Rebecca Adlington launching SMA Nutrition UK and Ireland campaign
Olympian Rebecca Adlington has opened up in an exclusive interview with Express.co.uk about anxiety so intense that she couldn’t bear to go to work.
The 34-year-old swimming champion’s mental health struggle peaked after she left the sport, but she still feels enormous sympathy for tennis stars like Emma Raducanu, whose own issues directly related to sporting pressure.
“Sometimes I had [anxiety] when I wasn’t competing and I had days when I didn’t even want to go to work let alone compete and be at my physical best,” she revealed.
“There is an immense amount of pressure and there’s an immense amount of expectation [so] it’s incredibly brave of Emma, I think,” Rebecca explained of the 20-year-old’s decision to discuss her panic attacks and anxiety struggles publicly.
That’s something Rebecca has also chosen to do, revealing that she’d suffered “panic attacks” which appeared to have no obvious trigger, leading to her seeking advice from a therapist in 2019.
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“A lot of people who go to therapy have a traumatic event that’s happened, but there’s another pocket of people where there wasn’t a specific event that brought it on and I was one of those people,” she began.
“I just assumed panic attacks were normal and that everyone kind of suffered from the same level of anxiety and panic,” Rebecca added, explaining that the lack of public discussion about it had left her unaware how serious the issue was.
“When something’s not openly spoken about all the time, you think: ‘Everybody has that, everybody has bad days, so why wouldn’t there be days where you wake up and feel anxious?'” she explained.
“It wasn’t until I spoke to my husband – my boyfriend at the time and [others who] told me: ‘This isn’t normal.'”
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Rebecca says that talking therapy might not be the right fit for everyone, but that it “definitely worked” in her case, arming her with the knowledge of how to deal with anxiety should it reoccur.
She has now revealed that she hasn’t had a single panic attack since starting the therapy.
“I still feel reall, really anxious but I know the right techniques now [to ward them off],” Rebecca, who also tragically miscarried a baby last year, explained.
“I feel like if I address the anxiety it doesn’t feel like a cloud and a thunderstorm that’s going to build up.”
She added that she sees it as “massively” important to remove stigma from mental health struggles, with the aim of ensuring no-one has to suffer alone.
Rebecca also praised the “bravery” of Emma Raducanu for speaking out after she was forced to retire from Wimbledon back in 2021 with “breathing difficulties” and “dizziness” when she was 18 at the time.
It was speculated that she’d had a panic attack on the court, with ex-pro John McEnroe explaining he thought things might have become too much for her.
Emma later made a Twitter (X) statement admitting that the tense moment “caught up with me” – and Rebecca has declared her an “absolute superstar”, adding that the world could benefit from being more “open and honest” about struggles behind the scenes.
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