Addiction in Ultrarunning with Dr. Harlan Austin | KoopCast Episode #188

View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.

Episode overview:

Harlan Austin, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist with national certifications in sport psychology and addiction psychology.  With 20 years of experience working in the sport and clinical psychology field, Harlan has worked with individuals focused on high performance, return-to-performance, and leadership development. Harlan has served in many roles, including performance consultant, clinician, program developer, and clinical director. He has lectured and presented at national conventions on the topics of sport and performance psychology, clinical sport psychology, athlete psychological assessment, athlete rehabilitation, and athlete return to sport. Throughout his career, Harlan has had the opportunity to work with professional athletes (NBA, MLB, NFL, Boxing, LAX, Ski, and Snowboard), healthcare professionals, US Special Forces groups, and high-level executives.

Episode highlights:

(14:20) Why athletes are higher risk for addiction: no simple answer, appreciating social context, hard work and celebration, examples, adolescence and sport, letdown in sport

(30:00) Changing behavior to aid performance: meet addicts where they have motivation to change, develop incongruence between addiction and performance

(41:20) The process of recovery: removing the substance is step one, finding out what was going on under the surface is step two, parallels to the athlete mentality, transferable skillset

Additional resources:

Resources covered-
CAGE Substance Abuse Screening Tool
https://www.recoveryanswers.org/
https://www.samhsa.gov/
https://www.addicttoathlete.com/
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