin with his name and spend a long time listing the results.

Now he needed help. Following his second arrest for drink-driving, he entered treatment and stayed for forty-five days. In later interviews, he described his experiences of depression and the importance of continuing therapy after he left.

There is a temptation to rush through this part of an athlete’s story. We know there is a comeback ahead, and the comeback is easier to tell. The swimmer returns to training. His times improve. He qualifies for another Olympics and gives us the ending we recognise. We can put a medal around the difficult years and feel that something has been resolved.

But stay, for a moment, with the arrival. Before another race could be won, here was a person agreeing to receive care. Whatever happened in a swimming pool afterwards, that decision already mattered.

It is a difficult idea to hold inside a culture that measures almost everything. We understand a time dropping, a ranking rising, a place being secured. We can compare this season with the last and identify exactly where an athlete stands. When somebody begins to understand themselves, repairs a relationship or becomes able to ask for help, the improvement is harder to display. There may be no photograph that captures it and no date on which it can be declared complete.

Yet those changes concern the life in which every performance takes place. A sporting record, however extraordinary, cannot tell us whether that life is going well.

Phelps later described the contrast between the attention given to his body and the attention given to his mental health. Throughout his career, he told Healthline, people had been available to work out how to make him physically stronger. The same support had not been there for him mentally. By 2022, he was speaking about caring for both every day.

The contrast raises a question that reaches well beyond Olympic sport. How much do we know about what an athlete can produce, and how much do we know about how they are doing? A coach may know a swimmer’s splits, a player’s running capacity and the precise circumstances in which their technique breaks down. A parent may know every upcoming competition. The athlete may know all of these things too, while finding it much harder to answer an ordinary question honestly: how are you?

Sometimes the answer is complicated because things appear to be going well. You have been selected. Your times are improving. People are telling you how proud they are. Explaining that you feel overwhelmed can seem like contradicting the evidence. You may even suspect that you have lost the right to struggle, because someone else would gladly exchange places with you.

An achievement can be worth celebrating while the person who achieved it needs support. Holding both truths allows us to respond to the whole situation.

This is the first principle of winning happy: make wellbeing part of what you are trying to achieve. Give it a place in the plan, the conversation and the decisions you make about your sporting life. Let it matter while you are performing well, when it is easiest to assume that everything else must be fine.

For that to mean anything, we need a fuller understanding of wellbeing than simply feeling cheerful. Imagine an athlete leaving a demanding session. Their legs ache, they are frustrated with a technical problem, and they have another early start tomorrow. Asked whether they feel happy at that instant, they might reasonably say no. Asked whether they value the work, feel supported and want to return, they might answer very differently.

Now imagine a second athlete leaving with a personal best. They are pleased with the result, but frightened of what will happen if they cannot repeat it. They have nobody with whom they feel able to discuss that fear. The good result is real. So is the difficulty surrounding it. A single mood, like a single performance, gives us only a partial view.

The psychologist Martin Seligman offered a useful way of widening that view. His PERMA framework identifies five elements of wellbeing: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. Pleasure has a place, but so do absorption in an activity, connection with others, a sense of purpose and the satisfaction of achieving something worthwhile. Different people draw on these elements in different proportions.

Notice that accomplishment is included. Ambition has a legitimate place in a fulfilling life. The satisfaction of mastering a skill or meeting a difficult standard deserves to be taken seriously. The framework also gives us reason to look beyond achievement when asking how someone is doing. One part of life can be flourishing while another needs attention. That is a useful perspective to bring to a training programme.

Picture a team at the end of a successful season. The players have improved, the results are strong, and the coaching staff are pleased. Now imagine asking each player what the season was like to live through. Did they feel connected to the group? Could they make a mistake without fearing humiliation? Did they understand the purpose of the work? Were there moments when they enjoyed being there?

These questions might reveal a team whose success was accompanied by trust, growth and lasting friendships. They might reveal something more troubling. Until we ask, the trophy gives us no reliable way of telling the difference.

For an individual athlete, the same inquiry can begin much closer to home. Think about the last week of your sport. Try to recall an occasion when you were absorbed in what you were doing, a conversation that left you feeling supported, or a moment of satisfaction that did not depend on somebody praising you. Perhaps several come easily. Perhaps you have to search.

The point is to become curious about what your sporting life contains. You can be deeply committed to a goal and still notice that the way you are pursuing it has become lonely. You can love your teammates and realise that you have stopped learning. You can be progressing beautifully and need more time to recover. Each observation gives you something specific to consider.

This matters because a vague instruction to be happier offers very little help. It asks for an emotional result without examining the conditions around it. A more useful conversation might discover that an athlete feels isolated after moving clubs, uncertain about their role, or exhausted by a schedule that leaves no room for anything else. Those are different situations. They deserve different responses.

Research gives us grounds for taking deliberate efforts to improve wellbeing seriously. In a review published in 2021, Joep van Agteren and colleagues brought together 419 randomised trials involving more than 53,000 participants. Across the research, psychological interventions could improve mental wellbeing, although effects were moderate at best and the evidence was generally of low to moderate quality. The studies included varied populations; they did not establish that a happier athlete will win more races.

The useful finding for this chapter is that wellbeing can be worked on. We have reason to explore practices and forms of support that may improve how people experience their lives. We also have reason to pay attention to individual responses. A practice can be helpful, unhelpful or simply poorly suited to the situation. Curiosity serves us better than insisting that everyone should feel the same benefit.

