Dr. Carl Bescoby explores the impact your mental health may have on injury susceptibility looking at general risk factors that may impact on mental wellbeing. Considering your mental load and how it may have impacted your injury will help you to determine the right support programs during rehabilitation and return phases.

Your mental health ‘ebbs and flows’

It is important to acknowledge that mental health is on a continuum that constantly moves between a range of wellbeing, mental health, and mental illness states. You may at any time find yourself at either end of the continuum and this may shift as your situation either deteriorates or improves. This could ebb and flow within a week, a month or a year and it is important to accept these fluctuations as part of being a human.

Risk factors to your mental health

There are general risk factors that may impact your mental health such as general life events, daily stressors, relationship difficulties, financial worries, lack of social support, and reduced or impaired sleep. These risk factors could affect performance and injury susceptibility. Furthermore, mental health challenges that affect your susceptibility to injury may also have a compounding effect on rehabilitation and recovery outcomes. In another article I will outline ways in which to navigate these mental health challenges and how to reduce the compounding effect this may have on your recovery.

"stress is the biggest predictor of injury susceptibility and injury rate"

When you are exposed to a potentially stressful situation, your stress response will dictate whether an injury may occur. Your stress response is largely determined by your personality, history of previous stressors, and available coping resources. When faced with a stressful situation such as financial worries, you will cognitively appraise the situation which can be influenced by and may influence your physiological or attentional changes. When this happens, you respond to stress.

Therefore, stress is a predictor of injury, and effective coping mechanisms and strategies should be introduced to manage sport/activity specific stressors as well as general life stressors. This should be developed as a preventative strategy to reduce susceptibility to injury so that you can focus on thriving instead of feeling like you are constantly walking on a tightrope. In the next article you will learn about some of these coping resources and how to use these strategies during your injury and recovery.

Acknowledge and be aware of your ‘mental load’

Too often, injury is accepted as part of sport, and whilst this may be unavoidable, when you sustain an injury, the cause is often attributed to the physical components with little consideration of the mental health components. The training and competition load you go through is frequently discussed with little consideration for the mental health load. Considering the mental load and how it may have impacted your injury will help you to determine the right support programs during rehabilitation that help to alleviate your stressors and psychological distress to better support your mental health.

It can be helpful to check in with yourself to be aware of your mental load and current stressors. If you feel like you are experiencing several stressors and you are worried about getting injured or how this mental load may affect your recovery outcomes then check out the tools on my website to help manage stress.