What Simone Biles and Alysa Liu Taught Us About Mental Health, Neuroscience, and What It Actually Takes to Be Great

Call it Mamba Mentality - Next Play Mentality - The Reset Break - The Comeback Kid…

In 2021, Simone Biles walked away from the Olympic team final in Tokyo. Not because she was injured in the traditional sense. Because she was protecting her mind — and she was honest enough to say so out loud, in front of the entire world.

The reaction was immediate and divided. Some called it courage. Others called it something far less kind. Sports commentators debated whether she’d let her team down. Social media had opinions about what an athlete “owed” the sport, the country, the moment.

And then she came back.

At the 2023 World Championships, Biles became the most decorated gymnast in World Championship history. She landed the Yurchenko double pike — a vault so technically demanding that it now bears her name — a skill the sport’s governing body had actually underscored for years, possibly to discourage others from attempting it. She did it anyway. She did it better. And she did it as someone who had publicly, unapologetically chosen her mental health over a gold medal and survived the noise that followed.

Alysa Liu’s story runs parallel in ways that don’t get talked about nearly enough.

She burst onto the competitive figure skating scene at thirteen, becoming the youngest U.S. Figure Skating Champion in history. The pressure that followed was immense — and largely invisible to audiences who just saw a tiny, gifted kid landing quads like it was nothing. Behind the scenes, she was navigating the particular kind of psychological weight that comes with being exceptional very young, in a sport with a long history of not handling young girls particularly well.

She stepped back. She took time. She made choices about her skating that prioritized her relationship with the sport over her ranking in it.

And when she returned to competition, something had shifted. Not just technically — though that was there too — but in the way she carried herself. There was a grounded-ness to her performance that hadn’t existed before. A presence. Like she was skating for something real, not just performing for approval.

Two athletes. Two very public breaks. Two very different sports. And the same outcome: they came back more fully themselves, and more formidable for it.

That parallel is not a coincidence. It’s not luck, or personal resilience, or some intangible “champion’s spirit” that certain people are born with. There is actual science underneath what happened to both of them during those breaks — in their brains, their nervous systems, their capacity to process pressure and return to their sport with something that chronic, uninterrupted striving can actually erode over time.

That thing is called self. And it turns out, it’s one of the most important performance tools an athlete can have.

What’s Actually Happening in the Brain During Rest and Recovery

When athletes push through without real recovery — mentally or physically — the brain’s prefrontal cortex begins to lose efficiency. This is the region responsible for decision-making, emotional regulation, focus, and the ability to read a situation clearly under pressure. Chronic stress floods the body with cortisol, and sustained high cortisol doesn’t just make you feel depleted. It literally reduces the volume of the hippocampus, the brain region tied to memory, learning, and spatial awareness. For an athlete, that’s not abstract. That’s slower reaction time. Worse pattern recognition. Decisions made from fear rather than instinct.

Rest and intentional recovery — real rest, not just sleep — allows the brain to shift into what neuroscientists call the default mode network. This is where your brain consolidates learning, processes emotion, rehearses future scenarios, and does the background integration work that conscious training simply cannot access. It’s the mental equivalent of muscle repair. You don’t grow during the workout. You grow in the recovery.

Breaks also do something equally important: they regulate the nervous system. When an athlete is chronically overwhelmed, they’re operating from a threat response — fight, flight, or freeze. Everything feels high stakes. Mistakes feel catastrophic. The body is running on cortisol and adrenaline, and while that cocktail can produce short bursts of intensity, it is not a sustainable performance state. Mindful rest and genuine recovery shift the body back into parasympathetic activation — the nervous system state where creativity, connection, clear thinking, and high-level athletic performance actually live.

This is why so many elite athletes describe their best performances as feeling almost calm. Effortless, even. They’re not running on adrenaline in those moments. They’re running on a regulated nervous system that has been given enough space to actually function at its ceiling.

Simone Biles came back to gymnastics with a regulated nervous system. Alysa Liu returned to the ice having given her developing brain room to breathe, integrate, and grow. The performances that followed weren’t despite the breaks. They were shaped by them.

