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
Neurodiversity in Sports
Neurodiversity in sports is a topic that probably doesn’t get talked about as much as we need. Scroll through any of your social media accounts or emails and see what you notice. Did you notice much around the topic of neurodiversity, sports, and athletes? Did you know that there is increasing evidence that suggests autism and ADHD may occur at higher rates in athletes than in the non-athlete population (Hoare et al., 2023; Hoare et al., 2025). Given that information, why are we not talking about this topic and taking more action?!
Brief Introduction to the Psychology of Athlete Retirement
Last week, we revisited the topic of athlete identity in preparation for this week. Why? For the following reason. As important as athlete identity is for driving high performance and motivation in sports, athlete identity is a key predictor of athlete adjustment trajectories, though the mechanisms are not as clearly established (Haslam et al., 2021b; Haslam et al., 2024). Whether athlete, coach, sport and performance professional, or mental health counselor, understanding athlete identity is crucial. It also means that, given we don’t know the mechanisms, we must pay attention and remember to work with an athlete as a whole person.
Athlete Identity: What Is It?
As a working definition, identity is the amalgamation of memories, experiences, relationships, and values that a person uses to help define a sense of self. New experiences and facets can be incorporated through time. Remember, no definition is perfect and researchers are always learning more. For now, this definition will serve our purpose. Let’s begin by highlighting a couple key points from this definition.
Fatphobia in Sports
This week's focus is fatphobia. As before with the previous posts on racism and gender inequity, we will not be able to do this topic justice in such a short space. However, hopefully it serves as a pathway for understanding more about this topic and how it’s a systemic issue that must be addressed.
What is Order - Emotion, Feeling, Thought - What is the Difference? And, Why Does It Matter?
There is a complex interplay between emotions, feelings, and thoughts. Learn more about this interplay and why it matters.
Racism in Sports
Last week focused on gender inequity in sports, this week we turn to another systemic issue in sports, racism. These topics can be challenging to dive into, and they are essential topics that must be addressed. This post may be triggering for some, please make sure to take care of yourself. Thank you in advance for diving in and facing racism head on!
Racism takes many forms in sports. Racism shows up in numerous ways and incorporates a multitude of acts and processes that operate on the individual level and the institutional level, either overtly or covertly (Hylton, 2010).
Gender Inequality in Sports
When it comes to gender inequity in sports, one blog post cannot do the conversation justice. There are many conversations and threads that must be discussed. Moreover, conversations need to be turned into action. However, we must begin somewhere. This blog post hopes to serve as primer to introduce the topic in hopes of inspiring more conversations and action to bring about lasting change.
What Do Rugby and Artistic Swimming Have in Common? Part 2
Welcome to part 2 in this series about artistic swimming and rugby. Hopefully, last week encouraged everyone to learn more about both of these sports and any associated biases. Now it is time to look at these two sports through the lens of stigma. While these two sports may seem vastly different, how they are impacted by stigma brings them closer together as they are often misunderstood by the general public. These misconceptions include the nature of their athleticism, the intense physical impacts, and the gender-based stereotypes. Let’s begin our exploration on the impacts of stigma on these two sports.
What Do Rugby and Artistic Swimming Have in Common? Part 1
How often do we even think about comparing rugby and artistic swimming? Probably not too often, however, there is an important reason to explore these two sports and next week we will dive more deeply into this topic.
Building Creativity for Athletes
How often do people hear creativity, sports, and athletes in the same sentence? Chances are rare, if at all Yet, creativity can be one of the most essential topics in sports (Fardilha & Allen, 2020; Rasmussen et al., 2019). When we think about athletic creativity from a sport psychology perspective, many minds go to encouraging exploration, varied training, and open-ended problem solving, thus encouraging athletes to expand their flexibility and ability to identify novel solutions. The result is increased confidence and performance from the exposure to the above ideas, in addition to other topics such as the introduction of novel ideas, the use of visualization, and adapting creative mental exercises, like role-playing and including creative non-sport activities. Mouth full! Yep! So let’s break this down a little bit and make it fun.
Sport Psychology and Training Indoors
Chances are that many people dread the thought of training indoors because the experience is not the same. There are not the same cues that people experience when they are outdoors training such as the wind, sights, and a chance to practice cornering. That can make the experience not as enjoyable. We all lack the opportunity to practice certain skills, like cornering, but at the same time gain the opportunity to practice others, like cadence.
The Beauty of Winter
Winter mental health themes often focus around Seasonal Affective Disorder, winter blues, Depressive symptoms, isolation, anxiety, etc. All of these themes are important to discuss, as they are very real. And there is also room to spend some time inviting the beauty of nature and the winter season into the discussion remembering that winter is one of the seasons of the Earth and has its lessons for us.
Putting the Body Back into Sport and Performance Psychology
What is something that we all have in common? If you guessed the body, you would be correct! We all have a body that we live in on a daily basis. And the several past blog posts have highlighted a few themes: mental health, sport and performance psychology, and the mind-body connection. These themes absolutely stand on their own and are essential. What they can also do together is bridge the gap between athletes and performers, sport and performance psychology, and the body. That may sound funny to say because athletes and performers use their body constantly. And yet, when we look at sport and performance psychology we see a strong focus on the mind
Interoception
Interoception is the sense of your body's internal state, providing awareness of things like your heartbeat, bodily sensations, or thirst. Simply put, interoception is our ability to sense and be aware of what is happening within our own bodies. Why is it so important to us? Let’s dive in and find out why.
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