Mount Everest

Reading the mind of a record-breaking Everest athlete with Psyray

Andrew Ushakov reached the summit of Mount Everest on May 19, 2025, just 3 days, 23 hours, and 7 minutes after leaving New York – the fastest sea-to-summit time ever recorded, beating the previous record of 12 days by more than a week. And it was completed with a broken arm and less than an hour of sleep in four days.

A typical Everest expedition takes 40 to 50 days, most of these days spent waiting at progressively higher camps while the body adjusts to the thin air. At 8,849 meters, there is roughly a third of the oxygen available compared to sea level. If you climb too fast, the lack of oxygen can be fatal.

The natural question is: What goes on in a man’s mind (and body) when completing such an impossible feat? Luckily, thanks to two brain scans – the first completed just before Andrew’s ascent, the second upon his return to base camp three and a half days after summiting – Psyray can offer answers.

Andrew’s case is unusual in its scale and ambition, but the questions it raises can be applied more broadly: what does sustained high performance look like from the inside? Can we measure the psychological impact, accurately and reliably?

The man behind the record

Andrew is not a professional athlete. He is a structural engineer from New York, holds four Master’s degrees, and grew up in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

He started climbing in 2020. By 2023 he had climbed eight high-altitude peaks across South America, Alaska, Antarctica, and Asia. His approach to climbing mirrors his approach to engineering: systematic preparation, thorough risk assessment, and a clear-eyed view of what the data says.

When Andrew decided to attempt Everest, he knew he would need to do it without the traditional 40 to 50 days of mountain acclimatization – not out of recklessness, but because he couldn’t be away from family and work that long. Instead, he trained for the lowoxygen environment in advance: over two years, he logged more than 400 hours in a hypoxic tent and trained up to nine sessions per week wearing a hypoxic mask, guided by Dr. Irina Zelenkova, a physician specializing in altitude medicine.

In 2024 he almost succeeded in climbing Mt. Everest in six days, but lost his vision three times near the summit and turned back just 300 meters short. After minor eye surgery and better goggles, he tried again – and this second time he succeeded. This despite an avalanche on Cotopaxi that just two months earlier swept him 800 meters down the slope and left him with four bone fractures. Andrew kept training and climbed Everest with a compression bandage on his elbow, taking 45 ibuprofen tablets along the way. By Wednesday he was in Dubai for a meeting about a skyscraper.

The technology behind the scans

Psyray provides distinctive technology for the objective analysis of individuals’ mental and emotional processes. Psyray starts with performing a brain scans within minutes using a simple headset packed with complex technology. With the assistance of AI, these scans are compared to thousands of others to generate reports that help mental-health professionals gain insights into their clients’ mental and emotional states and their underlying causes.

Psyray maps wellbeing on a 0-100% scale across seven domains: emotional clarity, stress management, sense of purpose, vitality and engagement, practical stability, freedom from old pain, and relational capacity. Together, these produce an overall wellbeing score and a detailed profile of how a person is functioning across different areas of their inner life. Repeat scans allow users to track changes in these mental states over time.

Andrew completed his first Mt. Everest Psyray assessment scan at base camp, before beginning his climb. He began with an overall high score, with stress regulation and emotional clarity the highest. (His lowest score was in relational capacity, where the report flagged guardedness in close relationships. Andrew wasn’t surprised: “My therapist identified I have trust issues,” he said matter-of-factly.)

The profile generated showed someone with clear internal direction, high capacity to manage pressure, and solid daily functioning. Good preparation, in psychological terms, for what he was about to do.

“The most amazing part,” says Dr. Irina Zelenkova, “is that the mental landscape is put into numbers. You scan yourself and you know everything.” Dr. Irina Zelenkova is a physician specializing in sports and altitude medicine, and the Founder & CEO of OWNTOP. She leads the Scientific Advisory Council at Sports Equity Lab, where she has been a longtime research collaborator, bringing deep expertise in Olympic sport and altitude science and medicine. Her Ph.D. focused on the physiological mechanisms of hypoxic tolerance in elite athletes. For more than 18 years, Irina has helped elite athletes reach their best results and guided climbers to the summits of the world’s highest peaks.

"Performance can look stable while the system underneath is under strain."