Kobe, Steph, and the Mental Architecture of Elite Performance

Two of the most studied performance philosophies in modern athletics point toward the same underlying truth from very different directions.

Kobe Bryant’s Mamba Mentality is often misread as pure relentlessness — outwork everyone, sleep less, want it more than the next person. But what Kobe actually described in his own words was something more layered: radical self-awareness, obsessive preparation, and the ability to stay present under pressure regardless of what was happening around him. He didn’t just grind. He studied. He visualized. He understood his body and his psychology deeply enough that very little could surprise him in competition. The mentality wasn’t about ignoring limits. It was about knowing yourself so thoroughly that your limits stopped having power over you.

That kind of self-knowledge doesn’t come from never stopping. It comes from paying attention. From reflection. From the kind of honest relationship with yourself that only quiet can cultivate.

Steph Curry’s “Next Play” philosophy approaches it from a different angle. After a missed shot — even a costly one — Steph has trained himself to reset almost immediately. No rumination, no spiral, no carrying the weight of the miss into the next possession. Neurologically, this matters enormously. Rumination activates the amygdala, which triggers a stress cascade that narrows focus, clouds judgment, and makes the next mistake more likely, not less. Steph’s reset practice is essentially real-time nervous system regulation. He’s not suppressing emotion. He’s moving through it quickly enough that it doesn’t hijack what comes next.

What connects these two philosophies is that neither one is really about toughness in the way sports culture traditionally defines it. They’re both about mental flexibility — the ability to be fully present, process what’s happening without being consumed by it, and respond from clarity rather than reaction. That capacity is built in rest. It’s built in recovery. It’s built in the kind of honest self-awareness that Simone Biles modeled when she looked at what her mind and body were telling her and said, without apology, I need to stop.

The Research Is Clear, Even When the Culture Isn’t

Sports culture has spent decades framing rest as weakness and struggle as virtue. Push through the pain. Mental toughness means never wavering. If you stop, someone else is going to take your spot. These messages get absorbed young, and they do real damage — not just to athletic careers, but to the human beings inside the athletes.

The research tells a different story.

A landmark Stanford study on collegiate basketball players found that when athletes extended their sleep and recovery time, reaction speed improved, shooting accuracy improved, sprint times dropped, and reported mental wellbeing increased — not marginally, but significantly. Across sports, studies consistently show that structured recovery periods improve skill retention, decision-making under pressure, emotional regulation during competition, and long-term athletic longevity.

Youth athletes who are given intentional mental and physical recovery — not just the absence of practice, but genuine restorative space — show lower rates of burnout, stronger athletic identity that isn’t solely tied to results, and longer, more sustainable relationships with their sports. The athletes who are pushed hardest the youngest are statistically among the most likely to leave their sport entirely by their mid-teens, not because they weren’t talented, but because the system burned through them before they had the chance to fully become themselves within it.

Alysa Liu stepping back during a critical developmental window and returning with greater technical depth and emotional maturity is exactly this dynamic, played out on a world stage. Her brain needed time to consolidate what she had learned. Her nervous system needed to stop operating in survival mode long enough to shift into genuine growth mode. The sport got a better athlete back because the person got what she needed first.

Success Doesn’t Have to Cost You Yourself

There’s something worth sitting with here, especially for anyone raising or coaching young girls in sports.

The world sends a very specific message to girls who compete. Be agreeable. Be grateful. Be easy to coach, easy to manage, easy to mold. Don’t take up too much space with your needs or your feelings or your limits. Make the adults around you comfortable. Keep going. Smile.

Biles and Liu both received versions of that message. They both, at different moments and in different ways, chose something else. They chose to honor what they actually knew about themselves over what the system expected of them. They chose autonomy — not as a rejection of their sports, but as a condition of continuing to participate in them with integrity.

And they thrived.

That’s the lesson underneath the lesson. Success doesn’t have to come at the expense of your identity. You don’t have to break yourself to belong somewhere. You can be joyful and ambitious at the same time. You can set limits and still be exceptional. You can say no, step back, protect yourself — and come back even more yourself than you were before.

