Featured guest interview
Reframing Mental Health For A New Generation Of Athletes
By the time most professional athletes hang up their skates, cleats, or jerseys, the public assumes the hardest battles are behind them. For former professional hockey goaltender Chuck Thuss, the most significant battles began long after the final buzzer.
Today, Thuss is the Founder and CEO of Compassionate Connection and co-host of the mental-health-focused podcast Warriors Unmasked. His work sits at a unique intersection: elite performance, emotional resilience, and spiritual grounding. But the credibility he brings to the conversation does not come from theory. It comes from experience—raw, personal, and at times, life-threatening.
The Dream That Came With Hidden Costs
Raised in Canada, where hockey culture runs as deep as winter itself, Thuss followed a familiar path for talented young players. His dream was the National Hockey League. That pursuit took him to the United States for collegiate hockey and ultimately into an eight-year professional career across multiple leagues.
From the outside, it looked like success. From the inside, it felt like survival.
Long before mental health became a mainstream conversation, Thuss was quietly wrestling with what he would later recognize as test anxiety in college. He studied diligently and loved learning, yet during exams his mind would go blank. The same invisible pressure later migrated onto the ice. Before games, he became physically ill. At one point, a panic attack landed him in the emergency room—an event misunderstood at the time because the language and awareness around mental health simply weren’t there.
When his playing career ended, he assumed the problem would end with it. Instead, the anxiety intensified, deepened into depression, and spiraled into suicidal ideation. What followed was an eight-year personal journey of healing, therapy, and self-discovery that would ultimately redefine his purpose.
From Performance To Purpose
Thuss now describes his work as existing where three forces meet: mental health, mental performance, and life itself. Many athletes initially seek help because their performance declines. They assume the problem is technical or physical. Thuss’s approach is to “look under the hood.”
What he often finds is not a failing jump shot or a missed save, but stress at home, academic pressure, fractured relationships, or the absence of self-care. His methodology is conversational and deeply human. Through guided dialogue, he helps athletes identify root causes, develop actionable paths forward, and build practical tools that elevate not only their sport but their overall well-being.
The distinction he draws between mental health and mental performance is subtle but important. Mental health relates to emotional stability, stress management, and daily functioning. Mental performance, by contrast, is about how the mind engages with the task at hand—clarity, confidence, visualization, and focus. One influences the other, and in Thuss’s view, neither can be optimized in isolation.
The Power Of Quiet, Breath, And Vulnerability
In a world saturated with digital noise, Thuss advocates for practices that seem almost countercultural: silence, breathing, and vulnerability.
Quiet time—whether labeled meditation, mindfulness, or prayer—is central to his routine. He begins each day with 20 to 40 minutes of stillness, describing it as both mental detox and spiritual alignment. For athletes accustomed to constant stimulation, he frames silence not as inactivity but as strategic recovery for the mind.
Breathing exercises, often overlooked, form another pillar. Controlled breath regulates the nervous system, grounds emotional spikes, and restores clarity. The third pillar—vulnerability—may be the most transformative. By encouraging athletes to speak openly in confidential environments, he helps dismantle the stigma that often prevents them from seeking support in the first place.
Journaling, too, emerges as a recurring recommendation. Writing externalizes internal chaos, turning swirling thoughts into structured reflection. Clarity, Thuss argues, is often found not by thinking more, but by releasing thoughts onto paper.
Warriors Unmasked: Normalizing The Conversation
The philosophy behind his coaching extends naturally into Warriors Unmasked, the podcast he co-founded during the global pandemic. What began as conversations between two former athletes evolved into more than 200 episodes featuring firefighters, military veterans, teachers, engineers, and everyday professionals.
The objective is straightforward yet ambitious: normalize mental health discussions and reduce stigma. Mental health, Thuss emphasizes, does not discriminate by income, profession, or status. High-earning athletes and hourly workers alike face internal battles that are invisible to spectators.
One of the podcast’s earliest guests was a man who had been set on fire and left for dead—yet rebuilt his life, started a family, and found renewed purpose. Stories like these underscore a recurring theme in Thuss’s work: the resilience of the human spirit often exceeds the limits people imagine for themselves.
A Broader Cultural Shift
What makes Thuss’s message resonate today is timing as much as substance. Professional athletes are increasingly vocal about mental health struggles, dismantling long-held myths that financial success or public acclaim immunize individuals from internal hardship. The emerging narrative is not one of weakness but of holistic strength—recognizing that peak performance is unsustainable without psychological well-being.
