Nick Ferguson Beat the Odds in the NFL—Then He Faced His Toughest Opponent: His Own Mind
LOS ANGELES, July 28, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — He began at both Morris Brown College and Georgia Tech without an athletic scholarship, earning his place on each team as a walk-on. Then he went undrafted and persevered to play professional football in Canada and Germany before making it to the NFL. He built a 10-year career as an NFL safety, but in his final season, Ferguson found himself in a fight against an opponent he’d never trained for: his own mind.
“I was letting rage get the best of me. I didn’t care about my career,” Ferguson said on a recent episode of The Trent Shelton Podcast with host Trent Shelton, describing a stretch late in his career when tension with a coach sent him into a spiral. “It got to a point where I didn’t care about football. I hated driving up to the stadium.”
Ferguson’s wife pushed him to confront what he was facing, which led to his discovery of the book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard.
“As I was reading through Dianetics, I started realizing what was happening to me,” he said. “The analytical mind is a part of our mind that allows us to build things, construct and go about our days. And the reactive mind—that’s where we store all our pain, anxiety and negative emotions that have taken place in our life.”
NFL teams spend more than $80 million on average per team annually toward player health benefits, which include an array of mental health resources. Yet former players report depression and anxiety at much higher rates than other men their age. For Ferguson, the positive shift came from understanding how his own mind was working against him.
“I encourage people to read Dianetics because it has helped me to understand me,” Ferguson said. “I wish I had this in my second or third year in the league. It would have made a massive difference.”
Established in 1981, Bridge Publications, Inc., located in Los Angeles, California, is the publisher of the nonfiction works of international best-selling author L. Ron Hubbard. Bridge Publications’ award-winning state-of-the-art facility serves geographic regions including North and Latin America, Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
For more information, visit dianetics.org.
Sara Lucatero
Bridge Publications, Inc.
[email protected]
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