Chiefs’ Drue Tranquill battles anxiety. He wants to show others there’s a way ahead

In many ways, Chiefs linebacker Drue Tranquill is the embodiment of his surname.

Barring adverse conditions, he walks football fields barefoot before games to ground himself and “be in the moment and enjoy it.”

He’s a former NFL chess champion whose savvy and cool in the chaos of a game makes him a vital defensive signal-caller for the Chiefs … and made Patrick Mahomes hate playing against him when Tranquill was with the Chargers.

Because Tranquill tended to anticipate and call out what the Chiefs were going to do — the sort of thing that perhaps could be expected of a first-team Academic All-American at Notre Dame who had a 3.73 GPA in mechanical engineering.

But Tranquill’s path wasn’t always serene, making for both a vivid reminder that everyone has their own challenges and making him a testament of hope for those who might struggle with the sort of debilitating anxiety and stress he had to cope with as an adolescent.

“As human beings, we can concern ourselves with outcomes, and we can play out negative outcomes in our head,” he said in an interview with The Star on Thursday as the Chiefs prepared to take on his former team, the Chargers, on Sunday in Los Angeles. “And certainly that was the case for me as a kid.”

Careful to note that there are different levels of anxiety and mental illness, and that his greatest difficulties manifested when he was growing up, Tranquill made empathetic points that we all might appreciate.

“If every football player was to be honest, there’s (often) some level of anxiety of, like, ‘What’s going to happen in this game or this play?’” he said.

A moment later, he astutely added, “I’m sure you as a reporter, you come in and you’re, like, ‘Is this question going to land? How are they going to receive it?’”

In this case, Tranquill received it thoughtfully and constructively as he described his journey through those hard times to a beautiful life as a husband and father, and a sterling NFL career.

“I think sometimes we can walk around and feel like we’re the only one feeling a certain thing, whatever it might be,” he said. “We’re talking about anxiety in this interview, but I think we often go through life thinking, ‘Am I the only one feeling this?’

“And I think a lot of times people sitting across from us experience a lot of the same feelings.”

‘It kind of paralyzes you’

As a child in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Tranquill remembers being traumatized by the death of a family friend’s infant, who had been accidentally left in a car through a tragic miscommunication.

The oldest of five siblings found himself repeatedly playing out that scenario in his mind and often found himself pondering what if that had been him?

As the son of an engineer, he said, he also found himself innately apt to overanalyze everything. If he got sick or had a sore throat, for instance, he assumed worst-case scenarios.

Sometimes, he’d lie awake at night and feel a shortness of breath and what he now knows were at least something like panic attacks.

“It feels like it kind of paralyzes you,” he said.

Making it all the more heavy and self-perpetuating was the mystery of the anguish, since he was keeping it to himself.

Until one day when he was about 10 years old and the family and friends went to see the “Chronicles of Narnia.”

After his anxiety and a sense of claustrophobia compelled him to leave his seat a couple of times to go to the bathroom, as he put it with air quotes, he left for good as the character of Aslan was being prepared to be put to death — a scene that I find disturbing even as a 63-year-old.

Tranquill felt a weight on his chest and couldn’t breathe and sat distraught on a bench in the theater lobby. He was still struggling to get his breath and pale as a ghost, he said, when his mother, Shannon, came out to find him and lovingly said, “What’s wrong, honey?”

As he looks back on the moment now, Tranquill realizes that it was less that he finally told somebody than that he “kind of got caught or found out.”

Thank goodness, though.

Because as much as that was a low point, it also was a start toward demystifying what he was dealing with, and receiving the extra-loving support that no one knew he needed while he suffered in silence.

“After I opened up to my mom and spoke to somebody else about it,” he said, “I started to kind of see a path to healing and learning to process these feelings, these thoughts, these negative emotions, that I didn’t know how to previously.”

‘We’re all dealing with things internally’

While Tranquill still had to contend with anxiety clutching at him, he also found solace and inspiration in a variety of forms — starting with a commitment to his Christian faith and the scriptures his mother would pray over him before bed to keep him safe.

“And power statements like that,” said Tranquill, whose family moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana, when he was about 12.

Those statements effectively began to replace negative thoughts with positive reinforcement.

And the impact was tangible.

Embracing that, he said, created physiological changes. Or at least helped him feel more in control of his body’s responses.

So as much as he worked on anything else, as a student or an athlete, he sought to develop that part of his spirit.

