How can the mind increase the risk of injury?

“What makes men suffer is not events, but their assessment of them” Epictetus (55 – 135).

It is appropriate to start with this great reflection of the Greek philosopher, Epictetus, where he describes the importance of making a correct assessment and acceptance of the situation. Sometimes, we tend to make a negative overvaluation of a situation, so we turn a very simple and brief problem into a very tedious, complicated and complex one, which harms us and negatively influences our mental and physical health. The main thing is not to assign more relevance than it has to a specific situation. Given this small reflection, I add this other phrase of the philosopher.

“ The man is concerned not so much with real problems as with his imagined anxieties about his real problems ”.

What basically comes to say that, that it is not so much the problem or situation, but the mental representation that we make, which generates anxiety.

Based on the fact that sports injuries are normal and will appear yes or yes in the life of any person who performs sports or physical activity on a regular basis. All athletes are exposed to them and we are going to get injured throughout our sporting life, however there are a number of factors that favor the probability of suffering an injury. Knowing and trying to control these factors we can prevent some injuries, reduce their severity, decrease recovery time, enhance the rehabilitation program and favor a return to training and competition. In this case we will talk about one of the most important factors throughout the injury process, stress.

We are no longer surprised to turn on the television, the radio or open a newspaper and find ourselves with the word stress, post-holiday stress, work stress, postpartum stress, sports stress and a long etcetera. We have become accustomed to hearing this term and even introducing it into our daily vocabulary.

Do we really know what stress is and how it affects us?

Lazarus (1984) defines stress as “a particular relationship between the person and the environment that is valued as overwhelming or as something that exceeds their resources and endangers well-being”. In other words, it is a subjective assessment, where the demands of the environment exceed the resources available to me, so the situation is beyond my control. To understand the seriousness and great impact that stress has on society, I am going to present the data obtained in 2018 by the Official College of Psychologists (COP). They carried out a study with people between the ages of 18 and 64, and concluded that nine out of ten people (96%) confirm having felt stress during the last year and four out of ten have also suffered it continuously (42.1%). . This would mean confirming that around 12 and a half million Spaniards suffer from stress every year and therefore constitutes a problem in today's society.

What is the impact of stress on sports injuries?

The presence of stress in an individual increases vulnerability to injury for several reasons:

• Stress produces muscular overactivation favoring the appearance of tiredness and physical exhaustion. Which, in turn, can lead to misuse and motor coordination, attentional distractions and flexibility problems. All this impairs the efficiency and quality of the movements, increasing the risk of suffering an injury.

• Stress weakens the athlete's immune system, which makes us less prepared and more sensitive to possible injury.

• In sports we find ourselves in many situations that increase our level of stress, for example, an athlete who has to overcome a score to be able to participate in a specific competition. There are also personal situations that increase our stress and affect our sports performance, for example, an athlete who, before training or competition, argues with his partner. All these situations can increase our level of activation. An athlete who does not reach the optimal or necessary state of alert suffers many implications in his attentional processing (dispersing it). These attention deficits can cause distractions, causing them not to focus on relevant aspects, ignoring important information, making mistakes in the execution of the activity and making rapid and erroneous decision-making. All this increases the probability of suffering an injury.

• Following the line outlined in the previous point, stress can also cause the opposite, a very low level of activation. As? High levels of stress can favor psychological and therefore also physical exhaustion, and low and apathetic moods, all of which makes it difficult for the athlete to increase their level of activation, preventing them from reaching their optimal level to perform correctly. An excess of relaxation in sports practice will directly influence our attentional system (reducing it), causing us to make attentional errors and stop paying attention to relevant aspects, favoring the appearance of errors and increasing the risk of injury.

• Following the line of an inadequate level of activation, stress also increases impulsivity and aggressive behaviors and physical risk. There are two forms of response to a stressful situation, fight or flight, in this case, the impulsive and aggressive responses are part of the fight response.

• Similarly, the other stress response pathway is the response of escape. Some athletes have found that the period in which they are injured is ideal to escape and get away from stressful situations. For this reason, sometimes thanks to the injury, they can avoid unwanted stimuli that generate stress.

• Stress and uncertain situations can cause the athlete to want to control the situation, sometimes excessively, which leads to an abuse of physical activity, even going so far as to train beyond their physical and psychological capacities . This factor is known as overtraining. In these cases, the athlete can ignore their own vulnerability to injury and their own physical abilities at that moment, quantitatively exceeding adequate training, increasing the risk of injury and favoring the appearance of one.

Therefore, stress can increase vulnerability to injury in many different ways, so early identification of the first symptoms of stress is necessary to carry out correct intervention early , so as to reduce the risk of injury, shorten the recovery period and return to training and competitions in the best possible way.

As previously stated, the very nature of physical activity and sport invites injuries to occur, so, as the saying goes “prevention is better than cure”. However, if we have been injured, the ideal is to take a positive perspective, seek an objective, be motivated and have a resilient mentality.

And, what is a resilient athlete? Currently we are bombarded by the term resilience, defined as the ability to adapt to extreme situations, very complicated situations, overcome, learn and emerge stronger from them. During the period of injury we must acquire a resilient mentality, so that we take advantage of the rest time to continue learning and training other relevant aspects in sports practice, psychological aspects, and use the injury as an opportunity to continue growing as an athlete.

Therefore, as a conclusion, we must take into account the importance of our mind in our physical health, specifically stress in sports injuries. Knowing how important it is, it is appropriate to know yourself correctly and know how to identify the first symptoms of stress, so that you can start working on it to reduce the risk of injury, enhance our sports performance and promote our well-being.