Sport requires both physical and mental skills for optimal performance. Athletes that perform better tend to exhibit specific mental skills, including emotion regulation, management of performance anxiety, the ability to challenge unhelpful thoughts related to one’s performance, visualization and goal setting, the development of a pre-performance routine, as well as the ability to inspect and optimize a growth mindset. These skills can be taught and enhanced through work with a psychologist, much like physical skills (e.g., fine tuning your shot) can be taught and enhanced by a coach.
So, what does it look like to receive mental performance services for sport? First, an athlete would be assessed to determine their mental strengths, challenges, and general performance patterns. Second, evidence-based techniques would be taught to enhance mental skills for sport. One evidence-based modality that is often used to teach the mental skills necessary for sport is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which focuses on addressing the connection between thoughts, emotions, and behaviours so that athletes can feel more capable of managing their performance and general well-being.
- Thoughts: This includes identifying catastrophizing, over-generalized thoughts that might hinder performance (e.g., “I can’t make mistakes”) and working to develop alternative perspectives that are in line with a growth-mindset. Optimal sport performance is correlated more with a growth mindset (e.g., “I can develop skills and ways to cope”), as opposed to a fixed mindset (e.g., “I can’t change”).
- Feelings: Your psychologist may work with you to teach arousal regulation, breath training, and mindfulness skills to allow athletes to perform well, even when nervous. The goal is to teach athletes to understand and regulate emotions to allow for optimal performance, rather than having their feelings take over in important, stressful moments.
- Behaviour: Your psychologist may work with you to build performance routines to help stabilize attention and reduce variability, enhance reset behaviours (short, practiced actions for recovering after errors), goal-setting frameworks to help guide effort and keep focus on improvement rather than outcome, and deliberate practice habits to target specific areas of challenge.
In some cases, an athlete, in part due to their sport environment, might go on to develop a mental health disorder, like anxiety or depression. For example, intense training schedules and expectations imposed by self or others (e.g., a team, organization, fans, coaches) can result in clinically significant worry, low mood, lack of motivation or interest that can lead to functional impairment (including reduced sport performance, relational discord, poor sleep and physical health) in important areas of life. When this happens, it’s important for athletes to work closely with a psychologist who has expertise in mental performance skills and the treatment of mental illness.
