Olivia Møller
Freediver - Activist - Explorer
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Olivia Møller
Freediver - Activist - Explorer
You thought you were just tired. A bad week, maybe two. But now even the thought of putting on your gear drains you. The sport that once gave you life now feels like a job you can’t quit. You wonder what’s wrong with you. You’ve lost your edge, your spark, your why. You’re not broken. You’re burnt out. And you’re not alone.
Burnout isn’t just a buzzword, and it’s not just for corporate workers with inboxes overflowing. It happens to athletes. To the weekend warriors. To the record-breakers. To the ones who love it so much, they forget to stop. It’s more than just being tired or needing a couple of easy days. It’s when your body, mind, and spirit say: enough.
In sports psychology, burnout is understood as a state of emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged and excessive stress. According to a foundational study in The Sport Psychologist, athletic burnout is made up of three main components: emotional and physical fatigue, a diminished sense of achievement, and a growing indifference—or even resentment—toward the sport itself. You don’t just lose energy. You lose interest. You lose identity.
Because athletes are trained to override discomfort, it often goes unnoticed. You push through pain. You train when you’re tired. You wear sacrifice like a badge. But there’s a difference between discipline and depletion. When you start to dread the thing that once defined you, it’s time to listen.
Burnout can show up in anyone. Perfectionists who never feel they’ve done enough. High performers with no space to fail. Young prodigies pushed hard from the start. Veterans who’ve lost their drive but feel obligated to keep going. It cuts across disciplines, ages, and experience levels. And ironically, it often hits the most passionate the hardest. Those who care the most are often the ones who push themselves into the ground.
It’s easy to mistake early symptoms for a lack of motivation or grit. You might chalk up the mood swings, the exhaustion, the poor sleep, or the mental fog to stress or aging. But over time, the pattern deepens. Training feels like a chore. You find excuses to skip sessions. You feel flat during workouts. Wins don’t feel like wins. And even when your body says it’s ready, your heart isn’t in it.
Psychologist Christina Maslach, who pioneered research on burnout, points out that burnout is rarely about personal weakness—it’s about environmental imbalance. In sport, that imbalance can come from overtraining, lack of rest, pressure to perform, or a loss of autonomy. Athletes often feel like they’re living for others: for coaches, sponsors, followers, or results. And in the age of social media, the comparison game only adds fuel to the fire. You scroll through others' highlight reels and wonder why you don’t feel the same excitement anymore. Somewhere along the way, joy turned into obligation.
It’s also important to understand how burnout differs from overtraining syndrome. While they often coexist, they’re not the same. Overtraining syndrome is primarily physiological. It manifests through fatigue that doesn’t go away with rest, consistent performance decline, recurring illness, and elevated heart rates. Burnout is more psychological. You might be physically capable, but emotionally and mentally checked out. One lives in your cells, the other in your soul.
Recovering from burnout isn’t about pushing through. It’s about stopping. Fully. For longer than you’re comfortable with. And not just physically. The recovery that matters most is psychological detachment from sport. That means stepping away from the routine, the identity, the metrics. It means allowing yourself to be more than an athlete. More than the sum of your stats.
Research in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology emphasizes this need for full mental recovery. Athletes often don’t just need time—they need distance. They need to reconnect with who they are when they’re not training. For some, that means traveling. For others, it means sitting still. For many, it means confronting the discomfort of no longer having performance as a crutch.
Recovery might look like walks without a destination. Days with no plan. Eating without calculating macros. Rediscovering what you like outside of chasing goals. Sleeping in. Saying no. Talking to someone—ideally a coach, therapist, or sport psychologist who understands the inner mechanics of burnout. You don’t need to figure it all out on your own. In fact, that’s often how you ended up here in the first place.
And when the fog begins to lift—and it will—the return needs to be deliberate. Not back to where you were, but forward into something better. That means being honest about what led you to the edge. Was it too many competitions? An obsession with improvement? External validation? A fear of being left behind?
Coming back stronger doesn’t mean diving in with even more force. It means revisiting your relationship with your sport. It means redefining success. Maybe it’s not a personal best or a podium. Maybe it’s training without fear. Feeling connected again. Or just finding peace underwater.
Intrinsic motivation—the internal joy of doing something for its own sake—has to come first. When your worth is tied to outcomes, burnout is always around the corner. When your identity rests on being “the best,” there’s no room to rest. But when you move for the love of it, recovery becomes possible. You stop chasing, and you start flowing again.
Part of the process may also involve setting boundaries you didn’t have before. That could mean limiting training days, avoiding toxic comparisons, saying no to events, or protecting your time outside the sport. It could mean reshaping your community—surrounding yourself with people who value your well-being more than your output. It could mean diversifying who you are. Because you are not just a freediver, or a cyclist, or a triathlete. You are a person first.
Some athletes never fully return to their old training loads—and that’s okay. Others come back sharper, more balanced, and with a deeper appreciation for what they do. There’s no universal timeline. What matters is that you come back on your terms, with intention. Because this time, you know what to watch for.
If you're a coach or parent, your role in preventing burnout is crucial. Many athletes suffer in silence, especially those who are high functioning. They may not complain. They may even appear to be thriving. But burnout can exist behind perfect attendance and top scores. Ask deeper questions. Encourage honest check-ins. Celebrate the off days, the boundaries, the signs of balance. Be willing to see the human before the athlete.
If you’re reading this and realizing that something here sounds familiar—don’t panic. You’re not alone. And this doesn’t mean the end of your athletic journey. Burnout is not failure. It’s feedback. A message from your body and mind saying something needs to change. And if you listen, it can lead you somewhere better.
Some of the strongest, most enduring athletes have been through burnout. What they share isn’t just resilience—it’s transformation. They come back not just with better habits, but with a better understanding of who they are. They realize that the goal isn’t constant domination. It’s sustainable passion. It’s alignment. It’s health.
Freediving teaches this beautifully. In a sport where effort sabotages progress, and surrender becomes strength, burnout is often the final lesson. You cannot force your way deeper. You must trust. You must let go. You must befriend stillness.
In the end, burnout has a strange gift hidden inside it: clarity. When everything is stripped away—goals, ego, ambition—you’re left with the truth of your relationship with the sport. And that’s where the rebuild begins. Not from pressure. But from presence.