What Psyray put into numbers was something Andrew already sensed but had never seen measured. He is not someone who naturally gravitates toward psychological language, but when he read his before-summit report, using quantifiable measurements rather than abstract language, his response was direct: “That’s accurate.” Psyray surfaced what Andrew already intuitively knew, but has never seen measured. To him, that was the point. “It’s about perceived accuracy,” he says. “If I read it and recognize myself, it’s useful.” And he recognized himself.

Measuring the physical toll

Three days later, at 7,900 meters, the edge of the death zone, Andrew hit a wall. After three sleepless nights he vomited and his bloodoxygen levels reached a low of 35%. He lay in his tent holding a syringe of dexamethasone, the emergency medication used to relieve the symptoms of altitude sickness and get a climber moving again for a descent.

But Andrew wasn’t ready to give up. He put the syringe down and slept 40 minutes. When he woke, his blood-oxygen levels had rebounded to 80%. So, at midnight, he started the summit push – and he reached the summit the next morning.

Continuing was Andrew’s choice. The extremely high stress-regulation score revealed by his scan before departure predicted this capacity: his ability to assess situations clearly and hold steady when everything else was failing.

When Andrew completed his second Psyray assessment back at base camp, the contrast was stark: Stress regulation, one of his biggest pre-climb strengths, had dropped 43 points. Embracing and enjoying life fell 32 points, mind and heart 31 points. The profile of someone in peak readiness had become someone running on empty.

One domain moved the other way: practical functioning (stability and ability) rose 16 points, to almost 100%. This might be the most interesting finding – one that most wellbeing tools would miss entirely. Enhanced task performance alongside broad psychological depletion is a warning sign: high practical functioning can obscure underlying dysfunction. Standard checkins would have returned a high score before the summit, and a higher one after. Psyray’s multidomain structure makes the gap visible.

“I wasn’t totally exhausted after the summit,” he says. “I was tired. But I felt I could climb another mountain. Physically, I think I could. Mentally, I just didn’t want to. That’s a difference I’d never felt before.”

The man who had just climbed Everest in a world-record time was back in Dubai for a business meeting within days. On the surface, he was performing normally, but underneath the numbers told a different story.

“He had an interesting transformation,” Irina says. “Earlier climbs and interviews showed the mountains had been good for him. After the Everest summit, this changed completely. The cost that I personally observed in Andrew was clearly reflected in the numbers.” Andrew’s case is extreme, but the patterns Psyray uncovers aren’t unusual; they are just unusually clear to see.

"What this means for the rest of us?"

The before-and-after comparison of the two Psyray scans was able to show a trajectory, change over time. The drop of 43 percentage points in stress regulation isn’t just a low score, it’s a story about what the experience cost him. Over time, this kind of longitudinal tracking could help identify who is at risk of, e.g., burnout or uncover delayed psychological costs before they become bigger problems.

Of course, this is important in expedition medicine and extreme sports, where pre- and post-event scanning can establish a baseline, track what the experience costs, and support structured recovery. However, these insights are equally applicable in high-pressure professional roles. Andrew raised the question himself during our conversation: Could Psyray be used to check whether a surgeon is in the right state of mind before an operation? Whether a pilot, a police officer, or an air-traffic controller is carrying more than their regulatory system can handle?

The tool’s speed and multi-domain structure make this an easy check to implement. The pattern this case revealed (high task performance alongside broad psychological depletion) is exactly the profile that conventional check-ins miss: that someone who looks functional might actually running on empty, putting them at risk of crashing if there is no intervention. By the time burnout becomes visible, it has usually been building for a long time. Regular scanning can reveal this trajectory before it becomes a clinical problem, and whether the intervention being used is having any effect.

Future research should explore how Psyray scores correlate with validated clinical instruments under controlled conditions: How reliable is the tool when someone is acutely depleted, as Andrew was after the summit? Does this before-and-after pattern show up in other elite athletes, or replicate across other high-performance populations, such as military personnel or emergency workers? And can longitudinal tracking be used to predict psychological cost early enough to act on it, rather than just describe it afterwards?

Andrew’s case is one data point. A very interesting one that is in line with years of experience in assessments of high performing individuals, but it is essentially anecdotal evidence. The patterns here are real. The question is how consistently they appear. Could Psyray become the tool that makes the invisible visible?

"High task performance can obscure underlying dysfunction"