How a Sportscaster At the Top of Her Game Prioritizes Self Care & Tunes Out Trolls
Everyone deserves their own hair wellness strategy. Find out how Bonnie got to the root of the issue.
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Sports run through Bonnie Bernstein’s blood, you could say.
Considered one of the most accomplished female sportscasters of all time, Bernstein fell in love with the games of football, baseball, and basketball back when she was just a kid. Her parents were die-hard sports fans and games were constantly broadcast on the television in her childhood home in New Jersey.
A gymnast herself, she earned Academic All-American honors at the University of Maryland. All of this uniquely positioned her to understand the mentality of being a competitive athlete, setting her up for a two-decade career in sportscasting on-air at ESPN, CBS sports, and more.
These days, she is producing sports docu-series and running her own company. Her career hasn’t slowed down one bit, but at age 48, time and the stressors of the industry have caught up with her at times.
Just a few years ago, her already fine hair was thinning and starting to fall out in spots. And some additional medical scares caused her to reevaluate and prioritize her health. The wake-up call resulted in what’s become her new and improved routine: stretching and exercise, healthy eating enhanced by supplements like Nutrafol Women, and plenty of water and sleep.
Here’s a look at how she practices self-care while continuing to bring the art of the game to our living rooms.
We are nothing if we don’t have our health
It was a fall day in 2006. Bernstein was on the road, traveling at least four days a week to cover football for ABC on Saturdays, then immediately flying out Saturday nights to do ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball. That day, she was standing on the sidelines, covering the iconic Cotton Bowl where Texas plays Oklahoma in one of the biggest rivalries of the college football season.
Her upper left leg had been bothering her for a week now, but she dismissed it as a pulled a muscle. Over the course of the game, though, her leg started to throb with pain.
Not one to walk out on an assignment (and still having her athlete mentality to push through anything and everything) Bernstein stuck it out. After the game, though, as she was jogging back to the car to get to the airport, she couldn’t breathe. Three days later in New York tests revealed a D.V.T blood clot that ran from her Achilles up to her groin. It infiltrated both her lungs, causing a life-threatening bilateral pulmonary embolism.
“I was working my tail off at the time, and I wasn’t going to the gym or eating as well as I should have been,” she says. “I realized something had to give; if I kept going at the level that I was, I was going to die. That was the first red flag that health needed to become more of a priority.”
“Self-care is something we don’t pay attention to when we’re younger, because we feel impenetrable,” she says. “I was steadfastly obsessed with achieving as much as I could as quickly as I could as a professional and sports broadcaster; I never thought about myself. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that we are nothing if we don’t have our health.”
Stress comes with the territory
When Bernstein was just starting out as a reporter, she found out quickly enough she’d have to develop some thick skin to survive in the male-dominated sports world.
“I recognized at a young age sports was a male-dominated industry,” she says. “so I started creating a tough outer shell. When I did my college internships, I looked around and saw very few women. I knew what I was up against. If I didn’t have the strength to push aside the fact that, quite often, I was the only woman in the room, I’d get eaten alive.”
While that thick skin allows her to push aside critics and social media trolls she encounters daily, it hasn’t minimized the stress of the job. After decades of her grueling reporting schedule and on-air styling, her hair started to thin and fall out. She tried to change up her diet and tried different styling products, but nothing was helping.
Then in 2016, her best friend recommended Nutrafol Women supplements. Bernstein was drawn to the research and science that went into creating the supplement. Nutrafol, in particular, uses a blend of natural ingredients like ashwagandha, hydrolyzed marine collagen, bio-optimized curcumin and saw palmetto; its proprietary blend is designed to balance out digestive health, liver functions, stress response, and metabolic systems in the body.
Bernstein’s initial Nutrafol hair analysis signaled she may have been experiencing high cortisol (stress hormone) levels, plus elevated levels of mercury and aluminum indicating the need for liver support (our liver helps remove toxins from the body). In addition to taking Nutrafol Women, Bernstein also started taking Nutrafol Stress Adaptogen booster and Liver Support booster.
She didn’t expect to see such drastic results. “The first thing I noticed was the strength in my hair shaft,” she says. “I’ve always had very fine hair, so I could easily tell my roots were getting thicker. Then I noticed the hair on the crown of my head was starting to fill in.” After a few months, she experienced re-growth in her temple areas, as well.
Over the years, her hair wellness routine has simplified significantly as she took on a more organic mindset, too. Out: daily blowouts with a ton of hairspray when she reported outside. In: Washing her hair every two or three days. She is more conscious about ingredient labels, opting for natural products. And she only uses hairspray when she needs it, and has switched to a lighter formula that washes out easily.
Credibility over aesthetics
Although Bernstein’s professional mantra has always been “substance over style,” she says it would be naïve to say that looks don’t matter when you’re on-air.
“For better or for worse, aesthetics are a focus in our industry,” she says. “When I first got to ESPN, I was 24, the youngest person on-air at the network. You’re still trying to cement your own identity, and then you have other people opining on how they feel about you— the way you dress, what your makeup looks like, and what your hair looks like. I cut my hair short because I wanted people to focus less on my aesthetics and more on what I was talking about.”
Even as an executive often reporting in a studio now, she still remembers that credibility matters more than anything else.
“The appearance stuff has never concerned me.” she says. “I don’t care if you don’t think I’m pretty, if you don’t like my hair, if you don’t like my clothes. I care if you don’t think I know what I’m talking about. We all have some degree of sensitivity, but questioning my knowledge hurts me more than you thinking I look like crap in yellow.”
Staying mentally and physically balanced
In 2017, Bernstein started her own company, Walk Swiftly Productions, allowing her to have more of a hands-on approach to the creative side of content development. Since then, she’s been as busy as ever—she produced a college football series for Country Music Television, and a four-part docu-series about E-sports for ESPN. She already has two award-winning series under her belt. She also has a podcast in the works, plus she is regularly in-demand for public speaking engagements.
Despite her demanding schedule, she is fully committed to daily wellness and self-care. Mornings begin with a probiotic and a glass of lemon water to jumpstart her metabolism, followed with yoga stretches and meditation.
“My body is pretty banged up from gymnastics, I’ve had four knee surgeries and my lower back is a hot mess, so if I don’t stretch and do yoga for 10-15 minutes every day, I can’t function,” she explains. “But I see a ton of value in setting a daily intention, ‘What’s your purpose today?’ And then I identify three things I’m grateful for, because gratitude can so easily be lost in the grind of life. If your day goes south in a hurry, being mindful of the ‘good’ helps keep you mentally balanced.”
She also tries to get to the gym; even calling up hotels she’ll be staying at on the road and asking about their equipment and inquiring about walking trails nearby. She drinks plenty of water, eats fruits and vegetables wherever she can find them, and prioritizes eight hours of sleep at night.
“As an entrepreneur, the hustle is real, I’m just doing everything in my power to try and keep up,” she says.
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