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October 6, 2025
What Elite Athletes and Individuals with ADHD Have in Common and Why a Sports Approach Like Kobe Bryant’s Mamba Mentality May Help Improve Day-to-Day Performance
If you or someone you love has ADHD and has experienced focus, motivation, or stress levels impacting your ability to perform at your best, you have a lot in common with the best athletes in the world. Even if you have never played a sport in your life, Dr. Dawn Brown argues that individuals with ADHD share important characteristics with many of the greatest athletes. Being curious, resilient, a risk-taker, a creative thinker, and thriving under pressure are traits that commonly overlap. Kobe Bryant notably defined the Mamba Mentality as being about the journey and not the result as he incorporated passion, resilience, and a fearless approach into a pursuit of athletic excellence.
In her career as a sports psychiatrist, Dr. Brown has identified 5 sports psychology techniques that can be essential to managing symptoms of ADHD.
1. Know yourself: Building self-awareness of your strengths and of how symptoms impact your everyday life.
2. Cultivate a Winning Attitude: Fostering a winning attitude through positive self-talk, honing relaxation techniques, and using failures as lessons.
Write Your Motivation Playbook: Sustain motivation through realistic planning (no more than 5 tasks for a day), organizing tasks by deadlines, and completing the toughest tasks at times in the day when you have the most energy.
3. Fuel Up Like a Champ: Improper nutrition can lead to feeling tired, irritable, and mentally fatigued. Fuel your brain and body for optimal performance by setting reminders to drink lots of water, eating complex carbohydrates for sustained energy, eating the three F’s (omega-3 fatty acids, folate, & fiber), and using vitamins to ensure you get essential nutrients missing from your diet.
4. Master routines to Stay in the Game: Make routines more exciting to avoid getting bored with them, emphasize the how (e.g. timers & accountability partners), and plan short-term rewards.
For more insight on how sports psychology techniques can help manage ADHD symptoms, see this article, Sports Psychology Tricks That Work for ADHD Brains, by Dawn K. Brown, M.D. It explores the similarities between the ADHD brain and elite athletes and offers strategies that can help mitigate the impact of mental factors on performance.
Bradley Paramore, Ed.S., NCSP
Diagnostic Center Psychologist