Thuss’s own life illustrates this shift. He remains candid about continuing to manage his mental health daily. The tools he shares are not relics of a completed journey but practices he still relies on. In doing so, he models an important principle: maintenance is not failure; it is maturity.
The Human Advantage
In a performance-driven culture obsessed with metrics, Thuss offers a quieter but enduring advantage—the cultivation of inner stability. His work suggests that the next frontier of excellence is not simply faster, stronger, or more skilled, but more self-aware.
The lesson is not confined to athletes. Whether in boardrooms, classrooms, or households, the interplay between mental health and mental performance shapes outcomes far beyond sports. The courage to pause, breathe, and speak honestly may be among the most undervalued competitive edges available today.
Chuck Thuss once measured success by the scoreboard. Now, he measures it by something less visible but far more lasting: the number of people who realize it is okay not to be okay—and who discover that asking for help can be the first true act of strength.
Interview Transcript:
Aaron Olsen:
Chuck, welcome to American Dreams. Today we have Chuck Thuss on the show. He is a former professional hockey player, founder of The Compassionate Connection, and host of the Warriors Unmasked podcast. Chuck, welcome to today’s show.
Chuck Thuss:
Aaron, thank you for having me. It’s an honor and a pleasure to be with you today.
Aaron Olsen:
Thank you. We appreciate you being here. For the listeners, could you give us a little bit of your background? How did you start off in life, and what brought you to where you are today?
Chuck Thuss:
Absolutely, and thank you.
I was born and raised in Canada, and for many people who know Canada, hockey is a huge sport there. Most young men and women grow up playing it, and I was no different. My dream was to play in the National Hockey League, and that dream eventually brought me to the United States, where I was fortunate enough to play college hockey and then go on to play professional hockey.
I never made it to the NHL for a few different reasons, which we can certainly talk about. But even as a young man, Aaron, I used to get really nervous. People would just say, “Well, Chuck gets nervous about how things are going to play out,” or, “He gets nervous about what’s going to happen.”
As I moved into college, that started to show up in the classroom. I had a really tough time taking tests. I would sit down to take an exam, and my mind would go blank. I never really understood what was happening because I loved school. I studied hard. I was always in class. I handed in all of my assignments on time. But when it came time for test taking, I had this mental block. I couldn’t transfer the information from my mind onto the paper.
What I would come to find out many years later was that I had test anxiety, but I didn’t know it at the time.
After I left college, I thought, “Well, this is going to be great. Now I get to keep playing hockey. Whatever was going on in the classroom, I’m going to leave that behind. It won’t impact me anymore.”
But it didn’t take long before it started showing up in my hockey game as well. For eight years of professional hockey, I found myself getting sick before every game I played. I was physically getting ill. Again, nobody really asked why. Mental health wasn’t really talked about in the mid-to-late ’90s and early 2000s, so nobody asked me what was going on or whether I was okay. I don’t blame anybody for that, because it just wasn’t part of the conversation then.
One night, I even found myself in the emergency room after what I would later come to understand was a panic attack.
After my playing days ended, I thought, “Whatever that was, it happened at the arena. It happened before hockey games. I’m going to leave that behind.”
But it didn’t take very long before I was living with full-on anxiety, deep, dark depression, and suicidal ideation. I wanted to take my life because I just couldn’t figure out what was happening to me.
Eventually, I made a call for help. That call began about an eight-year journey with the woman I often say saved my life. Through that process, I came to understand why I was here, what had happened, and how I had gotten to that place. I found a new purpose in my life, and I gained a whole set of tools to help manage the things I was dealing with: anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and more.
That journey allowed me to start living life at a really high level. It was very transformative.
To go back a little bit, during my time at Miami University in Ohio, where I played college hockey, I didn’t play a minute of varsity hockey for three years. Then, in my senior year, I had a lot of success, and that launched me into my eight-year professional hockey career.
Today, I’m still on the journey myself. I still manage my mental health very intentionally, and I make sure I do certain things every day to stay healthy. But I’ve also dedicated my life to reaching back and helping other athletes who are going through some of the things I went through.
I want to give them the tools I’ve obtained, along with the wisdom and knowledge to understand what they’re dealing with. I want them to know that it’s okay not to be okay, and it’s okay to raise your hand and ask for help.
Every day I get to work in the mental health space, I feel grateful for the journey I’ve been on and grateful that I can now reach back and support these young men and women on their own journeys.
Aaron Olsen:
That’s great. It really is a noble cause. I feel like mental health still doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves in society today. It’s a much bigger issue than many people realize.
With The Compassionate Connection, what exactly do you do? You mentioned that you work with a lot of athletes and meet with them. How does The Compassionate Connection help individuals?
