Coping with Injuries
Injuries can be stressful for anyone, and athletes are no exception. When an athlete is injured and taken out of the game, it can impact their mood, and psychological distress is relatively common. There are several different ways to cope with pain and injury during the healing process.
Mindfulness is essentially being conscious and having the quality and mental state of awareness by focusing on the present moment. Mindfulness engages your present feelings, thoughts, and sensations in therapeutic techniques. Practicing mindfulness techniques can help an athlete manage pain and injury by acknowledging which thoughts and feelings are helpful and freeing yourself from those that are not. The athlete can let go of the reactions, emotions, and feelings connected to the physical pain and the associated negative thoughts or reactions to the pain in turn become more tolerable.
Social connections can help athletes cope with injuries. In addition to your teammates, family and friends can play a major role in recovery. When an athlete feels a strong support system, they are often more resilient to their injury and have a more positive healing experience. Sometimes that isolation away from the team during recovery can put strain on the athlete mentally, so it is very helpful to get the athlete that social support system while on the road to healing.
A simple technique that an athlete can try include focusing on the sensations of the injury and the pain. By separating the pain sensations and sensory, it helps the athlete understand these sensations are not permanent but rather feel that they are changing. This can help the athlete feel reduced stress. Some athletes use relaxation techniques with imagery to imagine a time and place when the injury did not yet exist, or a future when the injury is healed. This also helps reduce the stress and pain in the moment.
Another option is for the athlete to focus on the areas of their body that are not in pain during a relaxation and breathing exercise. You can move your pain-free body parts around to focus on the feelings and sensations of how the parts of your body that are not injured are feeling, rather than the sensations of the injured areas. Alternatively, you can relax and just mentally focus on your pain-free body parts, again focusing on how they are feeling. In some relaxation exercises, you can shift your focus from your toes up to your head and vice versa, hitting every body part in between, to focus on the feelings and sensations, relaxing each part during your focus.
Sometimes an injury can cause fear of pain, which may result in the athlete putting limitations on themselves physically when they could still be active or doing activities they normally enjoy, or just having fear in general. Personally, I have been around sports most of my life and worked in hockey for nearly a decade. A couple of years ago, during a college hockey game, I was in the scorekeeper box assisting with live web administration duties for a team positioned next to the trainer, scorekeeper, and team manager. In the first period, a deflected puck clipped me in the top of the head. It was a stinger, and there was blood. I had a very minor concussion, but nothing severe. What was the most frustrating part of this experience to me was the fear that came with it. The experience was not terrible at all, and as I mentioned, I have worked for years in hockey. However, after experiencing this very minor injury, I found this strange fear whenever I was at the rink ever since. I was jumpy and more anxious then ever before the injury occurred. It was silly to me because I knew it was all in my head, and coping methods helped me overcome the psychological limitations I was putting on myself.
I kept going to the rink and took part in the activities I normally would. Distractions helped, for example having responsibilities and work that needed to be done. These were all the same positive experiences that I loved to be a part of before, and eventually it helped me to get to that positive place again outside of the fear. Finding the positive feelings in the present moment help to not only distract, but also can help ease pain. For example, if you are still suffering from an injury, you can focus on the positive and pleasant feelings in the moment, such as a favorite song on the radio, a delicious meal, a great laugh with friends, and savor those feelings and the overall sensory experiences in those moments.
