THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH FEELING VULNERABLE! 💭 | Jude Bellingham interview

I think it is crucial and luckily it's something that probably gets talked about more now than it did in previous generations from what I've been told.

I think there's just so many with the kind of development of social media and technology, there's almost more ways to view this negative content.

There's more ways to attack someone negatively. There's more ways to make someone feel down.

And I think a lot of people are still there's still a stigma around talking about it.

I know for myself there's been times when I probably needed someone to talk to and wanted to keep up this kind of, you know, athlete, macho look of I don't need anyone.

But the truth is that you do and you'll feel a lot better for talking about your feelings and your emotions.

And from the perspective of a sports person, you know, the love you receive is outstanding.

It's huge. But for every person who loves you or every few people that love you, there's always one person that doesn't.

and maybe despises you for the team you play for, something you've done.

And, yeah, that can be difficult. That can be really tough for athletes.

And I can really empathise with athletes who struggle with their mental health

because it's the cornerstone for all your physical stuff and your performance if your confidence isn't there because of your mental health.

And I think it's really important that Laureus address that as something that's, you know,

a big factor in sports and society. And I think if

us as athletes are vulnerable with, you know, it seems like we have the world at our feet or our hands and we can do whatever we want and we earn so and so much money that we can never be affected by.

And I think if we can show a vulnerability about mental health, it can definitely open up a bigger conversation for those people who are struggling in the darkness in normal society as well.

And like I said, that's the duty of people like myself in the situations that we're in to be role models in that sense as well.

You know, there's nothing wrong with feeling vulnerable every now and then. I have my moments as well where I doubt myself or I feel like I'm not as confident as I should be or I was.

And it's important to have someone to talk to and to address your mental health and to take care of it like you would your body.

You know, you might go to the gym and work out eat clean but if you're not paying attention to your mental health and how you're feeling

those things stack up on you as well and yeah being

someone that's there for people to talk to as well you know again

people in our position probably

have teammates that sometimes you think oh god I probably wouldn't go to him for that and it's like no I think I'd rather be the kind

a teammate that someone comes to and dumps it dumps their kind

of their mental health issues on absolutely i'd rather

take it on and listen to it and try and help them out um

you know i think it's so so key you know there's been

so many examples of people who have struggled with it in

in the past and it leads to horrible circumstances so um it's really about trying to prevent those kind of circumstances in society in sport um and being open to to hearing them

definitely yeah definitely i think at the remember when i was

um at birmingham and uh you could you

could put your name into twitter and you could see every tweet about you within an

hour um and it was very quickly that i just

decided that why why am i why should

i let the opinion of people who don't know as much as the people i'm around um validate how i think about

myself you know um you know I always

felt I was a good player long before I saw it on Twitter and yet I was reading it to try and for what to feel better and then you obviously read one that

there's obviously isn't nice and that has the the same effect

but opposite and it's just like you know why would it why would I do that why would I put that on my own mental health and you know I think there's there's aspects of social media that's so valuable to an athlete I think um

more and more people now interact with that as opposed to things like press conferences

tv interviews so when you can be honest and authentic

with fans it gives them a great insight into how you felt about a

game how you're doing with certain things your day-to-day life to

to try and be more relatable to people but um yeah

there's also a negative element that i've decided to i know a lot of athletes have decided to as well just to slightly avoid to try and avoid that kind

of added negativity you know it's uh there's probably enough

of it in the game there's enough pressure there's no need to try and seek

it out you know so yeah I've kind of got to

the place now where when I do read stuff that's negative it

doesn't really affect me anyway but I'd still rather not see it so if there's I don't go looking for things that I know are only going to make me feel negative No, definitely not.

I do think more needs to be done. I still think athletes are seen as these people who should kind of shut up and take it, which is a bit of an old-fashioned approach to it.