Perfect Storm for Brooks’ Anxiety to Return

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The first time it happened was when I was about eight or nine. My mom was in the hospital and my dad, a firefighter, was working a night shift. I stayed at the home of another firefighter with his family. Late at night, they had to bring over a neighbor who was a doctor to convince me I wasn’t having a heart attack.

Throughout grade school, I would often get light-headed and feel faint during church, especially during the kneeling parts of the Catholic mass. On several occasions, I’d have to ask to be excused and sit outside on the church steps. Nuns or teachers would tell me to sit there with my head between my knees to bring the blood back to my head. They didn’t know that I immediately felt fine once the fresh air of the outdoors hit me.

I was cool for a while, probably over a decade before I started having weird moments when I turned 27 and dropped out of law school.

Then, at least fifteen or so years passed before I had to pull my car over and call for a family member to meet me in a parking lot in New Jersey because I swore I was going to pass out. I blamed it on imbibing a bit too much and dehydration. But, that wasn’t the case. Suddenly, every time I got behind the wheel to drive, I would feel funky. My heart would jump around. I’d get the sweats. My vision would become tunneled.

All of this was anxiety and I never knew when it would strike.

The “dormant” periods were never really dormant. They were just different, more subtle. I may have had a bit of OCD in excessive cleaning around the house or constantly worrying about health issues or existential matters like what I was doing with my life, but they did not disrupt my life significantly. When it did interfere with life, I never saw it coming.

While I have had my battles with anxiety, I cannot fathom what Brandon Brooks is going through. I know how debilitating anxiety can be, but I was never trying to play professional football in front of 70,000 fans with millions watching on television while having a full-blown attack. I cannot imagine the magnitude of the mental and physiological effects that anxiety would produce in those circumstances, let alone battling NFL competition. Any man that still takes the field while enduring an anxiety attack is a true warrior.

The weird thing about anxiety is you never really know what’s going to bring it on or make it unmanageable. It could be a color, a smell, a sound, or even a place such as a car for me or a football field for Brandon. Yet, in the face of all of that, at the mid-season mark this year, Brandon Brooks graded out as the top Offensive Lineman in the NFL by Pro Football Focus. In recognition of that, the Eagles signed him to a much-deserved contract extension making him the highest-paid guard in the NFL.

That contract could have precipitated Brooks’ recent anxiety attack, which forced him to leave the game against the Seahawks. We know, from earlier interviews, that the source of Brooks’ anxiety is a drive to be perfect and a fear of failure.

In a 2016 NBC Sports Philadelphia article by Reuben Frank, Brooks attributed his anxiety to a strive for perfection.

“For me, it’s just I always want to be perfect in what I do and if I’m not perfect it’s not good enough, and sometimes that just really weighs on you,” he said.

“And I have to learn how to kind of chill out and understand it’s OK to make mistakes. It’s OK to not be perfect.”

Brooks’ contract extension making him the highest-paid guard in the NFL had to put even more pressure on him to be perfect, to play like he deserved that title. He’s a prideful guy that doesn’t want to disappoint, to fail.

If you’re superstitious at all, you know the comfort a ritual or item can often bring. Anxiety is similar. The first time that I flew in over fifteen years, a friend gave me a couple of Xanax for the flight. I didn’t use them, but just having them in my pocket provided enough comfort to survive a flight to Frankfurt, Germany.

Lane Johnson seems to be Brandon Brooks’ Xanax. His security blanket, for lack of a better analogy. They even puke together on game days.

We have a guy recently made the highest-paid player at his position who suffers from a sometimes debilitating desire to be perfect with his safety blanket, Lane Johnson, not on the field with him due to the NFL’s concussion protocol. This weekend was pretty much the perfect storm for anxiety to come roaring back.

Brooks is everything Philadelphians crave in a player. He’s elite at his position. He works his tail off, returning from an Achilles faster than any athlete that I can remember. Even while signing a lucrative new contract, he still craves to perform at an elite level—the perfect level to a fault. He’s honest about his struggles and makes no excuses. This guy is a pure beast.

Anxiety isn’t a physical ailment that you can wrap with tape or wear a brace for and yet it can generate a full spectrum of physical symptoms. Marijuana helps, but that’s not permitted in the NFL even though Brooks would qualify for a medical marijuana card in Pennsylvania with an anxiety diagnosis. Hopefully, Lane Johnson returns this week and they can vomit and dominate together.

If I can offer a bit of advice for Brandon and for anxiety sufferers everywhere, it’s to accept your anxiety as it comes and do nothing when it rears its annoying head. Acknowledge its arrival and just be with it. Leave it runs its course. That’s the best advice I’ve gotten in years of therapy and a couple of powerful books. Embrace it, if you can. Welcome it.

Resisting anxiety and trying to make it disappear usually exacerbates things. Try not to think about it and that’s all you’ll think about. Breathing exercises to calm anxiety can often create hyperventilation and chest-breathing, which only intensifies it. That’s because anxiety thrives on resistance and fear. Without resistance, anxiety tends to dissipate and pass far more quickly. That’s the experience I’ve had after years of struggling with it.

More power to Brandon Brooks. His courage to openly discuss his anxiety in a world that is often quick to judge any kind of mental struggles simply because we, as a society, are scared of them or simply do not understand enough about them is inspiring. If Brandon can accomplish such success on the field against the world’s best competition, anyone can achieve success in their daily lives while having anxiety tag along.

The Eagles organization and the fans of Philadelphia need to be there for Brandon Brooks and let him know that it is okay not to be perfect and it’s okay to have anxiety.