It’s not only physical stress that can increase your injury risk, psychological stress plays a bigger part than you may think
You probably know that proper nutrition and hydration, as well as strength and conditioning all play important roles in injury prevention—but there is a significant factor that often gets left out of the injury conversation: stress. Injury prevention studies show that if you are experiencing high levels of negative life stress or have strong stress responsivity (which basically means you get stressed-out easily), then you’re at an increased risk of sustaining an injury. But if you have the resources, support, and coping skills to face challenging life situations without feeling stress, you can significantly reduce your risk of injury.
One of the main reasons for this increased risk of injury is that stress causes a cascade of psychological and attentional changes, including:
narrowing of peripheral vision
becoming easily distracted
inability to make quick decisions
not attending to task-relevant cues
increased muscular tension
decreased coordination
decreased balance
increased fatigue
So what can you do about it? Firstly it’s time to think about the psychological factors that can increase (or decrease) your stress response. To help frame your injury prevention strategy, consider the three R’s (Recovery, Relationships and Resilience) the next time you’re feeling stressed-out.
Recovery
If you are experiencing high levels of negative life stress, the best thing for your training plan might be to back off. If you can’t remove yourself from physical activity, you need to seriously consider deliberately increasing activities that reduce your stress response. The following is a list of evidence-based activities that can reduce stress reactivity. During times of increased life stress choose to do at least two of these stress balancing activities daily:
Take more naps
Listen to music
Get out in nature
Laugh out loud
Get a massage
Cultivate gratitude
Help someone in need
Mindfulness meditation (check out apps like Headspace and Insight Timer)
Relationships
Spend some time with your favourite people. Research indicates that time spent with others has a buffering effect on the stressors of life. Whether you’re getting together over coffee or grabbing a beer, heading out for a run or going for a bike ride; being proactive about building your support system is one of the most important things you can do for managing stress. You can also get support from your fellow injured athletes by joining communities (like The Injured Athletes Club) on social media or offline.
Resilience
Resilience, or “hardiness” is a personality trait comprised of three factors: commitment, control, and challenge. Athletes that are high in hardiness are less likely to become injured due to negative life stressors and are more likely to have positive outcomes if they do get injured.
Boost your hardiness quotient by focusing on:
The ability to persevere and see things through to the end (commitment).
Understanding certain things are out of your control, taking action where you can – ‘control the controllables’ and let the rest go.
Seeing stressors and setbacks as normal, ongoing parts of life, and viewing them as opportunities for growth (challenge).
You can’t prevent all injuries, but you can increase your odds of not getting injured when you pay attention to strengthening your body and your mind. We often leave the mental and emotional pieces of sports performance up to chance, but harnessing the power of these skills will decrease your risk of injury when life inevitably gets stressful.
Taken from an article by Carrie Cheadle, 2018
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