sport Injury

Every athlete at some time during their athletic career has experienced a physical injury that holds them back from partaking in the sport that they love, if it's from practice or competitive play it's a thing every athlete in the world wishes they could prevent. Even if you have been fortunate enough to train without a critical injury, all things considered, you know somebody who has had a physical injury that requires quite some time of professional rehabilitation before they can get back to training. These injuries and rehabilitation are regularly joined by abiding mental consequences, affecting the competitors' prosperity just as their probability of getting back to the sport. An anticipated result indicated that athletes with a high internal locus of control tend to recover faster than others. There is a fine line between being psychologically ready to return to a sport and being physically cleared for athletes with injuries. Some individuals possess specific personality traits that can forecast one's rate of psychological and physical recovery from an injury. This paper will elucidate the correlation between injuries' effect on mental health and the psychological health of an athlete. 

When athletes at any level face an injury, it puts them in a dilemma on how to face adversity; the athlete either chooses to overcome and grow or fold and eventually wash out of the sport.  When one experiences an injury, there is a tendency that the athlete will have more of a negative than positive impact on one's psyche. Athletes have tended to use various negative terms (e.g., anger, bitterness, confusion, depression, fear, frustration, helplessness, shock) to characterize their emotions after injury (W. Brewer, 2017). Evidence shows that athletes who report higher levels of emotional disturbance after sustaining an injury than before being injured and that athletes with injury tend to report higher levels of emotional disturbance than athletes without injury (M. Rice, 2016). 

Relationship Between Stress and Injury

Stress is a broad term; many underlying factors come into play, such as anxiety and depression. Furthermore, when stress (psychological, academic, training, or performance-related) overloads an athlete's stress-coping ability, the susceptibility to performance decrement increases, as does the risk of injury and illness (J. Hamlin, 2019).  Those who have a high-stress factor in their life are more likely to be prone to injury. When looking at stress-based injuries, there are two factors: muscle tension and attentional disruption. Attentional changes may include increased muscle tension, narrowing of the visual field, and increased distractibility, which may have a negative impact on the stress-injury response (L. Lavallee, 2019). A notable example to best relate to is Anderson and Williams  stress injury model. According to this model, personality, coping resources, and history of stress have impacted competitors’ reaction to distressing athletic situations that, thus impacts the likelihood of athletic injury through different stress-response methods. As well as proposing psychological risk factors, the Anderson and Williams model offered explicit pathways for skills training and psychological interventions to support unfavorable pressure related ramifications for competitors' wellbeing and to limit, or ideally prevent athletic injury.

Overtraining Syndrome

Emotional Responses to Injury

As we look into the effects of injuries on the mental and psychological health of athletes, there are more negative responses found than positive ones as injury tends to be a stressful thing. Shelly Sheinbein found that some psychological effects of injury include reinjury anxiety, psychological distress, and the stress of rehabilitation. Her findings were in accordance with Aditi Mankad of the Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology; there are many emotional responses that athletes tend to experience during rehab of their injuries. Mankad’s study features a psycholinguistic analysis of an athlete's experience in recovering from injury through three 20-minute writing sessions, which promoted disclosure of emotions associated with injury and rehabilitation. When an athlete is dealing with injury their head tends to fill with negative thoughts and when their levels of stress, mood disturbance, and self-esteem were measured research shows a decrease in all of them. These athletes tend to deal with anger, bitterness, confusion, depression and fear all factors which feed stress as we discussed earlier. As we found more negative impacts than positive ones we have to work with players to stay happy and positive through times of adversity like injuries but first we must understand the negative impacts an athlete experiences during injury and why it happens.

- relief ?? Bad season, players who are playing hurt get to rest 

Negative Impacts Injuries have on players of all sports

       As athletes deal with their injuries research shows that many tend to deal with depression/ and high stress levels. Not being able to partake in the activity that you train hard for and have loved since you started and compete affects many athletes negatively. They don’t get to spend time with their teammates and friends so they feel left out or not part of the team. Injuries are a hard thing to process, even the rehabilitation of an injury is a hard process as it is usually painful and will test the persistence of most people. From short term to long term all of these are factors that take a toll on a student athlete, after being at school all day, playing a sport was the one thing that took their mind off the struggles of everyday life and without being able to participate will bring their mental state way down. David Filan found when studying the long term mental and physical health of athletes dealing with a chronic hip injury that these athletes had a significant negative effect on the physical and mental well-being of athletes. Even if an athlete “receives corrective surgery, that may restore their physical function but is more limited in its ability to improve mental health status in this athletic cohort.” This brings in another negative impact that an injury could have on a player which would be on their confidence. 

