What have been your game changing attitudes? Today we're talking about how sports psychology and some of the modern updates to it are redefining self leadership for women.
Welcome to the modern creative woman. Explain the art and science of creativity. This is the podcast for women who want to elevate their creativity and start applying creative thinking in their everyday lives. I'm your hostess and creativity expert, Doctor Amy Backos. I'm a licensed psychologist and a registered and board certified art therapist with almost three decades helping women live their authentic lives. At the Modern Creative Woman, we are obsessed with helping you build your creativity and self leadership. Through her conversations and creative insights, I'll provide simple tricks and practices that will help take the mystery out of the creative process so you can start each day feeling empowered, creative, and ready to take on whatever comes your way. Let's get started!
Let's talk about how to creatively interact with your internal behaviors and your external behaviors to be the self leader that you always wanted to be. Sports psychology is full of strategies to help people visualize their success in their performance on the field. It's a subset of psychology that began around the 1920s, and as with most aspects of psychology, it began focusing mostly on men. In the 1990s, sports psychology became associated or tie in more with positive psychology. And since then, more recently, there's been more of a focus on intersectionality in women's sports psychology. And that's where the whole context of a person is valued and considered important in this sports psychology arena. So all the aspects of a person might be their race, gender or sexual orientation, their culture, their class, their abilities.
Research has come a long way to overcome gender and colorblindness in research. I've worked with many woman athletes in my career, and I've had a powerful experience running groups with teen girls in club volleyball, and what I've learned is that focusing on self leadership and the inner discipline allows each team member to show up, giving their best and relating to the sport and their teammates in a way that functions to let go of self-limiting behaviors and embrace the idea of self-improvement and winning as a team. I want to talk about three areas that sports psychology can teach us about self leadership. The first one is resilience. The second one is mindfulness, and the third is about managing our mental health. There's been some really powerful strides in how mental health and wellness can mediate sports performance, as well as recovery from injury. There's quite a few factors that contribute to athletic success, as you can imagine. One study I read focused mostly on resilience, mindfulness, and sleep, and the role of anxiety and depression in sports related injury is another key issue that people who are athletes or who are invested in an athlete have to be able to recognize and manage, and that's how to think of the self when injured and unable to play sport. And if one is attaching their entire identity to this one role in their life, it becomes very difficult to manage mental health when an athlete's no longer able to participate in the sport.
Certainly, there's a lot of research on disordered eating in athletes, and that's an aspect of personal recovery that is essential for strength and power in athletes, as well as healthy eating for a strong mental abilities. Another factor that sports psychology is looking at is the effect of social media and how it affects female athletes differently, and at a higher rate than their male counterparts. When thinking about resilience in athletes and if you're a non athlete, this applies to whatever you're doing. You can boil it down to a statement that you can check in with yourself about. I tend to bounce back quickly after hard times. Does that seem true for you right now or in the past? How you think about this and answer the question can determine how quickly you move past and recover from setbacks. Resilient individuals really are able to focus more on employing problem focused coping skills. And by that I mean seeking information or assistance when handling a stressful situation. It could also be removing the source of the stress or removing oneself from a stressful situation. And research has shown that resilient athletes are less likely to manage stressful situations with emotion focused coping behaviors and emotion focused coping behaviors are venting or emotions checking out or disengaging.
So these are strategies that you can use in almost every task. Solution focused coping skills rather than emotion focused coping skills. There's an abundance of research that says venting to others is unproductive. It can damage the relationship, and it can give us a false sense of doing something about the problem. What about mindfulness? From athletes and sports psychology?
In sports, mindfulness is focused on enhancing the athletes ability to accept and even experience a different kind of relationship with their emotions on and off the field. I found one study that looked at a negative association between mindfulness and pain catastrophizing. And they also found that there's a positive correlation between mindfulness and mental toughness. So in other words, mindfulness enabled the athletes to really just kind of moderate their reactions to pain or injury and focus much more on the present moment and have mental toughness when they were able to make contact with the present moment. I do want to go a little bit more into sleep, and there is a wealth of literature demonstrating that sleep both enhances athletic performance, and it's a protective factor against sports related injury.
And furthermore, there's several studies that show when athletes are not getting the sleep they need to perform, they complain about greater mood disturbances. This is consistent with other studies around mood disturbances. So that's depression and anxiety. And how a lack of sleep increases those unwanted symptoms. I'd like to mention how managing our mental health can increase and improve our performance. I found a study that showed the rates of anxiety and depression are highest among female athletes in general. And women are more likely to experience these two disturbances in mood depression and anxiety. Post-traumatic stress disorder or acute stress disorder are considered anxiety disorders as well. I think it's not surprising that female athletes have higher rates of anxiety and depression than their male athlete counterparts. I found a really surprising study, and it was with 112 NBA members, and the study found that late night tweeting activity. So their upload on their phone resulted in making shots at a lower rate, 1.7 percentage points less.
So this is a reminder to never underestimate the power of a small habit that late night tweeting habit decrease their success at making basketball shots. Research also showed that the distraction of social media is, you know, certainly a concern for male and female athletes. But female athletes seem to disproportionately suffer from the negative effects of body image portrayed in social media. In one study of 108 women interacting with social media, the authors of this study found that the women who were exposed to images on Instagram with very specific hashtags, had higher level of body dissatisfaction and a negative mood. To consider cleaning up your social media feed. If there are sites that make a uncomfortable connection to women, and body and body shaming or body judgment might want to unfollow those. Because when we consume this kind of material on social media, we feel bad. So you do have a lot of control to clean up your social media feed and limit the images that do not serve you.
The one main take home message that I hope you have from this podcast episode is The Power of Small Habits and how they can make a huge long term impact on our performance. So social media, what you're consuming, what you're watching. Managing mental health and focusing on solution focused behaviors rather than emotional limiting behaviors. Using mindfulness in as many areas of your life as you can, and focusing on resilience. Deciding that you'd like to bounce back quickly after hard times can make a huge difference in what happens after an injury or a setback. If you're an athlete or you used to be an athlete, I would love to hear from you and let me know. Your top tricks for dealing with setbacks or injuries and social media. Were these things talked about when you were an athlete? Did you get information on body image, sleep and help?
Let me know and I would love to hear from you on Instagram. Have a wonderful rest of your week! Now that you know about how to use your creativity, what will you create? Want more? Subscribe to the Modern Creative Woman digital magazine. It's absolutely free and it comes out on some men. And I know you can get a lot out of the podcast and the digital magazine. Yet when you're ready to take it to the next level, I want you to know you have options inside the membership. And if you're interested in a private consultation, please feel free to book a call with me. Even if you just have some questions, go ahead and book a call.
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