REDs: We Must Talk About It
Dedication, discipline, and the ability to push oneself are essential parts of being an athlete. But, what happens when female-identifying athletes push themselves beyond to the point of overriding fatigue to win and the very drive that helps fuel their performance becomes a detriment to their system?
Rebuilding Safety After Outdoor Sports Trauma
Many athletes love and enjoy their time outside engaging in the sport of their choice, whether it be cycling, running, football/soccer, field hockey, swimming, basketball, etc. It can happen where an athlete becomes injured or has an outdoor sports accident that leaves a lasting impact. When we are talking about outdoor accidents this may include being hit by a car while cycling, having a near drowning experience, or getting injured while running on the trail and not having help nearby. The lasting impact may not just be physical. It could be mental or a combination of both physical and mental. In this case, we are talking about the mental impact after a doctor has cleared the athlete and the gear is ready to go, but as soon as the athlete sees the trail, the mountain, or the water, their body completely freezes up. In this case it isn’t a lack of grit, mental fortitude, devotion, determination, or lack of passion. Rather, it is a highly intelligent, automatic survival mechanism where the brain, particularly the amygdala, is doing its job by sending a signal of danger in effort to keep the athlete alive. So, then how do we work with experience to get back out there? Enter the bottom-up approach. And, as we dive in please remember that this blog post is not intended to be mental health advice, treatment, or a plan. Rather it is meant to bring hope and know that trauma is not the end of enjoying a sport.
The Difference Between Treating Trauma and Being Trauma-Informed in the World of Sports
For the past two weeks we have been talking about the importance of being trauma-informed when working with athletes. We now reach a point where we need to discuss the difference between treating trauma and being trauma-informed. While both aim to support athletes, they are two different scopes of practice, clinical boundaries, and ultimate objectives. So let’s dive into our discussion!
Trauma-Informed Approach to Sports and Working Athletes Part 2
This week we continue with our discussion about the importance of a trauma-informed approach in sport psychology. Our focus switches to 6 Guiding Principles of a Trauma-Informed Approach introduced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2018). As a gentle reminder, the 6 Guiding Principles are the daily behavioral values used to achieve the R’s discussed last week.
Trauma-Informed Approach to Sports and Working Athletes Part 1
Many of us have heard the old athletic mantra: Leave your problems at the locker room door or something similar. For decades, traditional sports culture has demanded that performers push through pain, bury their emotions, and rely on sheer "mind over matter" to win. This approach has cost many athletes when it comes to their mental health and from a neurobiological perspective. The leave your problems in the locker room approach ignores a fundamental truth: the body keeps score, and athletes cannot simply uncouple their lived histories from their physical performance.
Protecting Your Brain as an Athlete
Our brains are essential to our daily lives! That might be one of the most obvious statements. Still, it’s worth saying because we can occasionally take our brains for granted. We can see this in athletics sometimes, so it is essential that we make the brain the center of our conversation at times. So it is with that in mind that we take a look at what protecting our brain in the context of athletics means. Protecting the brain in athletics is a multi-layered approach that requires thinking about physical safety, neurobiology, and sports psychology. The brain serves as the “hardware” for our athletic performance and injuries or chronic stress, for example, can impact reaction time, emotional regulation, and physical coordination, to name a few. So let’s dive into our conversation about protecting the brain in the context of athletics!
Fallibility of Human Memory
Memory is a constructive process, not a literal reproduction of the past, which can be prone to errors and distortions (Schacter, 2012; Schacter & Thakral, 2024). Because memories are pulled together from different fragments or pieces of information, that is where our memories become subject to distortion, misinformation, or misidentification. With that being said, this constructive process is functional, allowing us to use our past experiences to help us imagine future scenarios.
Summer Solstice! Welcome Summer!
This year the solstice happens on Sunday, June 21, at 4:24 A.M. EDT when the Earth is at the point in its orbit where the North Pole reaches its maximum tilt (approximately 23.5 degrees) toward the Sun (Almanac, 2025). This is also the time when the Northern Hemisphere is exposed to the Sun at the most direct angle of the year. This time of year has some profound implications for neurobiology and psychological well-being. These are what we are going to explore in preparation for June 21st!
Boundaries! Spiritual Boundaries
When we are looking through the lens of mental health, spiritual boundaries are the protective limits that we set for ourselves around our core beliefs, values, and practices that give our lives meaning and purpose. These boundaries help define our right to follow our own internally developed compass and protect our connections to a higher power or purpose, nature, or our inner self from being coerced, shamed, or diminished by others. Spiritual boundaries are necessary for existential safety or the feeling that we are allowed to exist as our amazing, authentic selves in a world with many different perspectives. With all that said, let’s dive into a deeper discussion.
Boundaries! Social Boundaries
The focus for this post brings our awareness to social boundaries. Social boundaries are the boundaries or limits that we set regarding our time, energy, and availability within the context of our relationships and community. These boundaries help us moderate how much energy we use to engage with the world around us in both the in-person and digital contexts. The goal here is to be able to ensure our social life nourishes us rather than depletes us overall. Before we dive in, it is worth clarifying something about emotional boundaries and social boundaries. While our emotional boundaries help protect our feelings, social boundaries help us protect our capacity. Social boundaries function like gatekeepers of our schedules and our social batteries.