This is not just an athletic truth. It’s a life truth. The self-awareness, nervous system regulation, boundary-setting, and resilience that these athletes modeled don’t stay on the court or the ice or the gym floor. They transfer. Into classrooms, relationships, workplaces, and the long, winding work of building a life that actually fits who you are.

Three Mindfulness Practices for Athletic Preparedness

These aren’t vague, soft suggestions. They’re grounded in the same neuroscience we’ve been talking about, and they’re practices I teach directly in the Mindfulness for Athletes workshop because they produce measurable, real results in both performance and wellbeing.

1. The Pre-Competition Body Scan

Before practice or a competition, take three to five minutes for a slow internal check-in. Start at your feet and move upward — just noticing, not fixing, not judging — where you’re holding tension, where you feel ready, where something feels uncertain. This activates what researchers call interoceptive awareness, the brain’s ability to read and interpret internal body signals accurately. Athletes with stronger interoceptive awareness make better real-time decisions and recover faster from mistakes during competition. The body scan also shifts the nervous system from anticipatory anxiety into grounded presence. You arrive in your body instead of getting stuck in your head before the whistle even blows.

2. The Reset Breath

Borrow this one from Steph. After a mistake, a bad call, a moment that didn’t go the way you needed — before the next play begins, take one slow, deliberate breath. Inhale for four counts, exhale for six. The extended exhale directly activates the vagus nerve, which signals the parasympathetic nervous system to downregulate the stress response. The whole thing takes about fifteen seconds, and it can genuinely change the trajectory of the next few minutes of play. The key is training it during practice, not just reaching for it in high-pressure moments. Make it automatic so it’s available when you actually need it.

3. Intentional Recovery Windows

Schedule mental recovery the same way you schedule conditioning — because it is conditioning. This might look like fifteen minutes of no-phone, no-stimulation quiet after a hard practice. It might look like a short mindfulness practice before bed during competition weeks. It might look like a post-game journaling habit where an athlete spends five minutes writing about what they noticed, not what they scored. The brain needs unstructured, low-demand time to process and consolidate what it just experienced. Without it, learning doesn’t integrate properly and stress compounds over time. Athletes who build intentional recovery into their routine consistently report better focus at the next practice, stronger emotional regulation during competition, and a healthier relationship with both their performance and their sense of self.

Introducing the Mindfulness for Athletes Workshop

This is exactly why I created this workshop -

Not because mindfulness is a trend, or because mental health has become a more acceptable topic in sports conversations — though both of those things are true. But because I am a mom watching my own kids move through a sports culture that still, in too many places, treats their inner lives as irrelevant to their athletic development. And I know that’s wrong. Not just ethically, but scientifically.

The Mindfulness for Athletes workshop is a space where young athletes learn to build a relationship with themselves — not just with their performance. Where mental health is treated as a foundation worth protecting, not a weakness to manage quietly. Where the tools we work with are practical, grounded, and evidence-based, because athletes respond to things that actually work.

We cover nervous system regulation and why it matters in competition. We work through pre-performance mindfulness practices that are simple enough to use in a locker room. We talk about recovery — real recovery — and how to build it into training in ways that improve performance rather than compromise it. And we talk honestly about identity: what it means to be an athlete, and what it means to be a whole person who also happens to compete.

Because the athletes who last — the ones who stay in their sport with genuine love for it, who perform at their highest when it counts, who build careers and lives that sustain them — are usually the ones who figured out how to stay whole. Who learned, somewhere along the way, that their value is not located in their score.

Simone Biles figured that out. Alysa Liu figured that out. Kobe knew it in his own way. Steph practices it on every possession.

And your athlete can learn it too — not after a crisis, not after burnout, but now, while there’s still time to build it as a foundation rather than discover it as a lesson.

You can be joyful. You can set limits. You can rest, and say no, and honor what your body and mind are telling you.

And you can still be extraordinary.

That’s not a contradiction. That’s the whole point.

Stay tuned for updates for open spots - lessons will begin this April for our first cohort. More information - sign up for updates at swiftmind.care