Why It’s Worth It | What happens when the identity you built your entire life around suddenly can’t hold everything you’re carrying? What does it cost to perform strength for years while quietly falling apart? And what if the thing we’ve been taught to hide turns out to be the most powerful thing we have to offer?
In this episode of The Happiness Lab, host Laurie Santos sits down with five-time NBA All-Star Kevin Love for an honest conversation about anxiety, depression, grief, and the long road from silence to advocacy. Kevin traces his mental health journey from a childhood shaped by expectation and emotional stoicism, through a very public panic attack during a nationally televised game, to the viral article that changed both his life and the broader conversation around mental health in sports.
Kevin opens by tracing the origins of what he calls his default setting: dread. Growing up in Portland as the son of a former NBA player, his identity was basketball long before he had language for what he was feeling. The pressure was real and generational. His father modeled emotional stoicism the way his own father had before him, and Kevin absorbed the same playbook: bury it, compartmentalize, perform. He describes a version of himself that was, in his own words, emotion-phobic, chasing accolades and championships the way someone else might chase a fix, always arriving and always returning to the same baseline of anxiety when the dopamine faded.
The losses came in waves. The death of his grandmother (the family heart for him) in 2013 went unprocessed because he stayed with his team and kept playing. A broken hand followed. Then isolation, suicidal ideation, and a room that had become a very familiar dark place. Laurie and Kevin navigate this part of the conversation carefully, and what emerges is not a story of weakness but of a person who never had the tools or the permission to do anything differently. Nobody around him did either. Snapping out of it was the only advice on offer.
The turning point came midway through the 2017-18 season, during a nationally televised game, when a panic attack took Kevin off the court and onto the floor of the trainer’s office. Every test at the Cleveland Clinic came back clean. Nothing was physically wrong. The question he couldn’t stop asking was: What just happened, and is it going to happen again? He went to therapy for the first time. He found a good therapist. He started, as he puts it, doing the work.
In 2018, Kevin published an essay titled Everyone Is Going Through Something. He describes pressing send that morning with genuine fear — fear that his career was over, that his teammates would lose trust in him, that the comments would be brutal. Within a week, more than ten thousand emails had arrived. LeBron James wrapped him in a hug on the team bus. His shoulders finally dropped. The rejection he had braced for as an ending turned out to be a beginning. Laurie draws the throughline clearly: Kevin could not have modeled vulnerability for others before he’d done the hard work of sitting with it himself. The oxygen mask principle, she calls it. You have to put yours on first.
Kevin’s Kevin Love Fund now brings a free mental health curriculum into schools, with teachers and coaches answering vulnerability prompts before students do. The modeling is deliberate and essential. He describes a high school athlete in one of those classrooms who, once the room opened up, talked about coming to school for the food because his dad was gone and his mom was working two jobs. That kid, Kevin notes, was an athlete, exactly the kind of person who would have stayed quiet a generation earlier. The ripple effect of one honest moment in one classroom, he suggests, is genuinely hard to measure.
Background | In this episode, Laurie speaks with Kevin Love, a five-time NBA All-Star, 2016 NBA Champion, two-time Olympic gold medalist, and founder of the Kevin Love Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to mental health education and youth well-being. Key points include:
- Identity built on performance breaks under pressure: When our entire sense of self rests on achievement, the first significant setback doesn’t just hurt; it threatens everything. Building an identity that includes but extends beyond our role or sport is not a luxury. It is a form of protection.
- Grief stored in the body finds its own way out. Unprocessed grief and suppressed emotion don’t disappear. They resurface as panic attacks, rage, withdrawal, and physical symptoms. The body keeps score whether or not we are paying attention.
- Vulnerability requires modeling, not just permission: It is not enough to tell people it is safe to be vulnerable. Someone with credibility and standing has to go first. Teachers, coaches, parents, and leaders who share their own struggles make it genuinely possible for others to follow.
- Stigma is expensive: Men, athletes, and high achievers are among those least likely to seek mental health support — and among those who pay the highest cost for not doing so. Silence compounds the suffering and extends the timeline to recovery.
- Early intervention changes trajectories: Teaching emotional literacy and modeling vulnerability in schools before the stakes become professional gives young people tools they can use for a lifetime. One honest conversation in a classroom can shift how a student relates to their teammates, their family, and eventually their own children.
Source | The Happiness Lab: Making Vulnerability Your Superpower (with NBA Star Kevin Love) – Season 10, Episode 40 (October 20, 2025)
About | Laurie Santos is a Yale professor, researcher, and happiness expert who studies how psychology can guide us to make better choices and live happier, more fulfilling lives. Her course on happiness, the most popular course at Yale in over 300 years, is offered in an online version, The Science of Well-being, on Coursera. Laurie also hosts The Happiness Lab, a podcast that focuses on changing how we think about happiness. Laurie’s core belief is simple: What our minds tell us will make us happy is often a lie.