Chuck Thuss:
Thank you. I really work at the intersection of mental health, mental performance, and life. Where all three of those meet is where I do my work.
A lot of athletes, once they start struggling on the field, on the ice, on the court, or wherever they play, assume it’s purely performance-based. But a lot of times, when you look under the hood, there’s much more going on.
It might be stress. It might be school. It might be relationships. It might be something happening at home. It might be issues with friends. There are many different things that can be going on. Sometimes it’s even a lack of self-care.
Often, they don’t realize what is leading to the decline in their performance. They don’t recognize how what is happening in life, or what is happening with their mental health, is impacting their performance in their sport.
What I do is work through conversation, questions, and meetings to find out what these young men and women are struggling with and what they’re dealing with every day. Then we help find solutions. We give them a path forward and tools to manage it, so that not only is their game elevated, but their mental health is strengthened and their life is enhanced.
It’s really a three-pronged approach.
Aaron Olsen:
What are some examples of the tools you share with these athletes?
Chuck Thuss:
I love that question. Thank you.
I’m a big believer in quiet time, also known as meditation or mindfulness. We are so stimulated by everyday life, whether it’s the outside world, our phones, social media, or everything coming at us all at once.
Then athletes enter the sports world, and they have coaches, expectations, demands, and pressure coming at them too. I believe we need to detox. We need downtime. We need quiet time. It’s good for the mind, and it’s good for the soul.
I’m also a big believer in breathing. The power of breathing is so underrated. We often think of it as something we automatically do to stay alive, but there is tremendous power in breathing.
And I’m a big believer in vulnerability. The more we can open up, the more we can talk, and the more we can share in a confidential space, the more we can start to work through what we’re going through.
Those three things — quiet time, breathing, and vulnerability — are really big pieces of the work that I do.
Aaron Olsen:
I really like what you said about quiet time.
I’m religious, and there’s a phrase I often think about from the Bible: a soothsayer — someone you might go to in an attempt to find peace. I sometimes catch myself flooding my mind and attention with digital audio or entertainment while I’m driving, commuting, or doing random mundane tasks.
But when I step back, I realize that by the end of the day, I’m not necessarily doing that well mentally. My brain isn’t as clear, and I feel a little more on edge. I’ve realized that when I’m constantly reaching for the next station or the next podcast, I’m often looking for something to soothe me, but I’m not really getting the peace my brain is craving.
So I really like what you said about quiet time and the importance of it.
Chuck Thuss:
I’m a big believer, Aaron, that there is a lot of wisdom in the silence.
I’m also very spiritual, and I have a strong relationship with our Creator. I believe it’s in those quiet times that we strengthen that connection. We’re so busy talking, working, commuting, taking care of our kids, taking care of our families, and handling whatever our work requires. Everyone’s day looks a little different, but I don’t think we often take the time to listen the way we should.
We ask a lot of questions. We pray a lot. But when do we go quiet enough to hear the answers?
I’m a big believer in that quiet time. There’s a tremendous amount of wisdom there, and it’s something I value deeply. I actually start every morning with anywhere from 20 to 30 or 40 minutes of quiet time, just sitting in that quiet, meditative state. I love it.
Aaron Olsen:
A couple of years ago, I was going through some of my grandmother’s things and found her journals. I noticed that, without fail, for years she wrote something in her journal. She would write the date and then the time she started writing.
Sometimes it was around 9:00 at night. Other times it was 11:50 p.m. As I thought about it and talked with others, I realized that writing can be a mental exercise. It can help clear the brain and help process your thoughts and what’s going on in your life.
Chuck Thuss:
Yes, absolutely. It’s very powerful.
That’s another thing I encourage the young men and women I work with to do: get those emotions, thoughts, and experiences out on paper. A lot of times, they create noise and chaos in our minds. The more we can get those things out, the clearer we become.
Once we have that clarity, we can start to strengthen that connection and begin to get the answers and perspective we’re looking for.
Aaron Olsen:
You mentioned mental health and mental performance, and that you work with athletes on both. How would you define the difference between the two?
I assume there’s some overlap, but I’m not as familiar with mental performance. Could you explain that?
Chuck Thuss:
Yes, absolutely. That’s a great question, and I get asked that often.
Mental health is really the state of our well-being. How are we managing stress? How are we managing everyday life? How are we interacting with people? How are we functioning in society? How are we able to accomplish the tasks we need to do every single day, and at what level are we doing them?
Mental performance, on the other hand, is about how our mind is working and engaging in the activity we’re doing. How is it enhancing that activity?