Boundaries! Emotional Boundaries
We have covered mental and physical boundaries thus far in the series. Today we arrive at emotional boundaries. Emotional boundaries address the invisible line that distinguishes our feelings and internal experiences from the feelings and experiences of those around us. They help us understand how much emotional energy that we are willing to share and even receive to ensure that we don’t get lost in others’ emotional worlds. Simply stated emotional boundaries help protect our inner peace and emotional stamina and allow us to take responsibility for our own feelings.
Boundaries! Mental Boundaries
When we talk about mental boundaries in the context of mental health, we are looking at our cognitive space that contains your thoughts, values, opinions, and beliefs. Unlike physical boundaries where we can potentially see or touch them, think about our body boundaries, mental boundaries are invisible. They separate our internal world and experiences from the experiences and thoughts of others. Our mental boundaries guard our intellectual autonomy and psychological sovereignty just like our physical boundaries protect our bodies.
Boundaries! Physical Boundaries
Because they set personal limits that help us feel safe, and they help us negotiate our behavior and choices in relationships outside of ourselves. Boundaries also help us prevent burnout and reduce stress because they allow us to establish clear guard rails about our time and energy. Ultimately, boundaries serve many purposes in our lives, and the above sentences only cover a few of the many. If an argument was to be made, though, boundaries as safety stands out as one of the most important reasons for them.
Mental Health Awareness Month: Why Do We Need to Care About Our Mental Health?
Welcome to May, Mental Health Awareness Month! This is a special month in the year where mental health professionals and organizations take additional time to remind us all about the importance of mental health. That is not to say that professionals and organizations don’t do this all year long because of the importance of mental health in our life. And, yes, our mental health is essential in our daily lives, and that is what this post will focus on. This post will serve as a gentle reminder about why we need to care about mental health, not just our physical health. While we will not be able to cover every reason in depth, nor can we cover every possible topic, hopefully, everyone reading this post renews their commitment to take care of their mental health.
Stress Awareness Month: Stress Relief and Resilience
Resilience is our ability to bounce back from stressful situations, which helps buffer the impacts of stress (Bajaj et al., 2022; Chen et al., 2022). The other key feature of resilience is that resilience is not about avoidance, but rather our ability to adapt to, manage, and recover from stress. Avoiding stress is something altogether different. And, resilience is something that we can develop through things like social connections, building our self-awareness, etc. Believe it or not, positive affect can be a resilience resource as higher levels of positive affect can help protect people from impacts of stress (Egan et al., 2024). The focus for today is diving into what helps us build resilience so that we can flip challenges on their head and turn them into growth opportunities.
Stress Awareness Month: Mediating Factors
What are mediating factors? Mediating factors is a fancy way of saying factors that explain how or why a stressor ends up in a specific outcome. These factors help explain the mechanism that conveys the effect of stress on us as humans, whether physically, psychologically or both. For example, why do some people end up with a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and others do not, despite going through the same event? The simple answer is because we are not the same. The long answer is because of mediating factors that we cannot necessarily see on the outside. These factors are worth talking about because they help us understand ourselves better and our relationship with stress.
Stress Awareness Month: Impacts of Stress
We spent much time in the last post talking about the different kinds of stress. Now we will come back to this point. There is a lot of overlap of impact between the different types of stress. Let’s look at environmental stress as our example. In one study they looked at air pollution, climate change, solar radiation, and meteorological conditions and their impact on different health outcomes, such as respiratory, cardiovascular, metabolic and gastrointestinal, renal and urogenital, neurological and psychological health, infectious and skin diseases, and major cancers, and let’s say the outcomes were not good (Sundas et al., 2024). Additionally, many of us experience many types of stress throughout our lives, which leads to cumulative impacts. For people who report high levels of cumulative stress in many different life domains and across time the negative impacts of daily stress are worse for their health (Haight et al., 2023). It’s time to take stress seriously. Do not wait. Today is the day.
Stress Awareness Month: Types of Stress
April is Stress Awareness Month. While we have a month devoted to bringing awareness to stress, let’s call a spade a spade. We experience stress in our lives everyday. Before we spend more time on the challenges of stress, let’s remember why the human body has the ability to experience stress. Stress is a natural physical and emotional response to the challenges we experience in our lives as a survival mechanism that activates the “fight-or-flight” to face what our bodies or minds view as threats.
Athlete Identity: The Impact of Social Media
We live in the day and age of social media. We have Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp, Reddit, and Pinterest to name a few. Approximately 63.9% to 68.7% of the world's population uses social media. This number differs slightly depending on where one pulls the information and from what year. The idea here is that many, many people use social media, and athletes are no exception. Social media is allowing athletes to build personal brands, control their narratives, and engage with their fan base, which all impact their athlete identity. While the above are generally considered to be positives, there is another side that we need to consider - the negatives. Athletes are more exposed to intense public scrutiny, social comparison, and mental health challenges. In this post we look at the good, the bad, and everything in between.
Spring is Here! What About Our Mental Health?
As of Friday, Mar 20, 2026, 8:46 AM MDT, we are officially in spring. Depending on where you are in the Northern Hemisphere, the time may be different. That time is the spring equinox, veteran equinox, or what is also known as the First Point of Aries. Spring brings with it budding flowers, the fresh green of new plant life, the birth of baby animals, and days filled with more light. It’s a beautiful time of year.
With the changing of the seasons, we may need to stop and consider our connection with nature, as there is an essential link between the two
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