Other nights ... I visualize to the point that I know exactly what I want to do: dive, glide, stroke, flip, reach the wall, hit the split time to the hundredth, then swim back again for as many times as I need to finish the race.

It's not how you start, but it's how you finish.

I have reached a place in my life where I need to sit down and say, 'Well, what do I do? What's best for me?' I need to look into options for the future.

[Phelps] firmly denies that he takes drugs, suggesting that the notorious photo of him smoking from a bong was a one-time lapse of judgment.

I learned how fast you can go from being an international hero to being a reference in a joke on a late night talk show.

We need to make seeing a therapist more accessible; we've got to crack down on this and allow people the opportunity to seek help. It's going to be a game-changer. I would love people to become more vulnerable and reach out and ask for help. I would never want somebody to go through the feelings I had, almost exactly three years ago, of not wanting to be alive. That's a scary thing, and to think of where I am today compared to that - that's way bigger than winning a gold medal.

With social media, so many people have anxiety and depression because of it. Of course technology is somewhat good, but it can present so many issues; more and more we're seeing what that's causing, and it's even leading to deaths. I just got finished doing a documentary called Anx with children talking about anxiety and recognizing their emotions and understanding them better. We need to let kids know it's OK to not be OK. And we need to help them be comfortable talking about it.