Ep 06: Treating Mental Illness Like a Physical Injury with Olympian Alexi Pappas

In this episode of No Magic Pill, Blake Mycoskie sits down with Alexi Pappas, Olympic runner, filmmaker, and author of Bravey, for a conversation about what happens when you achieve the goal you have been chasing your whole life and still fall apart.

Alexi represented Greece at the 2016 Olympics and set a national record in the 10K.

She did not take a single day off running after.

She was running 120 miles a week. And she was falling apart.

Alexi had already lost her mother to suicide when she was four years old. She was terrified that her own depression was a death sentence. So she ran from it, literally, until she couldn’t anymore.

What saved her was a reframe. A psychiatrist named Dr. Arpaia looked at Alexi the athlete and told her the truth: you haven’t broken down. You have a brain injury. And injuries heal.

This episode is for anyone in the middle of something hard who needs a reminder that the messy, disorienting, uncomfortable place they are in might not be a crisis. It might be the process.

“My dream now and my goal is not to go to the Olympics anymore. It’s to heal.”  ~Alexi Pappas

The Conversation

The Crockpot

Blake opens by asking Alexi what food she is today. The question is not as strange as it sounds. In her book Bravey, she writes about herself through food metaphors as a way of seeing clearly when direct self-observation feels impossible. Today she says she is butter. Something that can melt and then re-solidify. Something that can return to itself.

Then Blake opens to page 150 of Bravey and asks Alexi to read it aloud. The passage is the one that made him want to start this podcast. It describes healing as a slow cooker: you throw a lot of things in, you wait a very long time, and if you look inside mid-cook, it might not look like anything is happening. She writes that she was an accumulation of all her days, good and bad, and that in time, she became well again.

Blake describes this as the core reason he named the show No Magic Pill. There was no single thing that lifted his depression or ended his chronic anxiety. It was everything together, slowly, over time. And the hardest part of any healing journey is the middle, when you cannot yet see the result of what you are doing and the temptation to lose faith is strongest.

Glop

Alexi introduces a word her psychiatrist gave her for the middle of the healing process: glop. It comes from the biology of butterflies. When a caterpillar enters the chrysalis, it does not simply reshape itself into a butterfly. It liquefies. It becomes total gooey mess. And from that liquid, the butterfly forms.

The difference between a caterpillar and a human, she points out, is that we feel the discomfort of the middle time. And unlike the caterpillar, we can choose to go back. We can abort the process. That is why naming it matters: if you can recognize that you are in glop, you can understand that the disorientation and mess are part of a transformation, not a sign that something has gone wrong.

This leads to one of the most important distinctions in the episode: the difference between pain that is a signal something is wrong and pain that is part of a process of change. Alexi is deeply passionate about helping people learn to tell the difference, because she believes most humans confuse the two and either ignore warning signs or abandon a real transformation because they cannot tolerate the discomfort of it.

You Scratched Your Brain

After the 2016 Olympics, Alexi fell into a severe depression. She did not want to lose momentum. She was afraid of ending up like her mother, who had died by suicide when Alexi was four years old. The message she had absorbed growing up was that her mother was just so sad she had to go, and Alexi had quietly concluded that depression meant death. So when she started to feel not okay, she rejected it and kept running.

Her father and brother eventually arranged appointments for her when she was not yet ready to get help herself. The first doctor she saw told her she was at high risk and was about to kill herself. Alexi felt like a problem. Then she met Dr. Arpaia, who was warm and easy to trust. And in that first appointment, he said something that changed everything.

He asked her if she remembered falling down and scraping her knee as a kid. She said yes. He told her: that is what is happening right now. You fell down and you scratched your brain. You have an injury. And injuries heal.

For Alexi the athlete, the reframe was immediate and total. She could apply everything she knew about physical injury to this. It would not heal overnight. She would need help. Sleep would matter. Not every modality would work for her, just as not every physiotherapy approach works for every injury. But she was helpable. That word, helpable, became her anchor. Her goal shifted from the Olympics to healing, and she brought the same focus and dedication she had given to training directly into that new pursuit.

Deep Rest

Blake shares something he learned on his own healing journey: that the word depressed, broken into syllables a different way, becomes deep rest. The theory is that depression is sometimes the body and nervous system demanding what they have been denied. It forces low energy, forces withdrawal, forces the rest the system is desperately asking for.

Alexi recognizes herself in this immediately. After the Olympics, she did the opposite of resting. New contracts, new coaches, new events, 120 miles a week of running. She thought that keeping momentum was the competitive advantage. She now understands that the depletion she was running from was exactly what was catching up with her.

Blake also mentions the altitude factor, which Alexi brings up: high altitude can worsen depression. He was living in Jackson Hole when his own depression began, and hearing Alexi name this is a genuine revelation. Both of them note it as something more people should know, especially anyone who has recently moved to elevation and started feeling worse without understanding why.