Our mind is one of the strongest and greatest tools we have, but it’s probably the least used and least trained. There are many ways athletes can train their mind, including visualization, positive affirmations, and positive self-talk.
There are a lot of different things that go into mental performance and how we approach our game or sport on a mental level. Are we coming into it clear? Are we coming into it stressed out? Are we coming into it knowing what we need to do? Are we confident and self-assured?
As you can see, mental performance interacts very closely with mental health. I’m a big believer that you cannot have one without the other, especially based on the journey I’ve been on. I think I’m living proof of that.
Aaron Olsen:
I want to give a quick plug for your podcast, Warriors Unmasked. How long have you been doing that, and how did it come about?
Chuck Thuss:
We’re in about year four now, and I think this week we launched our 200th episode.
It really took shape during the pandemic. I was introduced to another former NHL goalie, Clint Malarchuk. Clint is also a mental health advocate and a former goalie, just like I was. We started having conversations about normalizing mental health in sports and normalizing mental health in everyday conversation.
We wanted to help drop the stigma around mental health because stigma is often what prevents people from getting the help they need. There are other factors, of course, but stigma is one of the biggest.
We thought that if two former athletes could have open, honest, and vulnerable conversations about our mental health journeys, maybe someday, somewhere, we would give someone else permission to raise their hand and ask for help.
I can tell you, when Clint and I started, we had no idea we would end up with more than 200 episodes. We’ve had firefighters, military members, teachers, engineers — people from all kinds of professions.
We try to cover as many backgrounds as possible because we want everyone to know that mental health doesn’t pick and choose who it impacts. One in five people will be impacted, and I believe that number is rising every day.
So we try to normalize the conversation. I’d love for people to tune in and understand the true magnificence of the human spirit and the perseverance we are capable of. It’s incredible.
Aaron Olsen:
I think that’s really important to keep in mind. Mental health doesn’t pick and choose. It applies to everybody. You can’t pick your parents, and you can’t pick your kids. You can pick your spouse, but mental health is something that affects everyone.
It’s something we all need to be aware of and work to stay healthy in.
Chuck Thuss:
That’s really good. I’ll add one more note because I think it drives the point home.
We’re starting to see more professional athletes share their mental health journeys. Sometimes people wonder, “That basketball player makes $20 million a year — how could he be struggling with mental health?”
But mental health doesn’t care about your revenue. It doesn’t care about your income. It doesn’t care about your profession. It impacts everyone differently.
It doesn’t matter what you do, where you live, the color of your skin, your gender, or anything else. Mental health can impact anyone. That’s why we try to normalize the conversation, and hopefully others will start to do the same.
Aaron Olsen:
Out of all your interviews over the last four years, what have been some of the biggest takeaways or highlights?
Chuck Thuss:
The resiliency we have as human beings is incredible.
We often think we have a limit to what we can endure or go through in order to get to the other side. We often hear people say, “I just don’t know if I can do this.”
But we are far stronger than we have ever given ourselves credit for.
One of our first interviews was with a young man who had been treated very poorly. He was actually set on fire and left for dead.
Aaron Olsen:
Whoa.
Chuck Thuss:
Yes. And he found his way through it. Today, he is thriving. He has a family and is doing absolutely incredible.
Did he have trauma from it? Absolutely. Did he work on that trauma to resolve it and heal from it? Absolutely.
Aaron Olsen:
Did he set himself on fire, or did someone else set him on fire?
Chuck Thuss:
Someone else set him on fire and left him for dead.
That is just one example of the resiliency of the human spirit. When we put our minds to something, we can do incredible things. That gets proven time and time again with each guest we have.
It will make your heart happy, and it will make your heart hurt at times. But to hear what people have been through and how they’ve come through the other side — it shows how incredible the human spirit really is.
Aaron Olsen:
I’m sure there are also many people around us who are willing to reach out and help, even when we don’t realize it. Not only neighbors, peers, and people around us, but God is also there, willing to strengthen us and lift us up.
Chuck Thuss:
One hundred percent. All day, every day. There’s no clock on that.
Aaron Olsen:
Well, Chuck, we’re about out of time, but I want to thank you for being on the show today.
For people who want to find out more about your podcast or The Compassionate Connection, where can they go?
Chuck Thuss:
For the podcast, they can go to WarriorsUnmasked.com. We’re also on Apple, Spotify, and all the major platforms. Again, that’s Warriors Unmasked.
For me personally, they can go to TheCompassionateConnection.com, and all of my contact information is there.
Aaron, this has been a true pleasure. Thank you.
Aaron Olsen:
Thank you. I loved having you here today. Thanks for being on the show.