Former NFL Star Brandon Marshall Gets Radically Honest About His Mental Health

Brandon Marshall is famous for a lot of things. He’s a six-time pro bowler. His big personality as an on-air analyst for Inside the NFL earned him an Emmy nomination. His work as a co-host on the influential I Am Athlete podcast. There was some volatile behavior. And way back before everyone on social media was talking about mental health, Brandon Marshall was out there doing it.

This week, he spoke with Men’s Health IGL Friday Sessions co-host Gregory Scott Brown, M.D., about not only what it took to be a pioneer in the mental health conversation, but how people can optimize their mental health now.

Mental health and wellness pros love to talk about how men should be vulnerable in order to have a real conversation that gets them somewhere with mental well-being, and Marshall went there right out of the gate.

There’s a thing he does with his team, he said, where he checks in and asks them, on a scale of 1 to 10, “where are you at personally, professionally, and mentally?” Marshall followed that right up with “I’m 5s across the board. That’s the lowest I’ve been in three years.”

Marshall is the founder and CEO of House of Athlete, a lifestyle wellness brand with IRL and app platforms. The ebbs and flows of being a founder and CEO of a business creates a lot of different types of pressure than being an athlete did, he says. But he and his brand are about acknowledging those pressures and developing ways to cope with them in ways that help you be successful as a person.

It was more or less a full decade ago that he saw himself as more than a football player. Friends visiting him noticed he wasn’t going out of his house much except to train and suggested he needed help. He found his way to an outpatient program at McLean Hospital, one of the top mental health care facilities. There, he discovered that he wasn’t just a player; he was a person “and I need to work on this the same way I work to get stronger and faster when it comes to Xs and Os,” he said.

Dr. Brown pointed out that the diagnosis he received—Borderline Personality Disorder, in which regulating emotions can be difficult—can be a hard one for people to process. Marshall processed it like an athlete, saying that when he learned of the diagnosis, he thought, “I know what fight I’m in now and can take my game to another level.”

You don’t need to be in distress to take steps to make your mental health better. In fact, that’s what his app, House of Athlete Plus, is all about. It’s about leaning into the fundamentals he lays out—train, fuel, mental fitness, recover and tribe—to perform at your peak, whether that’s as an athlete, a dad, a teacher, an entrepreneur or anything else. “Performance for me is unlocking your full potential whoever you are,” he says.

And that can mean knowing where your strengths are working for you and where they’re not. At McLean, he says, he discovered that some of what was making him a great player were “pulling me down off the field.” He’d note discoveries like these in a journal, and left viewers with this entry:

My pain, sadness gives me my strengths

My strengths ruin my mind, body and soul

I have been trapped all my life not by man, or cages, but by my own emotions

Where I’ve been while traveling inside myself can be summed up by one word: Damn.

Watch the entire discussion below:

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