Former UFC champ Miesha Tate offers advice on overcoming mental health hurdles in sports

Miesha Tate made it to the top of the proverbial mountain. And like most who make it there, she experienced what it was like to come back down when she wasn’t ready.

Tate won the UFC women’s bantamweight title with an upset of Holly Holm in 2016. A few months prior, Holm upset Tate’s fiercest rival, Ronda Rousey, to win the belt. And like Holm, Tate dropped the title in her first attempted defense against Amanda Nunes.

Almost as if to perfectly prove how up and down emotions can be in the sport, Tate had the high of submitting Holm and a short reign as champion, then had the low of the loss of the belt. And years later, she can take a shred of a moral victory knowing she lost the belt to the woman regarded as the pound-for-pound GOAT. She had the up, the down, the middle.

And to be certain, Tate said, it can take a toll on a fighter’s mental health.

“It’s like a spiritual comfortability where you realize that there’s so much more to life than just as simple as winning and losing,” Tate recently told MMA Junkie Radio. “You just want to go beyond that and above that and be more than just defined by that, which is what I was very tied to. If you’ve ever seen ‘The Weight of Gold,’ it’s a really good documentary – I highly suggest watching it – about Olympic athletes and how they put their whole life into this career.

“Then afterwards, it’s like nobody cares, and what happens after that? Nobody really follows it that much unless you win gold, but even a silver medalist, which sometimes can be so, so, so, so close – but it’s like, ‘Well, it was silver. We only care about gold.’ When we raise our kids to think like that, or we allow ourselves to become that, then we’re only as good as our last win or last loss.”

That may be something that’s been a slow burn for Tate, who now is a mother of two. She retired in 2016, but returned in 2021.

After a pair of decision losses, she submitted Julia Avila this past December for a $50,000 bonus. But in the second phase of her career, maybe she thinks differently than in the past.

“When I won, I was a winner. When I lost, I was a loser. And that was not a good way to go through your life,” Tate said. “It can make you feel suicidal at times. It can make you feel addicted to the sport in a way that’s like, ‘Look, I lost my last one. The only way to fix it is through a win.’ Well, that’s very short-sighted, because what if you don’t get a win on your next one? What if you’re burying yourself? What if you’re digging a hole? What if you’re burning the candle at both ends and the middle? Eventually, you’re going to burn out

“This is where I think athletes get the sort of mental illness, if you will, or the depression or these suicidal tendencies at times, because we throw ourselves so hard into the outcome and we forget that it’s more about the effort than it is about the outcome. As a society, we don’t really embrace that kind of thinking, so it’s going to take a little bit of a cultural shift.

“If I could put that out there for a few people that are doing sports, or just even to understand that there’s more to it – there’s more to life. There’s a life after sports. You’ve got to learn to have a little bit of balance so that we can have our worthiness, our greatness within ourselves, as opposed to just the sport.”