Noah Bowman describes himself as “risk averse.” If you know anything about this Calgarian, that’s probably not how you think of him. Bowman is one of Canada’s best halfpipe skiers and has been for a long time. For more than a decade and a half, his job has been to rip up and down the icy walls of a U-shaped ramp, gathering enough speed to pop himself high into the air so he can flip upside down once or twice, while spinning, and then land back on his feet.
As sports go, this is the high end of dangerous. Well-known athletes have died in halfpipe skiing. Bowman has never been one to downplay the risks. He’s always grappled with fear more openly than his friends or competitors. “Even when I was a kid, it would take me a little longer to get the confidence up to do something,” he says.
In 2010, at 17, Bowman shot onto the global stage by becoming the world junior champion in halfpipe skiing at the FIS World Junior Championships. Two years later, he was invited to be an alternate (a backup in case one of his team members couldn’t perform) for the Winter X Games in Aspen, the high-octane extreme-sports competition watched worldwide.
When Bowman was unexpectedly called into competition, he shocked everyone by performing a trick that nobody had ever landed before in a competition — a switch alley-oop double 900. In terms the rest of us mortals can understand, he took off backwards, did 2.5 rotations in the air, plus two flips, and then landed backwards. The trick won him a silver medal. He was still a teenager and had already earned his place in the history books of freestyle skiing.
Soon after, he started to struggle. The tricks became trickier and the pressure greater. He felt the weight of having sponsors and fans to impress. He stopped having fun. He started to overthink the consequences of failure. That’s a difficult thing in a sport where muscle memory is a key element for success.
“I’m in my head,” he says of those years. “I was trying to just talk my way through it, and it wouldn’t improve.”
Bowman turned to former Olympian Penny Werthner, a sports psychologist at the University of Calgary and certified mental-performance consultant. The pair began what has been a decade-long mental health-training program for Bowman.
This training has been key to Bowman’s longevity in his sport. “It’s so simple and obvious, but it was a huge realization that the voice in my head doesn’t help me take action when I’m up there and I’m scared,” he says.
Bowman started to focus on doing things creatively, bringing in tricks that were less common or had never been done before to separate himself from the field. He mentally broke his routines into small sections and repeated phrases in his head so the nervous voice couldn’t get through to him.
He was successful — becoming “the most steezy man in halfpipe skiing,” according to SBC Skier magazine (“steezy” being a combo of style and ease).
Psychological training has long been popular in sports where athletes can crack under pressure or question themselves at times when self-doubt is dangerous. In 2020, Simone Biles took a break from competing and started therapy when she developed the “twisties” — a phenomenon where gymnasts lose their spatial awareness mid-air — during the Olympics.
But mental health training is entering a new chapter and taking on a more modern approach.
Murray Heber is a cognitive coach at MH-Elevate who works with young hockey players and entrepreneurs. He focuses on one form of mental training called flow-state training — prepping the brain to more easily shift to a mode where you are fully immersed in whatever you are doing, regardless of distractions.
“Over the last 15, 20 years, advancements in neuroimaging have enabled us to be able to look at what is actually happening in [the brain] in flow states, so we are able to go try and reproduce them,” he says.
Heber is the co-founder of the Flow Factory, which uses a combination of AI, EEG brainwave-reading devices and an app to help athletes train themselves to get into the right headspace for peak performance.
The headset picks up information about the wearer’s brainwaves. When an athlete is overthinking what they’re doing, their brains are stuck in what is known as a high beta-wave state. That means a person is on high alert — anxious and focused on external factors. In competition, those factors could be the pressure they feel to perform, the crowds or the sounds of an announcer. When a person has an inward and relaxed focus, their brain shifts to alpha-theta waves.
In one of Heber’s exercises, clients put on the headset and try to trigger a small drone to move by getting their brainwaves into an alpha-theta state.
“The more [you] can practice and train that, you learn this is what it’s got to feel like,” Heber says.
“Flow” comes from the work of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, a Hungarian-American psychologist who coined the phrase in the 1970s. Flow was about losing yourself in a state of hyper-focused contentment that outside stimuli could not break, whether your goal was “to write great poetry, craft beautiful furniture, understand the motions of galaxies, or help children be happier — the self becomes largely invulnerable to the fears and setbacks of ordinary existence,” Csíkszentmihályi wrote. His 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, made the concept mainstream.
Heber says flow-state training is still in its infancy. “We’re still very much in the early-adoption phase. The people using it today tend to be high performers on the leading edge — Olympic athletes, professional teams, entrepreneurs and executives who are always looking for ways to push themselves to their highest performance possible.”
Flow, unfortunately, doesn’t come easily. It isn’t something we can force.
Werthner believes that it’s rare for someone to get into a true flow state. But, she adds, people can do things that help develop that feeling of total immersion.
First, they need to develop the physical and mental skill set required for success in whatever they’re doing. She also measures brainwaves in athletes to help them learn what it feels like when they have gone into an alpha-theta state.
But, even with modern technology now being applied to mental health performance training, Werthner believes the simplest things to still be the most effective.
She recommends a breathing exercise that has been tested and validated to help calm the nervous system and bring down the heart rate.
This is how you do it: first, slow down your breathing to about six breaths each minute. Take four beats for each inhalation and six for each exhalation, using your belly to control the movement. Stay focused on each breath. Werthner tells athletes to use the exercise every day.
“As you practice it, you do it better and better,” Werthner says. “I want them to use it as a tool, like in the middle of the day, so they can train it. We’re quieting the mind and we’re telling our system everything’s okay.”
Bowman followed her advice, and it got him through some of the toughest challenges of his career. In 2022, he placed fourth in the Olympics, heartbreakingly close to a medal. That hurt.
In 2023, at the X Games, Bowman was near the end of a run that he describes as being pure flow — fast, flying, on autopilot, but fully aware — when he suffered a catastrophic crash (flow cannot save you from accidents). He required surgery on his knee and more than a year of rehab.
But he worked his way back, training himself for a new trick, a switch double cork 1440. It had only been done by a few other people on the planet, all of them at least a decade younger than him. It was one step above the move he’d injured himself on. He nailed it.
In the summer of 2025, Bowman was doing all the little things he’d been doing for years for his mental health, and he realized that he didn’t want to compete anymore. He decided it was time to retire.
“There’s the mentality of it never being enough [in sport], right?” he says. “It’s always about the next trick. But, [I’m] going to embrace this. It has been enough.”
