The Good Side: Why Sports Help Mental Health

It’s widely accepted that exercise and playing sports are great for mental well-being. When you’re physically active, your body releases special chemicals and compounds that help your brain grow new cells and build stronger neural connections. Exercise also boosts the brain’s ability to use mood-regulating chemicals, calms down inflammation in the body, and even affects signals sent between your gut and brain. All of this adds up to better mood, sharper thinking, better emotional control, less pain sensitivity, better sleep, and greater ability to handle stress.

Beyond the biology, playing sports reduces depression and anxiety. It gives people a sense of independence and control over their own lives, helps build identity and a feeling of accomplishment, strengthens self-discipline and the ability to bounce back from setbacks, and creates social bonds and a sense of belonging to something bigger than yourself.

The Catch: Athletes Face Real Mental Health Challenges

Here’s the surprising part: athletes aren’t protected from mental health struggles just because they’re active and fit. For example, anxiety and depression are about as common—or even somewhat more common—in athletes in their mid-teens through late twenties as in everyone else. Roughly 27% of the general U.S. population deals with these issues, compared to about 34% of current elite athletes across various sports. But why is that, when sports have been shown to reduce depression and anxiety? More on the stressors that contribute to this in the next section. 

Athletes also show similar or higher rates of alcohol misuse compared to non-athletes, depending on the sport and group studied. One major review found alcohol misuse averaging around 18.8% among elite athletes overall, but individual studies have found much higher rates in specific groups. One study found a startling 69% rate among elite rugby players. 

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is also more common in athletes. A study of NCAA Division I college athletes found their OCD rates were more than double that of the general population (5.2% versus 2.3%). This actually makes some sense, since obsessive attention to detail and routine can help drive athletic success.

Perhaps most striking are the rates of eating disorders and disordered eating, which tend to be more common in both male and female athletes than in non-athletes. In sports that emphasize appearance or a lean physique (like gymnastics or figure skating), eating disorder rates have been documented as high as 42%. Even among male elite athletes across various sports, rates as high as 32.5% have been found. So while sports participation clearly protects mental health in many ways, it can also create real psychological risks.

Why Athletes Are Under So Much Pressure

Being a competitive athlete is demanding not just physically, but mentally. Beyond the physical grind of training and competing, athletes have to manage a whole web of other pressures. These include expectations from coaches, teammates, family members, and fans; the anxiety of trying to get selected by a team or promotion; and the burden of injuries, which bring not just physical pain but disability and emotional distress during recovery.

There’s growing evidence that stress and burnout among athletes are increasing. A large review of studies from 1997 and 2019 found that athletes increasingly feel devalued and less accomplished in their sport. As sports have become more popular and more visible in society, the competition among athletes and teams for attention has intensified, and this intensity can drive burnout.

There’s also a growing trend toward treating sports like a professional career at younger and younger ages. College athletes today can earn millions of dollars through sponsorships and endorsement deals. As a result, being an elite athlete and turning pro start to feel more like having a high-stakes, full-time job. The athlete’s personal identity becomes tied up with their public “brand.” This trend goes hand-in-hand with early sport specialization, where athletes not only start training early in life but also narrow their focus to just one sport. While this can produce highly skilled adult athletes, it also means the young person is repeatedly exposed to the same types of physical and psychological stress and injury risk over many years. This can interfere with healthy psychological development and their ability to cope with challenges later in life.

Athletes also can have certain personality traits that can negatively impact their mental health even when it helps their careers. Perfectionism, for instance, is strongly linked to depression, anxiety, and fatigue in athletes. Some can have a tendency toward sensation-seeking and risk-taking behavior. This is useful for split-second decisions when competing, when it’s better to just act and not think too much, but it has also been linked to higher rates of alcohol misuse among college athletes.

Finally, athletes are often subject to the authority of coaches, agents, team owners, medical staff, and sports governing bodies. This hierarchy and an intense drive to win creates conditions where all types of abuse (physical, sexual, psychological, neglect, preferential treatment) can occur and continue. The abuse that US gymnasts underwent for many years under the team doctor Larry Nassar is one extreme example, but less dramatic cases are plentiful and unfortunately are ignored or unreported, if the environment operates on a “win at all costs” mentality. Research also shows that sexual abuse and harassment happen more often in elite sport settings than in non-elite ones, suggesting that something about elite sport culture itself may pose psychological risks.

So we see how sports can have two sides — in many ways they can be protective, but in other ways also perilous to mental health. We will discuss in a future post the consequences of mental health issues and disorders in athletes.