Published on July 23, 2024
Sports organisations like the Australian Institute of Sport are devoting significant resourcing into supporting athletes’ mental health.
For example, athletes, coaches and staff can now access external psychological support through the newly established Mental Health Referral Network.
The International Olympic Committee has also devoted significant resources to support athletes at these upcoming Games.
Connecting athletes with mental health professionals can foster more helpful approaches to managing the stressors faced within elite sport.
Recently, the development of self-compassion and compassion-focused interventions has attracted increasing attention.
A growing body of research has consistently demonstrated that the ability of individuals to respond to distress and suffering with self-compassion is highly protective for mental health.
In recent years, growing research has explored how these approaches may be important among athletes.
Self-compassion appears to be an effective tool for responding to difficult sporting experiences, by combatting more harmful processes like shame and self-criticism.
Health & Medicine
Do we think about anxiety and depression differently now?
Among athletes, higher rates of self-compassion are associated with reduced psychological distress.
Elite sport is changing for the better.
Concepts like psychological safety and compassion are now commonplace, and athletes are becoming more and more comfortable seeking support.
Mental health is finally becoming less stigmatised in these high-performance competitions, and that can only be a good thing – both for the athletes themselves and for us, the spectators and supporters.
For more on this topic, listen to Dr Walton in this episode of PsychTalks, a podcast by the University of Melbourne's School of Psychological Sciences.
This article was first published on Pursuit. Read the original article.