Athletes on psychedelics: 5 Questions for sports psychologist Courtney Walton

Walton discusses whether psychedelics could be used in sports

Earlier this year, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers made headlines in the U.S. when he openly talked about trying ayahuasca. “I really feel like that experience paved the way for me to have the best season of my career,” Rodgers explained on the Aubrey Marcus podcast. Rodgers is one of many athletes who have discussed their use of psychedelics. Mike Tyson spoke at last year’s Wonderland conference about how 5-MeO-DMT changed his life. Former NHL and UFC athletes have tried psychedelic ceremonies to heal from physical and psychological pain, and adventure athletes — surfers, skiers, skydivers — have a long history of psychedelic use. Endurance athletes, too, have begun experimenting with psychedelics.

While there are many anecdotal accounts describing the use of psychedelics in sports, scientific evidence is scant, according to Courtney Walton, a clinical psychologist working at the University of Melbourne. Walton studies the mental well-being of athletes, and earlier this year, he co-authored a paper with Monash University researcher Paul Liknaitzky exploring the possibility of using psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy as a mental health treatment for athletes. The Microdose spoke with Walton about how psychedelics could be used in sports.

Why do you think it's important to study athletes’ mental health?

Generally speaking, you start to see mental health issues arise in people between 15 and 25 years old, and that tends to overlap with people’s careers in sports. For the majority of athletes, that age range includes the peak of their careers. 

Athletics can also lead to situations that introduce risk, like concussions, and that can influence mental health. When you’ve wrapped your entire identity and sacrificed other parts of your life for your sport, it can be difficult to step away due to injury or retirement. Not all athletes are professionals, so they’re trying to make the finances work. Another factor is isolation, particularly in individual sports– you’re on your own, and your sport can take priority over everything else in your life. 

In the past, athletes’ difficulties with mental health were pushed to the side; there was a focus on toughness and resilience. But we’re in a nice moment where that's turning. 

Do you think psychedelics could play a role in treating those kinds of issues?

We’re in a moment where I think psychedelics might be helpful in theory. In Australia, we’re quite far from this being a realistic option for treatment, so I see this more as an opportunity to explore. 

Psychedelics might be useful to break through barriers in traditional treatment. In clinical settings, athletes have been conditioned to mask difficulties, and they might be resistant or hesitant to engage with traditional psychological treatments. Particularly for high profile athletes, there’s uncertainty about how they may be perceived for speaking about their mental health. My understanding of psychedelic experiences and trials is that they could help people open up more. 

One primary area that struck me as interesting is the research around psychedelic interventions at the end of life or during significant illness. It might sound crazy, but I see a parallel there between that and retirement in sports. Whether it’s an autonomous retirement that the athlete decided on or due to significant injury, there’s a huge amount of difficulty for athletes in that transition phase. It’s a period where they’re at risk for mental health difficulties. I thought that seemed like the best place to start with psychedelic interventions, where treatment might help athletes gain a better sense of their broader identity and acceptance during that transition period.

 

Could psychedelic therapy ever be used by athletes currently competing in their sport?

There has been a bit of research about the potential psychological benefits, but most information about psychedelics’ effects have been anecdotes from people experimenting on themselves. The way I see things — and the way we discuss it in our paper — is from the framework of structured psychotherapy. That would take place in a clinically controlled setting with very clear dosing and therapy regimens. It’s likely that this kind of treatment would occur during a significant break in competing. If the athlete is in a state where that mental health is causing them distress, it’s likely that this is someone who's already tried more traditional therapy without much benefit. They're not going to be competing in their sport at that point. It's important to make the distinction between psychedelic therapy as an intervention away from sport and while competing. 

But the latter brings up questions of ethics. If there are benefits of psychedelics for performance, we need to really understand what those are, and how long they last. At what point is it fair for an athlete who's taking part in an intervention like this to be competing if they've potentially got some kind of advantage? I don't think there's much reason to think there would be, but on a longer term basis, that’s something sports organizations will need to understand.

Is there any indication governing sports organizations are thinking about psychedelics?

At the moment, as far as I’m aware, it’s a real sport-by-sport and country-by-country situation. I can’t really speak to what’s being done, because it’s all behind closed doors. But I know that publicly, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) has started to openly discuss psychedelics and they are exploring collaborations with Johns Hopkins. 

My view on this is neutral; I don’t argue that it’s something sports organizations should be doing now, or that they need to do now. But as psychedelics attract more interest and attention, athletes will be doing them, whether in a structured clinical setting or just on their own. It will be important to be ready for it: how will we handle it if athletes want to take part in psychedelic trials? The view of our paper was that this is all going to come, and we should start thinking about what we’re going to do when that happens. 

Academic papers take awhile to get published; you started writing this paper towards the end of 2019. What cultural changes have you seen between then and its publication in 2022?

When I first started working on this paper, the colleagues and family members I told about it were like, “Whoa, that’s pretty bold.” But just a few years later, it’s become far more normalized. As someone who is not fully immersed in the psychedelics world, it’s been confusing — and I think it’s confusing for the general public, too — because on the one side you have people talking about these drugs as if they’re going to change the world, and that they’re the most important thing to come out of psychiatry. But then you also have people with equal levels of expertise claiming it’s junk science and overblown. It’s very difficult for people, including sports organizations and athletes, to know where we really are in understanding the value of these interventions.  

There’s a risk of jumping too far ahead too quickly, so I’m a big fan of these clinical trials to continue building evidence. Once we get a better understanding of risk, we could slowly build towards trials for athletes and understanding potential performance-based benefits, but those trials take a long time, so it’s a long way until professional sports organizations could actually become involved in using psychedelics as treatment. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.