A player's self-esteem levels tend to be high when a player is in good form, playing well in games at practice, connecting with the team and coach but when you're injured you don’t get to do any of this. Injured players tend to sit on the sideline watching everyone else play and in this process many have psychological problems to deal with because of this. You don’t feel like you're part of the team, you feel as if everyone around you is improving or working hard while your sitting on your the bench, you even as if everyone is judging you for sitting out, all of these negative thought mess with a players state of mind and their self-esteem levels in the process. When they go back into play they don’t have the same thoughts as they did pre-injury, and these new negative thoughts fill up their head affecting their confidence and performance on the field.  Everyone reacts differently to injuries but athletes who are passionate about playing get affected greatly especially when it’s the one thing somebody is good at, they struggle at school, problems at home but playing basketball took their mind off all of it and now they can’t even do that. According to Trent A. Petrie and Jay Deiters University of North Texas University all of these negative effects and stress levels of athletes during injury mostly depend on moderating effects of social support, athletic identity, and especially mental toughness.

 (Add how could be scared to go back to play, bc scared of getting hurt or scared of not being as good)  

· Mood Disturbance 

· Fear of playing 

· Psychological skill level

· Afraid of not being as good as I used to be.

Mental Toughness Relationship with Stress and Mental Health

Petrie and Dieters argue that when an athlete is mentally strong they tend to deal with stress factors better than others. They defined mental toughness as a collection of innate or learned values, attitudes, cognitions, emotions, and behaviors that impact how athletes assess and manage negative, adverse as well as positive, challenging competitive situations to consistently achieve their goals. By possessing these mentally tough factors athletes can cope more effectively with the difficult troublesome aspects of sport and to adapt more successfully to the demanding challenging aspects of competition. They argue that, “Examples of these mentally tough cognitions and affects include believing in one’s ability to achieve competitive goals, remaining positive in response to difficult situations, challenging oneself to exert as much effort as physically and emotionally possible, and channeling negative emotions and using them to one’s advantage (pg. 16, Petrie & Dieters). The best way to be ready against and overcome adversity is to be mentally strong and work on your mental health. Dealing with stress is a hard and to overcome depression and negative thoughts is even harder but there are things you can do to ease your comeback to play. 

How to deal with negative factors that come with injury?/How to help improve their mental health ? 

There are many ways we can work on an athlete's mental health while they are out of play. Improving their mental state while being out of play is very important so players can come back the same as before or even mentally stronger than before. As Petrie and Dieters argued, we must improve an athlete's mental toughness to cope more effectively with the difficult aspects that come along with playing a sport, especially injury. They also found in their study that social support was a big factor in keeping athletes happy and focused. We have to make sure athletes still feel like part of the team even if they are out for the test of the season. It would be even more important if it is a crucial injury like this. One way we could keep an athlete content while in rehab would be giving workouts which don’t include the injured body part, for example if a player has a strained quad, we could still give them upper body workouts to do on his own or during team practices so they feel like they are still doing something. If we keep them busy with workouts they are able to do, we can hold back negative thoughts such as not working as hard as your teammates and getting out of shape by sitting out. We keep them busy and their mind off of what is affecting them. Another way to do this which was found effective by… 

was giving the injured players a special job, for example we could tell the coach to have a conversation with him and make hype man, tell him how important his spirit is to the team and how they need to have him there still. This will make a player feel needed and still part of the team. By giving him this “special task” we also get his mind off of what is wrong with him and keep him focused and contributing to overall team success.

· Coach gives special jobs (hype man) make him feel part of the team

· Keep checking in with them (follow-ups)

· Mankand argues in his study that an Analysis of writing samples revealed increased use of linguistic markers indicating affective awareness. Findings also highlighted the importance of emotional disclosure and cognitive integration in reducing stress and enhancing understanding of injury. Meaning that by writing down how they feel and it helped them understand their injury more and stay more positive throughout rehab

 

Work Cited

V :Filan, D., & Carton, P. (2021). Chronic Hip Injury Has a Negative Emotional Impact on the Male Athlete With Femoroacetabular Impingement. Arthroscopy: The Journal of Arthroscopic and Related Surgery, 37(2), 566–576. https://doi-org.ezproxy.whittier.edu/10.1016/j.arthro.2020.10.035

V :Petrie, T. A., Deiters, J., & Harmison, R. J. (2014). Mental toughness, social support, and athletic identity: Moderators of the life stress–injury relationship in collegiate football players. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, 3(1), 13–27. https://doi-org.ezproxy.whittier.edu/10.1037/a0032698

V :Mankad, A., Gordon, S., & Wallman, K. (2009). Psycholinguistic Analysis of Emotional Disclosure: A Case Study in Sport Injury. Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology, 3(2), 182–196.

V Sheinbein, S. (2016). Psychological Effect of Injury on the Athlete: A Recommendation for Psychological Intervention. AMAA Journal, 29(3), 8–10.