DEPRESSION AFFECTS APPROXIMATELY 10 per cent of the population. Although most people recover well, depression can have the largest negative impact of any mental or physical illness. Anyone who has experienced depression knows it’s an overwhelming experience.

So to talk about the activity levels of pro-athletes in the same breath as depression seems almost perverse. Depression has everything that could be designed to decrease your performance; it demotivates you, undermines your confidence, reduces your energy and makes you feel worse about yourself.

But look at what it takes to be Wayne Rooney: the ability to take endless physical punishment; to be able to block out the screaming abuse of away fans; to have one’s personal life torn apart; to make mistakes in glare of the world and to be able to get on with it. I couldn’t do it. I won’t be playing in the Premiership this week but I will do some things that could be helped with the type of mindset that he’s able to bring on the pitch week in week out.

When we look at pro-athletes, their mindset is flexible. If strategy A doesn’t work, we move to strategy B. It is future-focused. I can’t retake the last shot, I can only take the next one. And it is biased towards positive outcomes rather than negative ones. These are all styles of thinking which help athletes survive in deeply stressful environments.

Believing in yourself

Top stars believe they will win. This is often at odds with the facts. When West Ham play Chelsea, if they go out believing that they will lose, they will. They have to believe they will win. They mightn’t have won the last 10 matches but they have to believe that they will this one. But they also have to believe the exact opposite. They have to realise that the opposition team is stronger, richer, better equipped. They have to balance the absolute belief in winning with a realistic strategy.

Every pro-tennis player has a slower second serve than they do their first serve. They all have a match-winning mindset but with a focus on a realistic way of achieving the outcome they want.

There are three features common to our thinking when we are depressed. Depressed thinking:

• Often is fixed: focused on a certain way of looking at things. It struggles to be flexible, to examine possibilities. The feelings are so overwhelming, it is very hard to look at other ways of thinking about something. If my first serve doesn’t go in, I keep playing the first serve and feel lower every time it doesn’t work. A key part of therapy is having someone beside you to talk about the feelings and the thoughts, trying to focus on the idea that thought is not a fact. 
• Often is ruminative. It goes back over events, again and again in a circular way. It doesn’t focus on the next point, it focuses on the last one. In this way, negative events get replayed again and again, driving down our mood. A core part of getting out of depression, is making a decision to stop replaying past events. This is hard. Our mind seems to return to the negative like a magnet but gradually if we can decrease the amount of time we spend on ruminating, our mood picks up. Small steps, incremental outcomes, just focus on the next point, the next tackle, the next free kick and if we put enough of those things together then the game starts to take a positive turn. 
• Often it biases the way we think. Typical biases are:

1. ‘All or nothing’ thinking: total success or total failure excludes all the little victories and improvements along the way,
2. Discounting the positive: we all remember the insult but most of us dismiss the compliments but this gives a totally biased view of what other people think of us and how we see ourselves,
3. Personalisation: when it goes wrong we take all the blame, meaning we only ever take in negative information.

The first way to overcome a bias it to begin to notice that we do it. When does it happen? What would happen if we balanced that thought: took the insult and the compliment; took responsibility for the good as well as the bad; saw every little victory as a step towards our final goal and not a reminder that we haven’t got there yet.

Sports stars weren’t born with these mindsets. These are mental skills that they learned – and we can all learn them. Whether it is everyday stresses or depression, we could all benefit from a little of Wayne Rooney’s wisdom.

Dr Keith Gaynor is a Senior Clinical Psychologist delivering CBT in Outpatient Services, St John of God Hospital, Stillorgan. www.sjog.ie Tel 2771440

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Read: How exercise can help treat depression and anxiety