The NFL Hates Talking About Mental Health. Bryce Young Wants to Change That

Yeah, I got super lucky. We have a really good sports psychologist in Carolina, Dr. [Joanne] Perry. She’s amazing. Having someone that understands that stuff that you can express things to is always super helpful.

Do you have access to other things at the Panthers’ facility that you feel like has had an impact on your mental health?

For me, it’s more physical. I know people who, even though they’re getting physical stuff done, it’s a form of [mental health] treatment. It can still be a space where you’re like, “Even though I’m going to go and [physically recover] with this red light, everything’s down. I get my alone time. I get time to reset.”

I try my best to compartmentalize. I’ll do that a lot with location too. So stuff that’s physical and stuff that happens at the stadium. The stadium, that’s me. That’s the quarterback, that’s work, that’s all in. I try to leave everything at the stadium. Leave work at work. When I do leave, that’s where I try to separate myself.

Have you had any older players come to you and be like, “Hey, thank you for saying this. This has changed my perspective on mental health?”

There’s an older player, I won’t say the name, that had played in the league for a while. It was actually really cool. I had a couple of conversations, and the first one was very curious and very like, “Back in my time, you couldn’t really talk about these things.” I ended up seeing them again, having the conversation come back up. It was more of “I definitely did struggle with this and I got through it. It took a while, and it was a lot of work, but I never took that approach toward it. We always just wrote that off as something that wasn’t for athletes.” It was just cool to see how they described [how] their view changed a little bit.

As an athlete, how do you separate your mental state from the binary of wins and losses?

That’s something that I’ve struggled with a lot. I haven’t always dealt with it the best. I’m a work in progress, for sure, and it’s difficult. For someone like myself—and all the other competitors out there that fill out the league—you want to win. You want to win for yourself. You want to win for your team, who also work super hard. All of us at this level have pretty much dedicated our lives to it. It’s a business, and it’s a business where you’re judged by numbers and by wins and losses. When things don’t go your way, it is hard. I try to think, Okay, is it me feeling this, or me doing this, is it productive? Is it something I can control? What are my goals? How do they align with them?

Obviously, I also try not to run from the emotions. I try not to [say] “I don’t care. I don’t feel this.” I try to embrace how I feel, embrace when I’m hurt, embrace when I’m upset, and try to be reasonable with myself. If I’m upset, it’s okay that I’m upset. I understand if I work this hard, and we don’t get the result, it’s okay to be upset. If I’m sad about something for our team, I try to validate those feelings first, and then move on. All right, we’ve accepted where we are. Now, what’s our goal? And what we’re doing, our habits, are they helping that goal, or are they hurting it? If we want to change it next week, how are we going to go about that?

The last three games of your season, you had seven touchdowns and no interceptions; two of the games were overtime wins. Ending the season on that note, what did it do for your mental health?

I think it was great for us as a unit, just as something to build off going into the offseason. [This is] the first time we’ll be with the same staff, same system, a lot of continuity on the offensive side of the ball. Now it’s that balance of feeling the confidence and seeing the build, but also knowing that we still have work to do. I still have stuff to improve on. We all still have stuff to improve on!