Woodward was barely a teenager when he started searching for answers on Google 🥇
While training with his sights set on the 2016 Rio Olympics, he was secretly carrying an addiction to adult content that had followed him since childhood. He found an article that described a threshold of more than 10 hours a day as a warning sign, and that was when he began to understand that what he was experiencing had a name.
Today, now retired from competitive diving, he says that the high-performance mindset can become a trap: when your self-esteem depends solely on your results, any void gets filled with whatever. Add another factor that few people see: constant travel, empty hotel rooms, the loneliness of the professional athlete.
He is not the only one. Steve Weatherford, Terry Crews and Nick Willis also spoke about similar battles. Woodward decided to add his voice so that no other young athlete has to search alone online for what is happening to them: “It affected my confidence, my concentration, my maturity, my emotional control, my patience. I wonder whether it also affected some aspect of my strength”, the athlete said.
