Former NFL Super Bowl winner Ryan Mundy says managing his mental health was key to the game but too often undermined: ‘We didn’t have the agency to talk about our emotions’
When NFL safety Ryan Mundy retired from the game after the 2015 season, he didn’t enter a career with the cohort of former pros in sports broadcasting or coaching. Mundy, who was drafted to the Pittsburgh Steelers in the sixth round pick in 2008 and was a 2009 Super Bowl champion, was instead ready to challenge a culture that has shamed men in sports, particularly Black men, out of being emotionally vulnerable.
“I just got to a place where I couldn’t hold it in anymore,” Mundy tells Fortune. “I came up in the era, particularly within sport, where we didn’t have the agency to talk about our emotions. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t have the language or wherewithal or even the confidence or courage to speak to someone about it.”
Mundy hopes his advocacy will empower other men who too often internalize societal messaging that wrongly equates emotional vulnerability with weakness.
Emotional resilience and the game
Managing mental health is a bedrock of overall health and affects performance both on and off the field. Mundy, who has experienced anxiety and depression, admits that his game paid the price when his mental health declined.
“A lot of times you can put athletes on pedestals. The reality is athletes are human beings, and deal with the same type of emotions and conditions that everybody else deals with,” he says. There’s a difference between being mentally tough to counter the pressure and nerves of competition, Mundy adds, and larger mental health challenges that require interventions and often stem from suppressing emotions over time.
It’s precisely why sports teams have put more emphasis on hiring performance psychology and mindfulness coaches. Mundy, like many other mental health advocates, recognizes how emotional mastery positively influences overall health and performance.
While it’s recently become more celebrated than in decades past for athletes to share their mental health challenges and seek help as they would their physical ailments, there’s still a great deal of stigma.
When he retired less than a decade ago, Mundy searched for therapists to help with his bouts of anxiety and depression but wasn’t able to find a provider who could understand the compounding factors affecting his mental health, including racism in the health care system. After receiving his executive MBA, he launched Alkeme in 2020, a mental wellness platform that features Black practitioners, filling a gap in health care.
Mental health and wellness have become a larger cultural conversation since the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, high rates of loneliness, depression, and anxiety point to how resources aren’t reaching the people who need them. No one sees that gap more than Mundy, who hopes Alkeme continues to reach more people through its online community and library of content that includes advice on how to meditate, build healthy relationships, foster well-being at work, and more.
“For the longest time, there was no space for men to talk about this. There was no space for athletes to talk about this,” he says. “Now space is being created through community, through brands, through conversation and language where people are starting to share their stories.”
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