Supporting, resourcing, and advocating for permanently-sidelined student-athletes

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Insightful articles for helping permanently-sidelined athletes find a meaningful way forward.

Posts tagged internal healing sports injury
Life Beyond Sports: Shedding Our Athletic Armor

Sports do indeed offer valuable life experiences. We learn incredible skills such as persistence, work ethic, and how to set and work towards goals. We push our limits and learn about our own physical and mental strength. We learn how to sacrifice and discipline ourselves as we work through challenges. Ultimately, we experience a deep sense of passion and purpose as we try to attain our highest potential in sport.

Unfortunately, we also realize that in order to succeed in such a competitive world, we need to protect ourselves. So, we start to grow thick skin and a type of protective outer armor.

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Healthy Adjustment to Career-Ending Injury or Health Condition Part 3: Evaluating Internal Coping Strategies

Being an athlete is not an easy thing to do. It takes grit, discipline, and the resounding capacity to get back up after being knocked down. These are qualities you can continue to nurture in yourself throughout the healing process. Essentially, the same mindset which made you a great athlete has the power to help you overcome the loss you are experiencing.

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Becoming Sidelined: Signs and Symptoms of Depression

The World Health Organization estimates that over 300 million in the world suffer from depression. According to studies of depression in student-athletes, as many as one in five athletes may be depressed. Clearly depression represents an emergent health crisis with a massive scope of impact. Not surprisingly, research has identified depression as a potential outcome of the athlete’s emotional response to becoming permanently-sidelined.

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Healthy Adjustment to Career-Ending Injury or Health Condition Part 4: The Rebuilding Phase

Sometimes difficult transitions can make treating yourself kindly even more challenging. Evaluating emotional responses and internal dialogues while proceeding to implement change can be a tiresome task, as discussed in our previous articles here and here. Despite its potential difficulty, the exercise of evaluating internal dialogues can impact powerful change. Once you have learned to “mind your mind” and create more healthy internal dialogues, you are ready to start rebuilding what was lost.

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Becoming Sidelined: Managing Negative Self-Talk

Being forced to retire from competing in a sport that you love is objectively heartbreaking. You’re allowed (even encouraged) to let yourself feel every negative emotion that comes with grieving the loss of a really important aspect of your life and identity. What remains important throughout this process though, is that you treat yourself with kindness and patience. You owe it to yourself to alter any internal-dialogues which threaten to convince you that these circumstances are more disastrous than you are strong.

As we begin to analyze our internal dialogues, we should be wary of unhelpful thought patterns that have manifested themselves so deeply that they impact our entire perception of the world, our experiences, and ourselves. These thoughts are not reality-based and overtime they are reinforced, resulting in biases, irrational thoughts, and groundless beliefs.

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