“There have been so many positive, affirming things that I’ve been able to put to my memory and speak to myself in times that are hard,” he said.

Including the preciousness of silence.

“Whether you call it meditation, whether you call it prayer, whatever that is for you, creating space to listen to yourself and feel what you’re feeling and process through that,” he said.

And finding people to really hear you.

“Whether that’s a licensed therapist, whether that is your spouse, whether that is a close friend or a teammate, a coworker, I feel like those things are really important,” he said. “We’re all dealing with things internally. And when you internalize things for too long, it can create negative outcomes.

“And I think it’s important to take some of those internal things and make them external.”

On a related level, Tranquill also pays attention to who and what he surrounds himself with.

“The people you’re spending time with, they’re ultimately sources of information that you’re absorbing on a daily basis, which is going to create thoughts positive or negative,” he said. “That can be said also for the information you’re taking in on your phone or the news or whatever you’re reading. …

“But it’s important to surround yourself with good friends.”

Not to mention colleagues.

“I’ve had experiences as a player where coaches I just felt like constantly fed me negative feedback,” he said. “If done in the wrong way, that can tear you down as a player. Criticism is necessary from a coach; you have to have criticism. You have to get better.

“But if done in the wrong way, I’ve seen it harm my performance … And that’s why I love it here in Kansas City. Our coaches have a great balance of positive feedback and then criticism and hard coaching.”

Among the other things that have helped Tranquill maintain a healthy perspective: striving not to take himself so seriously, which he once wrote on a note he kept on his bathroom mirror.

“I was always very driven, very competitive, and over-analytical, and looked at every situation and every day as if that was the determining factor in my outcome in life,” he said. “When you learn to look at life as that you’re imperfect, you’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to lose, you’re going to have setbacks, when you’re able to kind of roll with the punches a little bit, I found that that’s helped me.”

‘You learn to develop this sort of mental toughness’

Girded by all that, Tranquill was equipped to handle suffering a torn ACL (ligament) in his left knee during his freshman year at Notre Dame.

His mindset was to attack the rehab and physical therapy and demonstrate his resilience, and be better than before.

He was less emotionally ready, though, when he suffered a torn right ACL the next season.

“A very, very low point,” he said. “I would say I experienced a ton of different emotions with that one.”

Just the same, he also had cultivated the psychological tools to hoist himself back up — both by his previous work and through the counsel of sports psychologist Amber Selking.

“She talked about that idea of your thoughts control your emotions,” Tranquill said, “which controls your physiological response, elevated heart rate, shortness of breath, etcetera, which ultimately affects your performance.”

Before long, he stopped thinking “why me?” and started focusing on controlling what he could control.

That included seeking out other methods of fortifying his mindset. Such as beginning the day with frigid showers to shock his body and learn to breathe through that — a practice he attributed to Wim Hof, a Dutch motivational speaker also known as “The Iceman.”

“When you put your body in a stressful situation to start each day …” he said, “you learn to develop this sort of mental toughness.”

Which defined the rest of his Notre Dame career, after which he was selected No. 130 overall by the Chargers in 2019 NFL Draft, and has helped distinguish him since.

“I don’t want to say we’re the sum of the things we’ve gone through,” he said. “But the hard things you go through definitely, definitely build you.”

Daunting as that time was athletically and academically, Tranquill was a key player on a team that reached the semifinal of the College Football Playoff and won the 2018 Wuerffel Award for service to others.

Emerging through that, he said, “was foundational in terms of building the toughness I have as a man and being able to take on hard things.”

While he experienced anxiety “a lot harder as a youth” than he does now, it’s because he has learned to manage it.

“If I’m feeling rushed and I’m overbooking my schedule and I’m not taking time to sit and reflect and pray and read and do all these things, my stress and anxiety is going to be up,” he said. “But if I am doing those things, it’s going to go down.”

To be clear, Tranquill wasn’t setting out to be prescriptive. He’s quite conscious of the fact that there are different degrees of mental health issues and ways to solve problems, including through therapy and medication.

“I don’t think anybody is walking around that doesn’t experience it at all,” he said. “And I think we’re all dealing with it on our own relative scales.”

But the fact he’s willing to speak about his experiences resonates in itself.

As a reminder that you might never know what anyone’s been through or going through.

And as reminder that you’re not alone if you’re dealing with any of these sorts of feelings … and that there’s a way forward.