Today, as part of Mental health Awareness Week, the ECB has published on its website, an honest insight from Ethan Bamber, into how the young Middlesex seamer, has learned to cope with anxiety throughout his career as a professional cricketer.
Our thanks go to the ECB for sharing this blog with us and allowing us to share it with our members and followers.
Ethan’s insightful blog can be reads below…
In 2021 a book was written by the former CEO of the San Francisco 49ers entitled ‘Be Where Your Feet Are; Seven Principles to Keep you Present, Grounded and Thriving’. Unfortunately, this book and its concise but powerful title came to me about 12 months too late.
During the Covid lockdowns of 2020 I had been anything but present, grounded and thriving. I was anxious, but not just about the virus.
To me, the world seemed to be crumbling, my mum and dad weren’t in the best health and there was no sign of any cricket being played. I felt rudderless.
For five months I existed in a strange state of limbo between now, my next gym session, my next meal, and the inevitable physical work and suffering that I must endure the next day in order to show that I was ‘professional’, that I was ‘dedicated’ and that I was getting better.
The only thing that was ‘where my feet were’ was sweat and occasionally tears. I have given a lot of thought to what motivated that behaviour, and it seems that everything stemmed from a feeling of not having control and of not knowing what the future held. In the most simple terms I was perpetually anxious.
The word ‘anxiety’ feels fairly complex to me. It carries great weight and can refer to a severe and paralysing condition, but it is also used flippantly and dropped into conversation, sometimes trivialised by its overuse. How might we talk about this word in relation to our everyday lives whilst at the same time being respectful to those people who are seriously afflicted by it? It’s difficult.
I don’t suffer from anxiety in the clinical sense, but as the story above suggests, I have had, and continue to have, anxious thoughts, particularly in relation to cricket. In sharing with you some of my experiences I hope to demonstrate the commonplace nature of such thoughts, and some things I have done in an attempt to coexist with them better.
Nothing has felt as severe to me as that summer of 2020, but I still have a great tendency to let my mind live in the future; it may wander to a game the next week, to selection, or even further to think about the potential long term consequences of not performing. I know that sometimes when I fail to stop a spiral, I can ruminate on who I am without cricket, on ‘what might happen if…’ and on what would be left if it all suddenly stopped.
The difference between now and three years ago is that now I know all of these thoughts are natural and perhaps even to be expected. Why? Because cricket is a huge part of my life and I care a lot about it; anything that means anything to anyone can generate great joy but also great discomfort.
I try to remind myself of this as my thoughts start to drift, I try and remember that I am not special, I am human, and as such I am biologically predisposed to worry and think about the ‘worst-case scenario'. This ‘circuit breaker’ creates just enough separation between me and the false reality I have created to enable the deployment of a more comprehensive technique.
The strategies outlined below are not magic silver bullets, in fact you’ve probably heard of them before, but I have found them beneficial.
The two most pragmatic techniques I have used are journaling and mindfulness. By writing down what’s in my head I seem more able to look at my thoughts objectively, and separate those which are unhelpful or simply hypothetical stories.
Similarly, setting aside times to actually be with my thoughts has helped me; I tend to do my mindfulness when walking, as it gives me a chance to organically connect with the world around me and remind myself to be where my feet are, not least so I don’t walk into a lamp post.
Perspective, play and talking are the three other pillars I try and come back to. I will deal with them in order;
I am very conscious of this sounding as if I’ve somehow cracked it. I haven’t, but I think I am now aware there is a path through.
Thinking is not something that we can just stop doing. Worrying is not something that we can just stop doing, it is our very nature. What we can do is develop a mechanism by which we don’t allow our thoughts about the future to hold us hostage.
I was invited to share a final message with those of you who have got this far, one thing that I would ask you to hold onto as you go about your lives. This is it: ‘Talking doesn’t work, talking is useless, talking never ever works…until it does, so keep talking, because maybe’.
I stole and misquoted that line from a recent Netflix drama.
It seemed apt because sometimes talking about mental health and wellbeing can feel like a forced exercise, empty words just ticking a box to cover a vogue topic. Maybe it is sometimes… but every time we talk about it, every time we discuss it and acknowledge its existence and every time we share our experiences, that might be the time when a person who needs it is listening.
So please keep sharing and keep talking.
The experiences described above led me to become involved with Opening Up Cricket, an organisation which uses cricket as a vehicle to stimulate thought, conversation and education around mental health and wellbeing.
Opening Up Cricket was formed in 2014 to promote mental wellbeing and suicide prevention in our sport. Key to this is trying to enable conversations about all aspects of mental health. For more information please visit openingupcricket.com
