An insight into my mental block journey
Over the weekend I released a video on social media, in collaboration with MindTricks, where I open up about my journey with mental blocks. It’s not something I always found easy to be open about, in fact this is the first time I’ve addressed it in a video. Of course, I was overwhelmed by the positive responses and support from my peers, but most of all the number of people who could relate and expressed to me that just thanks to that video they felt seen - being trapped in your own head and feeling out of control can be a very scary & lonely place.
As someone who had developed a reputation as a bit of a ‘sender’ on the contest field by pushing the limits of my sport, I held great value in my showcase magic tricks (My best & biggest moves for competition) - I was pushing and pushing, doing them every session, taking the maximum risk for sadly little reward looking at my results at the time. This mentality had gone on since I won the Olympic Games in Tokyo 2021, I was in fact very much disregarding my mental health by grinding so hard, piling on the pressure and ignoring the signs from my body and mind that I was exhausted. I actually thought mental health was kinda, fake, like just get over it… until, inevitably, it hit me like a brick wall.
Total physical and emotional burnout.
“I thought mental health was fake,
until it hit me like a brick wall”
In 2023 I hit a wall so great I thought it could be the end of my career, and at times, the end of my life. Pushing so hard lead me to painfully tear a ligament in my foot - another consecutive semi-major injury to add to the growing list, which included a grade 3 tear in my glute muscle just two months earlier, that was a pain in the ass! - the physical injury wasn’t the issue, it was trying to mentally come back after a year of physical and emotional pain. When I started to practice my big tricks again I was getting some strange feelings, gut wrenching fears and feeling uneasy about moves I’d done hundreds of times. I couldn’t focus, or rather I was too focussed on a million things at once.
My mind was going a million miles a minute, months into the future worrying about competitions, how this pattern of pushing so hard proves to equal the physical pain of an injury followed by great emotional pain of failure and overwhelming stress and misery on repeat; and what people would think if Charlotte Worthington ‘the sender’ couldn’t perform a simple backflip.
I tried to push past it desperately thinking “if I can at least do a flip and a flair at the competition, then I’ll be okay, but I can’t compete with anything less or else what will people think!?.”, but every time I dropped in to do one of these tricks, I’d look up at the ramp and get flashing images of terrible things happening to me, like dislocating my shoulder or panicking and getting stuck upside down. It was enough to make my stomach drop, feel ice cold with fear and freeze in my tracks.
Cue mental block.
At the time this was terrifying, riding a bmx bike is scary enough without feeling disconnected from your body and out of control. Even more terrifying was the thought of what are people going to think, how do I tell my friends, sponsors, coach and olympic federation that I woke up one day and can’t do any of my tricks. I’d ride to the edge of the ramp to drop in, and be frozen in fear of what’s going to happen 5 seconds from now, and be so embarrassed and panicked I’d burst into tears and have to leave. It broke my heart that I couldn’t be in the skatepark with my friends without having a panic attack. I’d forgotten who I was without my big fancy tricks.
“I’d be frozen in fear of what’s going to happen 5 seconds from now.”
So, it’s taken A LOT of work to go from that to making a video about it on Instagram haha! Through this I’ve learned my brain was working perfectly by trying to protect me from the ‘traumatic’ experiences I’d been having, by saying ‘enough is enough, I can’t let you do this any more, it’s going to kill you!’, although against my will, which is what a mental block is. With lots of help I gradually built myself back up to get back in the skatepark and slowly back into competition, however I still had these scary flashes and freezing moments on my big tricks or when I felt a lot of pressure to do something. Somehow I was able to do just enough to still make it to the Paris Olympics in 2024, although it was a tough ride to get there.
Back to the instagram video…
After spending the last year away from competition, primarily focussing on enjoying bmx and listening to my mind & body; I finally had a breakthrough! I did a flair (backflip 180 spin) on my bmx after almost 3 years! It felt like landing my first one all over again; no pressure, no expectation, no people pleasing, just doing it because I can and I wanted to. This is what spurred me on to make the video, to share with others going through the same thing and give them strength and hope, because other athletes did that for me.
To see behind the scenes training footage whilst going through mental blocks, and the ‘break through flair’ by watching the instagram video here. Keep an eye out for a long format YouTube video; deep diving into a little mental block science & emotion of how I ended up with the biggest obstical of me career, and what helped me get through it (mostly my incredible husband Matt Dalton, best friend Angelika Sroka, wonderful GB teammates and my fantastic psychologist Kate Hayes, oh and my dog Kota!). Plus what I learned from it all and where I am now - which is still working through it. If you have any questions on my experience, or want me to talk on something specific in the YouTube video please feel free to get in touch!
Watch the Instagram video here.
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