Every four years, the world watches teenagers and twenty-somethings stand on Olympic podiums and wonders what it took to get there. A new study from Australia offers an uncomfortable answer: for many young athletes, the climb to elite status consumes nearly everything else in their lives, and that imbalance may be quietly undermining their mental health.

Published in the Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, the research is the first known attempt to examine the transition into elite sport through an occupational lens, a framework borrowed from occupational therapy that asks how people distribute their time across work, study, rest, leisure and relationships. The answer for young athletes, it turns out, is that sport tends to crowd out almost everything else.

“When a passion once pursued for fun begins to consume every waking hour, young athletes face heightened risks for poor mental health and wellbeing, both now and in the future,” said Jamie Wilson, a PhD candidate at Flinders University and the study’s lead author. “The elite pathway of a young athlete is packed with soaring highs and brutal lows, but the real secret to sustainable success could lie in the life they build outside of sport.”

A neglected population

The study arrives at a moment of growing concern about athlete wellbeing. In 2023, the International Olympic Committee singled out youth elite athletes as a “neglected population” in its mental health action plan, calling for research into their specific vulnerabilities. A separate IOC consensus statement published the following year in the British Journal of Sports Medicine warned that young athletes competing at the Olympic level face distinct risks around identity formation, social media and complex relationships with coaches and teammates.

Those concerns build on more than a decade of evidence that elite athletes are not immune to mental illness. A 2016 narrative systematic review in Sports Medicine found that elite athletes experience anxiety and depression at rates broadly comparable to the general population, with injury, performance failure and retirement acting as particular stress points. Research on Australian elite athletes has found that roughly half report symptoms of at least one mental health problem, while a 2012 qualitative study in BMC Psychiatry documented that young elite athletes face unusually strong barriers to seeking help, including stigma and fear of being seen as weak.

What has been missing, the Flinders team argues, is a framework that looks beyond psychology to the structure of athletes’ daily lives.

Two studies, one picture

The researchers used a convergent mixed-methods design, running a questionnaire and a set of interviews in parallel and then combining the results. Thirty-nine athletes competing at state, national or international level completed the survey, 25 of them in the 17-to-24 window the researchers define as young adulthood, when the transition into elite sport most often happens. Eight athletes, most of them rugby players, sat for semi-structured interviews.

The survey findings were striking in what they revealed about athletes’ time. Participants trained an average of nearly 13 hours per week, with some reporting as many as 45. Yet 84.6 percent also held jobs outside sport, and 61.5 percent were studying at the same time. Nearly a third had relocated, some internationally, to pursue their sport.

Against that backdrop, two demographic patterns stood out. Female athletes reported significantly higher anxiety than their male counterparts, and athletes in individual sports reported higher anxiety than those on teams, along with preliminary signs of higher stress. The researchers note that these findings echo earlier work showing women and individual-sport athletes are more vulnerable to anxiety.

Motivation mattered too. Athletes who scored high on “enthusiastic commitment,” a measure of intrinsic desire to persist in a sport, showed greater grit and lower depression. Those whose commitment was “constrained,” driven by obligation rather than love of the game, were more likely to report depressive symptoms.

“Interestingly, young athletes who pursue sport for personal enjoyment and a love for the game, rather than in response to external pressure, seem more likely to be persistent and be psychologically healthier, supported by their commitment and enthusiasm,” said Professor Ivanka Prichard, a co-author on the study.

Pieces of meat

The interviews filled in the texture behind the numbers. From the transcripts, the team identified six themes that shape whether athletes can maintain balance: elite status as a time commitment, relocation for recognition, athletes as a commodity, meaningful relationships supporting life balance, access to formal supports, and “superhuman” barriers to help-seeking.

Several of the accounts were blunt. One experienced rugby player described himself and his teammates as “pieces of meat at the end of the day,” while another spoke of his “market value” having trebled. Relocation, the athletes said, was framed not as an option but as an expectation. One player noted he had not lived in the same city as his family since he was 18 and was now 34.

For unpaid athletes, the off-season was not a time of rest but of overtime, a chance to bank enough income to survive the next competitive season. Paid athletes, meanwhile, described relationships that were largely confined to the sporting workplace and that evaporated with injury or non-selection.

Perhaps the most troubling theme concerned help-seeking. Athletes described a culture in which the public expects them to be superhuman and in which disclosing a mental health struggle could cost them a spot on the roster. Younger athletes in particular said they felt they had not yet earned the right to have problems. “I’m not gonna annoy you with my problems because they have so many more things to worry about,” one young female rugby player told the researchers.

Balance as a foundation, not a distraction

The authors are careful about the study’s limits. The samples are small, the interview group was dominated by team-sport athletes, and one of the stress measures showed low reliability, meaning some findings should be read as exploratory. The direction of causation between occupational balance and wellbeing also remains unresolved.

Still, the researchers argue that reframing athlete wellbeing as an occupational question rather than purely a psychological one opens new avenues for intervention. The findings, they write, suggest that wellbeing problems on elite pathways are deeply connected to how athletes’ daily lives are structured, constrained and distributed, and that occupational therapists could play a role in sport that they have not traditionally filled.

“Supporting young athletes beyond sport is not a distraction from victory, it is the vital foundation for developing healthier, stronger and more resilient athletes,” Prichard said.

As the next cycle of global sporting events approaches, the message from Adelaide is that the athletes we celebrate for their single-minded devotion may need something closer to the opposite: permission to be more than an athlete.

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Endnotes

1. Wilson J, Prichard I, Petersen J, Stenner B. Balancing Act: An Occupational Lens on the Process of Becoming an Elite Athlete. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy. 2026;33:8. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44474-026-00006-2
2. Flinders University. Sporting glory starts with life outside sport, new study finds. EurekAlert!, 7 October 2026. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1147049
3. International Olympic Committee. Mental Health Action Plan 2023. https://stillmed.olympics.com/media/Documents/News/2023/07/Mental-Health-Action-Plan-2023.pdf
4. Bergeron MF, Côté J, Cumming SP, et al. IOC consensus statement on elite youth athletes competing at the Olympic Games: essentials to a healthy, safe and sustainable paradigm. British Journal of Sports Medicine. 2024;58(17):946–65. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2024-108186
5. Rice SM, Purcell R, De Silva S, et al. The mental health of elite athletes: a narrative systematic review. Sports Medicine. 2016;46(9):1333–53. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-016-0492-2
6. Gulliver A, Griffiths KM, Mackinnon A, Batterham PJ, Stanimirovic R. The mental health of Australian elite athletes. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport. 2015;18(3):255–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsams.2014.04.006
7. Gulliver A, Griffiths KM, Christensen H. Barriers and facilitators to mental health help-seeking for young elite athletes: a qualitative study. BMC Psychiatry. 2012;12:157. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-244X-12-157
8. Correia M, Rosado A. Anxiety in athletes: gender and type of sport differences. International Journal of Psychological Research. 2019;12(1):9. https://doi.org/10.21500/20112084.3552
9. Purcell R, Henderson J, Tamminen KA, et al. Starting young to protect elite athletes’ mental health. British Journal of Sports Medicine. 2023. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2022-106352