Meg Lanning and the devasting toll of success on auto-pilot

For many in the cricketing community, calling Meg Lanning a former Australian cricketer still feels a bit unreal. Her speech outside the Melbourne Cricket Ground — the venue of her coronation as the captain of the T20 world champion side in 2020 and where she announced her retirement from international cricket late last year — felt like it had gaping holes, with fans, pundits and contemporaries wondering why Lanning had chosen to bow out at the peak of her dominance in world cricket.

Multiple sabbaticals for previously undisclosed health reasons paved the way for a retirement at the unusual age of 31. On Thursday, in a podcast ( The Howie Games), the notoriously private Lanning decided to bare what life over the past 24-odd months looked like and how she coped with it.

The first signs of change emerged around the lead up to the Commonwealth Games.

“My head was spinning a fair bit for a number of reasons. Motivation was probably one and this was after the One-Day World Cup we won in 2022 New Zealand,” Lanning explained to Mark Howard, the show’s host.

At that point, we’d won everything and that World Cup was the end of a journey which began with what happened in the 2017 edition (where India knocked out Australia in the semifinal). I probably didn’t realise it at the time but it was the end of a phase. The motivation was not there in the lead up to the Commonwealth Games even, for training and other things. I guess it was about the commitment levels more than anything else.”

“Touring can be lonely. Within a team, lots of people are around but you spend a lot of time by yourself, more so as a leader. You get a few negative thoughts about what you’re doing or where you’re heading. So my head was spinning a fair bit and you’ve got so much time to think and there’s probably not a hell of a lot of good things going on. I got to a point where I really didn’t enjoy it. Through the CWG, I struggled a fair bit. Somehow I could get out there, block it out and still play quite well. I didn’t know if that was a good or a bad thing. It actually became a distraction – the games, because I couldn’t think about anything else,” she said, talking about how cricket – the sport that came naturally to her – helped her function on auto-pilot.

“Every decision I’ve made all along was based around cricket. I was happy to do that, I wanted to do that. It has brought me so much but I was starting to question if I wanted to keep doing it anymore and what that would look like. It became quite daunting for me because it was so different.”

Lanning pressed the pause button and went on to spend her down time as a barista – a massive difference from the high-pressure life of being one of Australia’s most successful athletes.

“It was nice to be a bit normal and get into the real world. The sporting bubble is great. There’s so many good things. You get a lot of support and there are incredible opportunities but it’s not the real world. You get a lot of things done for you. You don’t make a lot of decisions for yourself and it’s extremely structured which is good in a lot of ways but I just feel like I was not equipped in any way to go out into the real world and function.”

She chuckles about not graduating to the coffee machine, spending time taking orders and doing the dishes instead.

“At that point I thought, ‘Ah maybe I’ll go back to cricket ( laughs).’”

And return she did. Lanning featured in Australia’s tour of Pakistan in January 2023, led Australia to victory in the T20 World Cup in South Africa – the last World crown she would claim – and participated in the inaugural edition of the Women’s Premier League, leading Delhi Capitals to the final. Through it all, Lanning was her clinical self with the bat.

She registered scores of 67 and 72 vs Pakistan, accumulated 149 runs including three 40+ scores in the T20 WC and finished with the orange cap in the WPL with 345 runs in nine games.

Her performances happened despite the chaos in her head and she adopted an eventually debilitating coping mechanism to deal with the lack of control she experienced when not on a cricket field.

“I love exercise and I think I went a bit overboard because it was my coping mechanism. I’d love to put on my headphones and go for a run. But it got a bit out of control. I was over-exercising and under-fueling. I got to the point where I was doing about 85-90 km a week.”

“I’ve always been physically active and liked that side of it. It became a bit of an obsession. It was because I could escape mentally. I would throw the headphones on – I wouldn’t take my phone with me – I would have my Apple watch with me and listen to music. And so, nobody could contact me. I really liked that because I felt like I was in control.”

The collateral damage here was her dietary routine.

“I felt I was eating but I wasn’t eating enough.I’d eat maybe a couple of meals a day if I was lucky and they weren’t significant. It didn’t start off as a deliberate thing. Essentially I felt good. I was light. I could run heaps. I wasn’t getting injured like everyone was telling me I was going to do. It almost became a bit of, ‘I am going to show you’ sort of thing. And that even reinforced it.”

“I got down to 57kg from 64kg. It wasn’t ridiculous but it was significant. The ratios were out of whack. But it was the other things that I did not realise. It impacted my ability to concentrate. I didn’t really want to see other people. I disengaged a lot from friends and family. There would be very few people who I would want to engage with. I would get really snappy, real moody if anyone asked anything. I became a bit of a different person. Pretty hard to be around, I would say. I was not in a place to be able to go on tour and play cricket and give the commitment levels required for that.’

Lanning did eventually seek professional help. She admits that she had never been comfortable with the idea of approaching a psychologist given how closed off she was anyway. After orchestrating her nation’s biggest highs in her own way, she pined for control in her own life, something this obsession with running and exercise helped her gain. She would even keep food as a reward, a motivation for finishing a run.

“I felt very out of control in terms of what my future looked like. If it’s not cricket, what does life look like if I am not playing? How could I not want to travel the world and play cricket? That doesn’t make any sense. So [my obsession] was a bit of control. I felt like I was in control of that.”

ALSO READ | Meg Lanning retires: The story of a successful career spent searching for balance

Lanning’s issue was never officially labelled an eating disorder, she said in the podcast, but the signs of the lack of balance had started to show not just in her appearance but also her ability to sleep.

“I pretty much wasn’t sleeping. I got to the point where I dreaded night-time because I knew I would go to bed and not be able to sleep. That would make me so mad. I would just get more angry with myself because I couldn’t sleep. And you can’t do anything. At least during the day when I get a bit anxious, I can go for a run. That’s what I was thinking. I can do that. Your head then just goes round and round and it’s not a great place to be but I just kept operating.”

There was something heartbreaking about the world’s most decorated captain (five World titles as skipper across the two white ball formats) saying she realised that she isn’t cut out for the international touring schedule anymore. But that was the price she paid for close to a decade of mind-numbing excellence, a burnout that eventually took her away from the highest level of the sport she had made her own.

Lanning admitted that when started out as a young captain in a ruthless Aussie setup which valued results, empathy was not an asset she possessed. It’s one she had to learn. This experience only reinforced the value of that quality. It’s why she decided to open up about her experience nearly six months after a retirement announcement that left the world yearning for answers.

“I have always wanted to keep things private because it’s not really anyone else’s business. But I’ve realised that everyone is going through something no matter how much things aren’t under control. That’s something I think I was very good at, looking like I had things under control. That was absolutely not the case. Regardless of who you are, there’s something happening. Whether it’s big or small, important or not important compared to everyone else, opening up helps others open up a bit too. And then you realise you’ve got a lot more in common than you realised.”

It’s a new world for Lanning, one without a system she has fit into. She now has a world of possibilities before her, a scary prospect but an exciting one too. She revealed she still has to fight with her head sometimes, but she’s come a long way in prioritising her well being. While ambitions to open a coffee shop and staying connected with sport in some way are on her vision board, she’s just happy that she “can say yes to things now” that she couldn’t do before.

She remembered a quote she saw in the MCG gym all those years ago – ‘Ships are safe in the harbour but that’s not what ships are built for.’ 

“I realise that more people, especially younger people, do things that are safe because we don’t want to be bad at something or fail. So we don’t try new things or a new skill. Failing or not being able to achieve something is actually a good thing because that’s how you discover what you can do and what you’re capable of and you might actually surprise yourself. Don’t play it safe, go out there and give it a crack.”