From Perfectionism to Burnout in Sports

How athletes struggle with impossible expectations.

Reviewed by Devon Frye

Key points

• Athletes' perfectionism is often rooted in brutal training programs that cultivate fear.
• After retirement, athletes tend to turn their coach's expectations, criticisms, and punishments inward.
• Retired athletes' struggles with self-criticism, exhaustion, and burnout reflect the impact of sports culture.

This post is part three of a series on the struggles of recovering athletes.

In my last post, I talked about the struggle many athletes face, even in their retirement, with the belief that their personal worth is based on their achievements. This is closely connected to the next theme of struggle: perfectionism.

Athletes whose whole world rises and falls with wins and losses expect themselves to be flawless. A perfectionist ignores the fact that mistakes are human, that they cannot be completely eliminated, and that they are an important part of learning and growth.

To a perfectionist, a mistake is a dangerous opportunity to lose precious seconds or precious points, and it’s a dangerous invitation to be blamed by all who watch, especially their coach. In the perfectionist’s mind, these dangers must be eliminated, which leads to an exhausting (and unwinnable) battle that drags them through incessant anxiety, general disappointment, oftentimes serious injury, and (as mentioned in the last post) battered self-esteem—all culminating in burnout.

Contrary to popular opinion in the sports world, turning human beings into little perfectionists using any means possible turns out to be neither good for the person inside the athlete, nor for their performance.

The Connection Between the Quest for Perfection and the Quest for Safety

Athletes who struggle with perfectionism often relay the experience of having grown up in an environment where standards of robotic precision were expected by coaches and criticisms were yelled out every few minutes, starting at a very young age. Athletes interpreted this as, “The coach is never satisfied, and I am never good enough.” “I have to be perfect to please the coach.”

The surprisingly consistent stories from athletes in different sports reveal how the drama typically played out: The coach’s criticisms were voiced with anger or disgust and accompanied by an array of insults, threats, and demands for constant repetition. Comments like “You’re wasting everyone’s time,” and “You’re not worth the space you take up in the gym,” were coupled with accusations that athletes were lazy (“You look like a flopping fish”), stupid (“What’s wrong with your brain?”), fat ("What have you been eating?") and un-coachable (“You’re impossible—the worst I’ve ever coached”).

Once these demeaning comments were exhausted, the final order would come: “You can’t leave until you do it right.” The athlete would then be left alone and required to repeat whatever the “pain point” was until exhaustion or injury, at which point they would be accused of being a "faker" (regarding their exhaustion or injury) and assigned inordinate amounts of conditioning as a punishment. Under these textbook abusive conditions, athletes felt persistent and consuming pressure to perform flawlessly in order to avoid the wrath of the coach, often leading to daily anxiety, dread, an inability to concentrate, and stomach aches on the way to practice.

The athlete’s quest for perfection in these training environments was closely connected to their quest for safety: an attempt to protect themselves from the aggression of the coach by “pleasing” him or her with a flawless performance.

A Quest Doomed From the Start

As I listened to athletes’ stories about their quest for perfection, it became clear to me that there were multiple reasons why this quest was doomed from the start.

First, it’s just not realistic to think we can eliminate mistakes completely. We’re human and we can’t control chaos 100 percent of the time. The quest for perfection is going to fail for that reason alone and is a setup for disappointment.

Second, mistakes are an essential part of the learning process and play a positive role in our growth. Without trial and error, without risking mistakes, without in a sense “making friends with mistakes,” one can’t learn what works, what doesn’t, and why. If coaches punish mistakes, causing the athlete to have to avoid them at all costs, then the process of learning and improvement is cut off at the root.

There’s a third problem in these old-school training environments that makes the quest for perfection or even improvement doomed: the coach’s unwillingness or inability to offer the athlete a method for improvement. It seemed quite common that coaches who turned to yelling did so as a replacement for teaching, either because they did not know the steps an athlete would need to take to learn a skill or because, out of impatience, they were unwilling to take the time to teach. The athlete was left not knowing what to do or how to make things better while being faced with impossible standards of perfection and the danger of a frustrated coach.

This is the point at which a lot of athletes got injured, burned out, or quit (certainly not the performance-enhancing result the coach was hoping for). At this point, so many athletes’ bodies became wrecked from the incessant battering, their spirits were crushed from constant criticism, they spent the day at school unable to concentrate due to dreading practice, and they were no longer getting the returns that matched their investment. They couldn’t find a way forward with their current coach, and they couldn’t find a better coach with whom to train.

The Drama Turned Inward: From Self-Brutality to Hyper-Productivity to Burnout

After retirement, the dysfunctional drama continued. Time after time, when athletes told me of their day-to-day struggles in their lives beyond their sport, it was clear that they’d found a way to replace their coach’s voice with an internal voice that bullied them with brutal self-talk.

When trying to learn something new, whether at work or school or in a new recreational athletic activity, they might say to themselves, “Why do you keep screwing up?” “Why are you so stupid?” “You don’t belong here.” “No one is going to want to work with you.” The coach’s demands for perfection and insults were replaced with intense self-criticism.

Likewise, the coach’s penchant for excessive repetition got replaced with an inner demand for hyper-productivity—sometimes as a form of self-punishment, and sometimes because it had been drilled into them that they could never “succeed” unless they were constantly working. Retired athletes readily admitted their feelings of guilt about ever resting, even long after they’d left their sport. Constant work was yet another part of their quest for perfection and protection from blame.

Not surprisingly, with the perfectionistic-people pleasing-hyper-productive approach to life, athletes often struggle, even after retirement, with mental and physical burnout. The cycle often carries over into jobs and romantic relationships, where they believe they must be working at all times to please their boss or their partner, be flawless in order to avoid criticism or prove superiority, and ignore their own human needs for rest, care, and kindness, which they tell themselves are signs of weakness. At a certain point, the body and the mind say “no” to living this way, and illness or injury may force them to get off the hamster wheel, for which they often feel incredibly guilty and even morally at fault.

Final Thoughts

At the root of the perfectionistic and hyper-productive ethos that’s internalized by the athlete lies fear. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of being criticized or blamed. Fear of rejection. Fear of failure. Fear of letting others down.

And at the root of that fear is a set of beliefs that the old-school culture of sports reinforces and makes very sure you never forget or question: Other people’s opinion of you is everything, you exist to please your coach, others won’t like you or want to work with you if you make mistakes, mistakes are always a bad thing, and the only thing worthwhile about you is your performance. You must sacrifice everything (including mental and physical health) to win and appease others.

It takes a whole lot of work in philosophical counseling to call into question, examine, and unwind these beliefs and their effects, and to consider alternatives and new ways of operating in life. But one thing that I hope is clear from this series of posts is this: We have to stop thinking of the suffering that athletes face as “personal” mental health problems for which they alone are responsible, and face directly the normalized culture of abuse and crisis in ethics that cause these problems in the first place.