Winnipeg Jets star forward Gabriel Vilardi makes his point abundantly clear, repeating himself over the course of multiple interviews. He’s going to talk about mental health and, as such, he is going to talk about his personal struggles with panic attacks, negative self-talk and the ways he’s tried to cope with those challenges since he was a child.
But this story is not about Gabriel Vilardi. The three-time 20-goal scorer is sharing the details from his life in case he can help somebody else.
“Everyone deals with anxiety, right? Just because I was diagnosed, it doesn’t mean that I have it different than other people do … I hope this can help give people ideas for how to deal with it.”
Those are the ground rules. We’re having this conversation for the greater good, through the lens of Vilardi’s lived experiences, because the first lesson he ever learned about managing anxiety was that it is important to seek help.
“My family is from Italy. A very old school area of Italy. For my dad to say he had anxiety growing up, it would have been … ‘F off,’ right? I think we’ve grown so much as a society, and especially in hockey, with mental health. It’s not like that anymore. For me, seeing the mistakes my family made — where maybe they didn’t see help — I look at that and say, ‘I have all of these things available to me. I have to do them because they didn’t do them and it’s going to help me.’”
As a professional hockey player, Vilardi has access to mental health professionals and stress-reducing strategies that his parents’ generation didn’t think about. He’s grateful for that. There have been times he’s wondered what his career would look like without them.
But this is a story that goes back to his earliest days as a child, long before he celebrated professional success and coped with failure in front of thousands of people, 82 games a year.
Vilardi’s journey with mental health started when he was a boy growing up in Kingston, Ont. Vilardi had seen anxiety manifest itself in his father, Natale, as well as his grandmother. Even as a child, he’d reflected on the importance of mental health supports. He understood that people could struggle with mental health without a formal diagnosis. Then, when he was 11 or 12 years old, Vilardi started to experience panic attacks at home.
“There was a period I didn’t go to school for six months,” Vilardi says. “I was scared … I had this idea I was going to throw up for whatever reason and I’d have panic attacks.”
Vilardi thought about his dad’s and his grandma’s experiences. He considered the differences between his upbringing as a first-generation child in Canada and the “old school” Reggio Calabria Italian culture that had raised his parents. The idea to seek help came naturally to Vilardi. He’d seen how much harder it is when people choose to battle alone.
He found a psychologist at Kingston General Hospital and made sure to talk to them at least once per week. When he was drafted by Windsor in the Ontario Hockey League at 15 years old, Vilardi sought out resources through his junior team, then did the same in the NHL, first in Los Angeles and again when traded to Winnipeg in 2023. The habit of speaking to somebody at least once per week is a foundational part of his personal and professional life.
So what is a panic attack?
The Mayo Clinic defines a panic attack as a sudden episode of intense fear that triggers severe physical reactions, when there is no real danger or apparent cause. It describes panic attacks as frightening: “When panic attacks occur, you might think you’re losing control, having a heart attack or even dying.” Some people experience negative self-talk during a panic attack, wherein their internal monologue bombards them with unhealthy or hurtful thoughts.”
That’s what Vilardi experienced for the first time as a child and continues to relate to today.
“For me, negative self-talk is not just panic attacks; it’s something that I deal with a lot. And it drags on. It starts with one play. Then it’s like, ‘Oh s—, I’ve got to make up for that play.’ Then it drags on to three shifts because you’re still thinking in your head that you’ve got to make up for it. Next thing you know, it’s a period and it’s like, ‘F—, I’ve only got two periods left.’ I was in my head the whole first period.”
There are times when Vilardi’s self-talk becomes so critical that he changes how he prepares for an NHL game. As a first-line forward who plays a key role on the team’s top power-play unit, Vilardi knows he’s counted upon to score goals and produce points. This season, when it took him eight games to score his first goal, he found that he had to battle through negative self-talk.
“I went through a period where I stopped watching my shifts for three or four games because I just got to a point where I was overanalyzing myself,” Vilardi says. “To the point that no matter what I did, I was fearful to watch my shifts because it felt like there were no positives coming out of it.”
Publicly, Vilardi said all of the right things while he was slumping. He talked about helping his team win games in ways that didn’t necessarily involve scoring. He says he understood, rationally, that he was creating a large volume of scoring chances and that those usually lead to goals.
But anxiety is an enemy of the word “rationally.” Self-talk can lie.
