How Sport Is Good for Your Mental Health

Sports are great for your physical health, but also have many psychological benefits:

• Help moderate stress: exercise causes your body to release endorphins, the chemicals that relieve pain and stress.
• Improve your mood: sports force you to put aside your worries and concentrate on the task at hand. They help you clear your mind, calm down, and sleep better. 
• Boost mental health with team sports: taking part in sports within a group has a greater positive impact on mental health than individual sports.  
• Help fight addiction: a study found that teenagers who played sports were less likely to smoke cigarettes and use cannabis as adults. 
• Help with depression and serious mental disorders: exercise improves some symptoms, including loss of motivation and thinking difficulties.

Some of the physiological explanations for improved mental health through sports:

• Greater perfusion of the brain and an increase in its volume.
• Increased volume of the hippocampus.
• Reduced brain inflammation in neurological diseases by anti-inflammatory effects.
• Resilience to stress-induced depression via skeletal muscle peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma coactivator 1-alpha (PGC-1α), enhancing kynurenine conversion to kynurenine acid, which in turn protects the brain and reduces the risk of stress-induced depression.
• Increased release of growth factors, endorphins, and signaling molecules.
• Reduced levels of stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline.

Physical activity has a lot of health benefits, both physical and mental. However, in order to take advantage of the positive outcomes of physical activity and avoid its negative ones, being aware of its limits is crucial. 

Some examples of negative outcomes of physical activity: 

• Physical:
  • Injuries
    • Most coaches are untrained in the strengthening and conditioning principles, resulting in an increased rate of injuries.
  • Increased morbidity (cardiovascular diseases)
    • Such as: pathologic structural remodeling of the heart and large arteries, coronary artery calcification, diastolic dysfunction…
  • Eating disorders
    • Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are common eating disorders encountered in sports; and athletes may feel pressured to have the ideal body type for their sport.
• Psychological:
  • Increased stress to be the perfect player
    • Due to pressure from coaches and family, or pressure on oneself to perform well. 
  • Depression and anxiety
    • Especially in competitive and stressful sport environments.
  • Inappropriate expectations to obtain scholarships or a professional career
• Social:
  • Inconsistent funding to insure proper safety equipment and venues
  • Expenses
  • Inequality across groups (socioeconomic, ethnic, geographic, gender-based)
  • Low integration with family and friends, and social isolation

Recommendations for practicing sports in a healthy way:

• Plan exercise, rest, and enjoy your social life
  • Ex: aerobic exercise three times a week, muscle-strengthening exercise two to three times a week.
• Set long-term goals
• Adopt a holistic performance development including physiological, medical, mental, and psychosocial aspects
• Monitor physiological health over time: exercise load (time, intensity, volume), recovery (sleep, resting heart rate), sickness (type of infections, time needed to heal), frequency of injuries
• Monitor mental health over time: motivation for training and competition, managing personal perception of stress, depression, self-belief, etc.
• Following sports rules (proper use of safety gear et equipment)​​