'Beating anxiety inspired me' - the player turning sports psychologist

"I had constant imposter syndrome," David Wheeler says of his first experiences as a professional footballer.

It was a condition he conquered, enjoying a career featuring more than 400 appearances in all three tiers of the English Football League - and a goal in a play-off final.

Now, 12 years after turning pro with Exeter City, Wheeler has hung up his boots.

But rather than go into coaching or becoming an agent, the 34-year-old plans to put those old demons to new use and help others overcome similar anxieties.

Wheeler is embarking on a new calling he hopes will keep him involved in the game he loves - training to become a sports psychologist.

"The experience of going through it, but then also of coming out the other side and having a successful football career for 12 years - which I never thought I would do, largely because of the anxiety - has really given me the inspiration," he tells BBC Radio Devon.

"It's really my 'why' of why I want to do the sports psychology."

Having failed to make the grade at Brighton's academy, Wheeler played non-league football for clubs including Lewes and Staines Town while studying for a sports science degree.

He was offered a trial at Exeter in the summer of 2013 and subsequently given a deal by then manager Paul Tisdale.

It was a time when the Grecians had future international strikers Ollie Watkins and Jamie Reid in their youth squad and experienced heads such as Sam Parkin, Matt Oakley and Danny Butterfield in the first team.

"When I first signed for Exeter especially, I experienced extreme anxiety and often I was going into games having been sick or not eaten before the game," Wheeler recalls.

"I had this feeling I was under constant threat, that I wasn't good enough, and a similar kind of experience when I was a young player at Brighton - I think that was ultimately why I ended up getting released.

"It was really affecting me and it was affecting my consistency because an attack of anxiety was not something that is necessarily predictable and you're not sure that you're going to be able to overcome it in order to play to your ability."

Wheeler says being in a good mindset is key for performance and cites the intervention of a sports psychologist brought in by Tisdale during the early part of the 2016-17 season.

Exeter won just three of their first 11 League Two games, losing the other eight, and were second-from-bottom in League Two when the City boss decided to look for some outside help for his side.

"We'd come off the back of lots of losses and we had a session with a psychologist, the whole team, and we just deconstructed what was going on," Wheeler says.

"Tis set that up to be fair to him, not many managers would do that.

"I remember one of the main takeaways was just to get a clean sheet, but not care about anything else. Everyone worked towards a clean sheet and we ended up drawing 0-0 - it was one of those games where it must have been awful to watch."

That goalless draw - at home to Grimsby Town - might not have been one to write home about for fans but it gave the players the belief they were capable of performing.

And their form improved markedly, including a 12-game unbeaten run that featured 10 wins as they sped up the League Two table.

City only lost six more league games as they finished fifth, before falling in the play-off final to Blackpool, with Wheeler netting Exeter's Wembley goal in a 2-1 defeat.

"We had a weird sequence of ending up playing the team that was just above us again and again and again, and we kept leapfrogging [them] - it just gave us that momentum and we just kept going and kept going," he adds.

"We settled on a team that a lot of Exeter City fans could probably name now - it was just set, and we just had that chemistry."

That intervention at Exeter lit a spark that has stayed with Wheeler throughout his career.

After leaving for Queens Park Rangers in 2018, he spent time on loan at Milton Keynes Dons and Portsmouth before six seasons at Wycombe Wanderers, during which Wheeler helped the Chairboys win promotion to the Championship in 2020.

As his career progressed, he became more and more interested in sustainability within sport, giving talks and lectures on the subject and being nominated at last year's BBC Green Sport Awards.

Wheeler feels that outside interest - a "diversification of identity" - helped him as a player.

It meant he was not just solely focused on football but had other goals that allowed him to step away from the relentless pressure of getting results on the pitch.

He feels strongly that allowing players to have interests outside of football is a key asset to make them more successful on the field - an issue he hopes to promote.

"It's championing the ability of players to not only pursue an education, but also other interests and hobbies and still be a successful footballer," Wheeler says.

"I think it's an archaic and harmful thing to not champion that as a manager, as a football club, because there are so many players that fall out of the game.

"Even the ones that have 15 to 20-year careers, long successful careers, come out of the game and the statistics are alarmingly high for depression, addiction, marriages falling apart, bankruptcies.

"It's not really a surprise to me because I found it very difficult to come to terms with, and I had all these other things going on.

"I think from five years old most of us identify as a sportsman, as a footballer and that's our main part of our identity, that is reinforced throughout our whole childhood into adulthood.

"It's the main thing you're known for, that you're celebrated for and by leaving that part of you behind it's leaving a big chunk of you behind that was a source of validation."