As much as the Olympics brought glory to us, it also brought us moments of tears as the campaigns of some athletes ended tragically with injuries. Indian wrestler Nisha Dahiya battled severe pain and injury but lost her quarter-final bout in the women’s 68kg division at the Paris 2024 Olympics wrestling competition. Murali Sreeshankar managed to breach the qualifying standard in the men’s long jump but did not travel to Paris as a knee injury ruled him out for the entire 2024 season. Even the mighty Neeraj admitted that the fears of aggravating his injury slightly held him back during the Paris Olympics.
As discussed in the previous blog, Injuries are not just physical wounds for athletes, but a realm where no athlete wants to be. Sport injuries, although not very uncommon in the field, have tremendous effect on an athletes’ sporting career as well as on their wellbeing. Recovering from a sports injury entails more than just healing the wound, the athlete has to undergo many psychological stressors ranging from bearing the constant pain, the emotional pain of not being able to play or missing out on important competitions, loneliness, even anxiety and depression at times. In these times understanding the psychological antecedents and responses to injury becomes a crucial step in appropriate rehabilitation of that injury.
From a sport psychology perspective, here’s our take on why and how athletes sustain injuries and what are some common reactions to them.
Psychological Precursors to Sport Injury
Although an injury is defined as any physical harm caused to one’s body, it may have its roots in one’s psychology. Research conducted over the past decades suggests that both external (physical) and internal (psychological) factors, or their interaction could lead to an injury. This means that a person’s psychological state, which could be positive or negative, may have an effect on the chances of an athlete sustaining an injury. This can be understood with the help of an example, a long jumper competing in his first National tournament, is under tremendous pressure of performance. As a consequence, his focus keeps shifting constantly to the opponents, to their scores, constantly feeling nervous about his jump, which leads to him missing a step in his run up before the jump and causing an ankle twist.
A reason why this happens lies in the cognitive appraisal that one does of the situations that they face. In simple words, how one perceives a situation determines their psychological state while facing that situation. The more the athletes perceive it as a stressful situation, higher are the chances of the athlete sustaining an injury. The perception of stress is determined by many underlying factors such as the athlete’s personality, their life experiences, their upbringing and so on. These factors are instrumental in deciding one looks at a situation as a challenge or as a danger. Athletes may experience poor muscular coordination as a result of stressful situational assessments, which can also cause negative effects like peripheral constriction (missing task-relevant inputs), increased muscle stiffness, and loss of attention. Additional factors include worse situational cue recognition, delayed decision-making, increased reaction latency, or other sensorimotor abnormalities.
Responses to Sport Injury
Along with physical distress, an injury brings a lot of emotional distress for the athletes. Sustaining an injury entails a break from the respective sport, which alone is distressing enough for an athlete. Along with that, it brings considerations such as rehabilitation period, attaining the pre-injury fitness, return to the sport, missing out on important tournaments. An injury can alter the path of an athlete’s sporting career which may cause heightened distress such feelings similar to grief, or even anxiety or depression at times. Here too, individual differences in personality, life experience, coping skills as well as available coping resources play a huge role in the rehabilitation journey of the athlete.
This idea views injury as a dynamic process that considers situational and individual factors in relation to rehabilitation adherence, and it describes the behavioral, emotional, and cognitive reactions to sports injuries. Since recovery results are focused on the athlete’s cognitive evaluation, emotional reactions, and behavioral reactions, it is inferred that all three can directly affect recovery outcomes.
In order to help athletes cope better with injuries, it is vital that professionals understand the stressors that may lead to an injury, and how the athletes may respond to it.
Rasika Kalgutkar, Sports Psychologist, Mindsports