“I was in the right spots. I was doing the right things … (But) when you’re so in your head, you don’t see those things. You just see the negatives. ‘Why did I get rid of the puck there? If I was playing with confidence, I wouldn’t get rid of that. I’d carry it a little bit more.’”
So Vilardi reached out to his social support network. For him, that means his brother, Francesco, his mom, Giovanna, and a select group of close friends. He spoke to Dr. Morgan Marcoux, one of three psychiatrists (and five mental health professionals) listed on Winnipeg’s hockey operations staff. He also continued to engage with the day-to-day stress-reducing habits he’s formed over the years.
When he scored his first goal of the season on Oct. 24, Vilardi’s first response was not joy but relief. He looked skyward, grateful to have finally broken his slump, then raised two fists into the air and jumped into the glass.
“You should be happy. You should be joyful. You should be whatever emotion you want to call it. Yeah, that one felt more like relief — which isn’t always a good thing, but sometimes it is a good thing. It’s part of the process.”
Vilardi has scored 11 more goals in 17 games since that game.
There are several tools Vilardi uses to look after himself during the rigors of an NHL season.
One rule he has for himself is that he always tries to do something fun when he gets out of the rink. His teammates tease him (lovingly) for going to the Rec Room as often as he does to indulge in arcade games.
“Guys always mess with me for that but it’s a mental thing,” Vilardi says. “I go there and I have an hour or an hour and a half where nothing else exists. I just go there, I play, I have fun, and I’m like a kid.”
At home, Vilardi gets into that same state of mind by building Lego. It’s methodical and slow, demanding just enough of Vilardi’s focus to make everything else in his day irrelevant for an hour while connecting to a joyful piece of his childhood. Building 7,500-piece showstoppers such as the Millennium Falcon from “Star Wars” or smaller projects such as the DeLorean from “Back to the Future” is a healthy distraction. And for Vilardi, who’s hoping to get the Lego Death Star for Christmas, it’s just plain fun.
The cold plunges aren’t quite so joyful, but he believes in their value.
“I really enjoy cold therapy because that’s legit — it’s like fight or flight. Your body is telling you to ‘Get the F out, get the F out,’ but you’re like, ‘No, I can do this,’” Vilardi says. “That correlates directly to situations where you could have high anxiety.”
He’s also reached out to people in his support network for tools to manage anxiety as it’s building up in the heat of the moment. He knows people who use deep breathing exercises. He meditates. His mom counts backwards from 10, which sounds simple but has been useful in moments that feel overwhelming. His days aren’t perfect, even when he’s scoring goals, but — to borrow a hockey phrase — Vilardi stays in the fight.
One thing he’s particularly grateful for in hockey is that, as long as there’s time on the clock, there’s always another opportunity to turn things around.
“I get put in situations where I feel like I can succeed … You make a nice move and it’s like, ‘What did you just do?’ almost. But it just happened naturally. Then you build confidence off of that.”
There is one more positive offshoot to Vilardi’s experience with anxiety. He’s using what he’s learned as often as he can while speaking to students through his role in the Jets organization’s mental health-focused initiative, Project 11.
Project 11 was created in honor of the late Rick Rypien, a former player on the Winnipeg Jets and Manitoba Moose who died by suicide. It works with schools in Manitoba to deliver mental health curricula to students of all ages in English and in French at no cost to teachers. Project 11 is delivered in classrooms and is meant to connect thousands of kids in Manitoba and beyond with a positive mental health curriculum.
Vilardi has volunteered at Project 11 events in schools and at Canada Life Centre in Winnipeg, speaking alongside mental health professionals about managing emotions and anxiety. He also volunteers with the Winnipeg Jets Hockey Academy as a part-time coach.
“One thing I tell the kids when we talk to our hockey team with the WJHA is, ‘Talk to yourself like you’re talking to your friend,’” Vilardi says. “If your friend was struggling or thought he sucked, you would never say, ‘Yeah, you suck.’ You’d say, ‘You’re great. You had a bad practice or you had a bad game but you’re good, don’t worry.’”
He’s trying to pay it forward, sharing lessons that have not always been easy to come by in his own life. In speaking to him multiple times for a story about mental health, the degree to which Vilardi cares about others comes through.
“Everyone deals with anxiety,” he says. “Fortunately or unfortunately, I started to deal with it at an earlier age than maybe most people would.”
