Sport Psychology Tactics - Understanding Athlete Identity & How Lowering It Improves Performance
About the Author
Ben Foodman is a licensed psychotherapist & performance specialist. He owns his private practice located in Charlotte North Carolina where he specializes in working with athletes to help them overcome mental blocks (the yips), PTSD, ADD / ADHD and achieve flow states through the techniques of Brainspotting & Neurofeedback. If you are interested in services, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!
Introduction: Understanding How Athlete Identity Is Harmful & Why It Is A Primary Sport Psychology Issue
When individuals commit to training extensively in a sport, they naturally invest large amounts of time, resources and finances to improve in their craft. This is a healthy response and a sign of someone who is committed to improving themselves both in their craft and personally on an individual level. However, there are many athletes that make a natural transition towards understanding their whole identity as an athlete. Essentially, the sport that an individual partakes in is who they are and how they explain their identity to others. This is called Athlete Identity.
While this may seem harmless to casual observers, athletes that have high athlete identity will suffer immensely for this feature. When athletes develop this, ironically while it is not usually a conscious decision, athletes can actually implement controls to reduce this problem. For this issue of the Training Report in part I. I want to discuss what Athlete Identity is, in part II. I will review how it affects athletes, and in part III. I want to review 2 simple strategies that athletes and coaches can implement to reduce this issue and also improve performance. Let’s begin by reviewing what Athlete Identity is.
Part I. How The Field Of Sport & Exercise Psychology Defines Athlete Identity
If you get 10 sport psychologists in a room, oftentimes you will get 40 different opinions. However there does seem to be some consensus about how to define what exactly Athlete Identity is. Athlete identity has been defined in the sport and exercise psychology literature as, “the degree to which an individual identifies with the athlete role”. So how does this come to fruition? There is no standardized explanation of this, but based on my professional experience athlete identity usually begins for humans during early childhood. Why is this the case?
As children our brains are still developing. Because the brain is still in development, so too is our identity. There is some research that suggests that the human brain does not fully mature till our early to mid 20s. As such when we are beginning to experience stress in life, we are also trying to create stability and homeostasis. As a young person, it is crucial to establish balance in our lives and stabilizing our identity is one way our unconscious mind tries to accomplish this. Therefore, when young people engage in sports, the more they identify with their sport the more stability they think they have created. But how does high athlete identity hurt individuals?
Part II. How Athlete Identity Harms Athletes & How They Usually Cope With It
Athletes usually start to encounter the negative side effects of athlete identity as the pressure of sports becomes more intense. When athletes get further along into their careers, statistically they accumulate more experiences. Many of those experiences tend to be either setbacks or losses. But because the athlete’s Athlete Identity has been growing in synchronization with their experiences, when they experience losses the intensity of those experiences feels increasingly debilitating. This is because individuals with high Athlete Identity see themselves as losers when they lose…even though this is logically not the case.
While all of this may seem illogical at first glance, it is usually because people do not understand one of the underlying mechanisms for why the individual’s mind pushes them towards having high athlete identity. As I stated before, young folks want to create stability in their lives, therefore they heavily immerse their identity in their sport. But one way we can conceptualize this issue is by understanding that this is a defense mechanism that individuals employ in order to protect themselves. This process of stabilizing the mind is the unconscious way of defending itself from instability.
Another area of research that has begun to help us better understand athlete identity is based in Polyvagal theory. In Bessel Van Der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps The Score, the author discusses Polyvagal theory in a way that can help us better understand issues surrounding athlete identity: In 1994 Stephen Porges, who was a researcher at the University of Maryland at the time we started our investigation of HRV, and is now at the University of North Carolina, introduced the Polyvagal Theory, which built on Darwin’s observations and added another 140 years of scientific discoveries to those early insights. (Polyvagal refers to the many branches of the vagus nerve-Darwin’s ‘pneumogastric nerve’ which connects numerous organs, including the brain, lungs, heart, stomach, and intenstine’’’.) The Polyvagal theory provided us with a more sophisticated understanding of the biology of safety and danger, one based on the subtle interplay between the visceral experiences of our own bodies and the voices and faces of the people around us. It explained why a kind face or a soothing tone of voice can dramatically alter the way we feel.
The author continues: Human beings are astoundingly attuned to subtle emotional shifts in the people (and animals) around them. Slight changes in the tension of the brow, wrinkles around the eyes, curvature of the lips, and angle of the neck quickly signal to us how comfortable, suspicious, relaxed or frightened someone is. Our mirror neurons register their inner experience, and our own bodies make internal adjustments to whatever we notice. Just so, the muscles of our own faces give others clues about how calm or excited we feel, whether our heart is racing or quiet, and whether we’re ready to pounce on them or run away. When the message we receive from another person is ‘you’re safe with me’ we relax. If we’re lucky in our relationships, we also feel nourished, supported, and restored as we look into the face and eyes of others. The reason this is important to understand is because if athletes have high athlete identity, they will be increasingly sensitive to the social cues of those around them. Fear of rejection due to performance means fear of rejection of the self. So what can athletes and sport psychologists do to fix this issue?
Part III. Two Simple Solutions To Lower Athlete Identity & How It Will Improve Performance
The first step athletes can take is by creating healthy boundaries between themselves and their sport. A specific example of this is finding a hobby or activity that is completely unrelated to their sport. This hobby or activity should be challenging and require mastery. Most athletes are very self-driven and require stimulating experiences that give them a sense of accomplishment. Video games and movies do not provide that, whereas other activities like art, music, writing or even playing another sport allow the athlete to dethatch from their main sport while also having something else to look forward to.
Another activity that athletes can engage in is purposefully finding gratitude for things in their life that are completely unrelated to their sport. Research has shown that when individuals engage in activities that help them find gratitude, their mental health outcomes significantly improve. However athletes choose to reduce their athlete identity, they inevitably will see the benefits both in their personal life and their sport life as well. By finding value in who athletes are as individuals and not primarily as athletes, this will increase their psychological health outcomes, and remove the unnecessary pressure that Athlete Identity enforces upon athletes.
Note To Reader:
If you are an athlete reading this segment of the TRAINING REPORT, hopefully this content was helpful! I put the Training Report together because I felt like many of the discussions on issues such as the Yips/mental blocks, strength training & other subject matter on athlete performance concepts were really missing the mark on these ideas (e.g. how trauma is the direct cause of the Yips). If you are interested in learning more, make sure to subscribe below for when I put out new content on issues related to sport psychology & athlete performance! Also, if you are looking to work with a mental performance specialist, you are in the right place! USE THIS LINK to reach out to me to see if my services are the right fit for your goals!
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