How to Help Someone Who Is Suffering

One of the most practical parts of the conversation is about friendship and what actually helps when someone is struggling. Alexi describes her friend Anne, who knew Alexi needed to buy a wedding dress and simply showed up: I am picking you up at 10. We are going to Portland. I am bringing you a juice. No mention of anything being wrong. No question of whether Alexi wanted help. Just action.

Blake connects this to something he learned from his friend Pat Dossett, a Navy SEAL. In the teams, they do not ask if someone needs help, because the answer is almost always no. Instead, they just do the thing. I am coming over today with lunch. Not: do you want lunch? The question gives someone in pain an easy out. The action does not.

Alexi adds the layer of shame: when you are suffering, you may not only be unable to ask for help, you may feel like a burden for needing it. A friend who acts without making you explain yourself removes that shame entirely. They know something would be helpful. They just do it. That is what saved her more than once.

Physical Cues the Body Sends Before the Crash

Alexi shares advice from a Japanese physiotherapist she worked with in LA: the parts of the body with the most nerve endings are the face, hands, stomach, and feet. When something is off in any of those areas, it is the nervous system signaling overload. For Alexi, it is canker sores, eye twitches, or unusual skin breakouts. For Blake, it was a burning tongue that took months to trace back to overwork and stress.

The physio told her: if you have something really abnormal showing up, take a day off. This is not superstition. It is the nervous system communicating in the only language the body has. When she looks back at her collapse after the Olympics, she can now see the signs that were there and that she ignored.

Her point is a preventive one. Mental health crises rarely arrive as a monster jumping out of a closet. They arrive at the end of a process that had earlier, smaller signals. Learning to read those signals and respond to them, by slowing down before the crash, is how you close the gap between a dip and a collapse.

Personal Laws

Alexi introduces a concept from her book: personal laws. These are the rules we either consciously adopted or absorbed somewhere along the way that feel true, even when they are not. They are the unconscious beliefs that organize our behavior and our interpretation of what happens to us. The problem is that humans are more comfortable being right than being happy, so we tend to find evidence for our personal laws even when the evidence requires distorting reality to fit.

Blake immediately recognizes himself in this. His personal law was not feeling enough. It drove an obsessive work ethic and a pattern of entering relationships that confirmed the belief, because confirmation, even of a painful belief, felt more familiar than the alternative. He traces his healing partly to recognizing that the not-enough story was a personal law, not a fact.

Alexi connects this to therapy: part of what makes it useful is having someone help you catch yourself in the act of making your personal law come true. Going slower, asking for input, finding people you trust to tell you when you seem out of touch. We cannot always see our own blind spots.

Try Hard and the Question of Commitment

Blake is a parent, and he asks Alexi about her father’s parenting philosophy, which she writes about in the book. Her father raised her and her brother after her mother’s death. He never pushed achievement. He pushed commitment. Whether she came in first or last at a cross-country race, they went to the same post-race pizza afterward. His response to failure was always the same: okay, just go try again.

What she understands now is that he was essentially removing the option to quit while also refusing to punish failure. The message was: the good news and the bad news is that you can do this. And the good news and the bad news is that you are going to have to. That is not comfortable. But it is honest, and it turns out to be one of the most empowering things a parent can give.

Blake relates this to his 11-year-old, who just started playing water polo and is getting crushed by older kids. He is trying to figure out the right balance between encouragement and relief, and Alexi’s story gives him a frame: commitment does not mean punishment for struggling. It means staying in it.

Who Knows

Near the end of the conversation, both Blake and Alexi land on the same idea from different directions: a good relationship with the unknown makes life better. Blake has a tattoo on his arm that says “Who knows?” from a conversation with an Argentine friend who ended a long story about cause and effect with that phrase. It became one of the most useful reminders in his life.

Alexi frames it as needing a reorientation with the unknown. We do not know every kind of human that exists. We do not know the job we will have in ten years, because it may not exist yet. Trying to control for all of that is not just exhausting. It is based on a false premise about how much agency we actually have. And when you release that premise, something opens up.

They close on a line Alexi says that Blake compares, smiling, to Matthew McConaughey: as long as you can keep moving, you’re still in the game. That is the life. And it is enough.

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About Alexi Pappas

Alexi Pappas is an Olympic runner, filmmaker, and author. She represented Greece at the 2016 Rio Olympics, where she set the Greek national record in the 10,000 meters. Her memoir, Bravey: Chasing Dreams, Befriending Pain, and Other Big Ideas, is a book about athletic excellence, mental health, grief, and the art of becoming.

Alexi grew up in California after losing her mother to suicide when she was four years old. She attended Dartmouth, where she competed in distance running, before pursuing professional athletics and filmmaking simultaneously. She co-wrote, co-directed, and starred in the feature film Tracktown. She is also the host of the Mentor Buffet podcast. She lives in Los Angeles

Links

Website:alexipappas.com

Mentor Buffet Podcast: Watch Blake on Mentor Buffet