Mental health: Norris admits he suffered from imposter syndrome and how he “beat himself up over it”

British Formula 1 driver will start his third season in Formula 1. His performances have been noteworthy on the track, but he has certain goals off it as well.

Mental health awareness is one such goal, and an important one in Norris’ eyes.

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about mental health across sport. The notion of men having to “just deal with their issues and get on with it” has been thrown out of the window.

Part of this may be attributed to the growth of social media, which allows sport personalities to share a much closer bond with their supporters than in years gone by. They didn’t have a public platform then to let people know about what they’re feeling behind the scenes.

In a sense, it has given their personalities a more human touch.

The downside to this is when things don’t go their way or they make a mistake. Social media seldom lets noted personalities off the hook easily in case of a blip, and this can have an adverse effect on any individual.

In an interview, Norris spoke about dealing with anxiety.

“There’s a lot of pressure and I worried about it. I didn’t have much self-confidence so I’d never had the belief that I could stay there for long or even get there in the first place so whenever I didn’t do well, I beat myself a lot over it,” he said.

“Mentally, I did struggle a lot and it’s of course not the nicest thing to talk about but the best thing is just to talk and it’s something you never want to do.”

It is noteworthy that Norris has played a role in helping many others tackle their problems.

“I’m lucky I enjoy a lot of these things. Mainly because I’m terrible at a lot of things that I try to do. Because you get the messages which are like ‘how do you get through this?’

“Or you get the positive messages which are ‘Thanks for doing this because you’ve helped me in this area and I was struggling. It’s nice that you get these messages and you can have that impact on people.

“That’s something I think I’ve got much better at over the past few months,” he said.

Norris used to suffer from imposter syndrome. In essence, this means the individual feels inadequate in spite of achieving success. A number of other drivers have been vocal on mental health issues as well, which benefits the society on a whole.

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