A coaches guide for Anxiety
This guide is designed to help you understand mental health and anxiety. It's divided into the following sections:
What is Mental Health?
Athletics and Mental Health
“There’s no crying in baseball!” This line from A League of Their Own is telling for how much of sport sees any form of emotional expression. From a young age, we’re taught to suck it up, play through the discomfort, ignore pain, and to show no signs of weakness. Ignore, suppress, force our way through things– that’s how we deal with our inner world.
Yet, researchers have found as many as 15% of college baseball players suffer from clinical depression, while 46% of a sample of Australian athlete’s experience symptoms of at least one mental health disorder (Proctor & Boan-Lenzo, 2010, Gulliver et al., 2015). Mental health issues can encompass a wide range of issues from mood disorders to anxiety. In Clinical Sports Psychiatry, the authors outline many of the specific challenges that athletes face, including: substance abuse, addiction, eating disorders, personality disorders, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and concussion related mental health issues (Baron et al., 2013).
Thanks to a few high-profile athletes being outspoken, the tide has finally started to change with how sports treat mental health. After NBA star Kevin Love spoke openly about his struggle with panic attacks, for the 2020 season the NBA required every team to have a full time mental health professional on staff. The door has cracked open for a conversation on the mental health issues that athletes face.
Athletes are not invincible. They are humans, who suffer from doubts, anxiety, depression, and the whole malady of mental health issues that humans do. It’s time to move on from the old school ‘ignore and push through it’ model to one backed by science and experience: acknowledging, understanding, and navigating the mental world.
In this guide we will tackle one particular aspect of mental health, how to help athletes navigate anxiety.
What is Anxiety?
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 19% of American adults suffered from an anxiety disorder in the past year, while 31.1% of adults experience an anxiety disorder at some point. Anxiety is one of, if not the most prevalent mental health disorder.
Anxiety can be defined as excessive worry or uncomfortable thoughts, that often also includes feelings of agitation or irritability (Gardner & Moore, 2006). Anxiety is an umbrella term that captures everything from specific phobias to disorders such as OCD or panic disorder. Anxiety disorders often trigger avoidant coping strategies, which can impact an individual’s daily activities.
The combination of thoughts and feelings can create a sensation of distress that makes it difficult to function. Further complicating the issue, is that anxiety is classified as a cluster of thoughts, feelings, and experiences with many of us experiencing one or two of these symptoms acutely. This often leads to a brushing off of anxiety or a misunderstanding of the long-term effects of an anxiety disorder.