There is an important choice here for anyone interested in performance. Suppose an athlete becomes better supported and more able to enjoy their sport, but their ranking stays exactly where it is. Has anything valuable happened? Your answer reveals how much room wellbeing actually has in your definition of success.

It is easy to endorse wellbeing when we expect it to produce faster times. The commitment becomes clearer when we care about it before knowing what the stopwatch will say. An athlete deserves a life that is manageable, connected and worth participating in. That remains true through a plateau, a disappointing season and the years after competition ends.

Phelps did return to the highest level. At the Rio Olympics in 2016, he won five gold medals and a silver. During the opening freestyle relay, he later recalled, he found himself smiling in the middle of his swim. He was competing on the largest stage again and enjoying the experience.

His story offers a powerful possibility: seeking help and continuing to pursue exceptional performance can belong to the same life. It also invites us to resist turning that possibility into a demand. Nobody entering treatment should have to produce an Olympic comeback to demonstrate that receiving care was worthwhile.

Years later, Phelps was still talking openly about difficult periods. In a 2022 Sports Illustrated interview, he described depression during the pandemic, the importance of communication with his wife and his continuing efforts to understand himself. His account was of an ongoing process.

That matters to the way we read the medals. They were extraordinary achievements, and they did not mark the end of his need for care. Wellbeing remained something to attend to after the celebration, as it does for the rest of us.

Most athletes will encounter this principle in less dramatic circumstances. It may appear in a week when training, work and family commitments have crowded out every unhurried conversation. It may appear when you realise that you have begun dreading a sport you used to anticipate. Or it may appear while everything is going well, when you have the chance to protect the things that help make it so.

You do not need to wait for a crisis before taking that information seriously. Nor does every difficult week require a major change. The task is to notice what is happening with enough honesty to make a considered response.

Imagine sitting down with your next training week in front of you. The sessions are already there, along with work, study, travel and perhaps a competition. Before filling the remaining spaces, ask what would help you live that week well. The answer might be an evening with your partner, a meal with teammates or a conversation about a concern you have been carrying. It might involve protecting time that is presently being consumed by commitments you have never properly examined.

Choose one thing that matters enough to put into the week. Give it the same practical detail you would give a training session: when it will happen, who needs to know and what might get in the way. A wish to feel more connected is difficult to act on. Arranging breakfast with a friend after Saturday training gives the wish somewhere to go.

Then pay attention to what happens. Perhaps the conversation helps. Perhaps you spend the entire breakfast discussing selection and leave more anxious. That is information too. You may need a different conversation, a different setting or a clearer understanding of what you were hoping for. The purpose is to learn how to support your wellbeing, with room to adjust as you go.

At the end of the week, review the sporting work and the experience together. What did you accomplish? What gave you energy, interest or a sense of connection? What repeatedly left you depleted? Avoid turning the answers into another set of targets at which to fail. Look for one useful observation and one reasonable next step.

Some answers will involve other people. If you do not understand your role, you may need a conversation with your coach. If the schedule is becoming unmanageable, the schedule may need to change. If you are struggling in ways that persist or interfere with daily life, a qualified health professional can help assess what support you need. Personal habits have a place within a wider network of care.

Coaches and parents have influence over how possible these conversations feel. Consider what happens when an athlete says they are exhausted. If the response is immediately a story about somebody who trained harder, the athlete has learned something about what can safely be said. If the response begins with a question and a willingness to listen, there is a better chance of understanding the situation.

Listening can lead to a demanding plan. It can also lead to an adjustment. What matters is that the decision has room for evidence about the person, alongside evidence about the performance. An athlete who tells you the truth gives you something valuable to work with.

The same care is needed when wellbeing is measured. A questionnaire may help begin a conversation, but its usefulness depends partly on what athletes believe will happen to their answers. If reporting difficulty feels like risking selection, the numbers may tell you more about what people think you want to hear. Asking how someone is doing carries a responsibility to make an honest answer usable.

You can begin more simply. Ask about the week beyond the result, and allow enough time for the reply. Notice the athlete who is performing well as well as the one who is struggling competitively. After a win, celebrate the achievement and remain interested in the human being. Success should not make a person harder to see.

There will be periods when the balance is difficult. A major competition can require unusual focus. Travel can separate you from people you love. Rehabilitation can be tedious, and learning can be uncomfortable. Making wellbeing part of winning means considering those costs deliberately: which are worthwhile, how long they will last, what support is available and what would tell you that the plan needs to change.

You may willingly choose a demanding season. You can also decide what you want that season to contain. There might be a friendship you intend to protect, a way of speaking to yourself you want to practise, or a promise to seek help earlier if you begin to struggle. These commitments can sit beside the performance goals on the same page.

When you look back, you will have more than a finishing position to consider. You can ask whether you became more skilful, whether you contributed, whether the relationships around you grew stronger and whether you would choose to pursue the next challenge in the same way. The answers may be mixed. Mixed answers give you somewhere honest to begin again.

Return to Phelps arriving in Arizona. The man handing over his phone had already achieved more than enough to establish his place in sporting history. His record could remain exactly as it was, and he would still deserve the help he had come to receive. What followed would include more medals, but the value of caring for him did not depend on them.

Keep that in mind as you consider your own ambitions. Write down the result you want. Prepare for it with seriousness and imagination. Alongside it, make room for the person who will do the work, live through the uncertainty and carry on after the event is over. That person’s wellbeing belongs in the plan from the beginning.