The Cognitive and Emotional Benefit of Sports on Mental Health

At some point, we all face barriers that affect our mental health, whether it’s stress, anxiety, sadness, frustration or overwhelm. Having an effective outlet is essential — yet not everyone knows where to turn. For many people, that outlet comes through sports.

From a young age, parents often enroll their children in activities like soccer, swimming, or dance to keep them active and social. While the physical health benefits of sports are widely recognized, many parents may not be aware of the positive impact they can have on their child’s mental health.

Whether it’s a team or individual sport, physical activity provides far more than exercise. It can become a primary outlet for emotions, a way to strengthen the mind, and a source of joy, fulfillment, and belonging. Let’s look at the different ways sports can enhance mental health.

Cognitive Benefits

A lesser-known benefit of sports is the boost it provides to cognitive functioning. Participating in sports can sharpen skills like:

• Reaction Time & Decision-Making: Quick decision-making is integral in most sports, where split-second choices continuously occur (Hogan et al., 2013). Players must constantly assess their surroundings, anticipate their next moves, and respond accordingly. Whether it’s keeping tabs on a nearby opponent, a ball coming your way, or following instructions from the coach on the sidelines, playing sports helps strengthen information processing and making decisions under pressure.

• Focus & Concentration: Playing sports teaches how to shift focus and block out distractions, like parents and friends cheering, the other team communicating with each other, and various other movements and noises happening nearby. Through practice, players learn to filter out irrelevant information and focus their attention on the voices of their coaches and teammates.

• Memory & Thinking:Exercise decreases stress and improves sleep and mood, which promotes calmness, leading to greater capacity in memory and cognitive clarity. When moderately exercising, our brain produces endorphins, which help promote happiness and relieve pain and stress(Ali et al., 2021). Endorphins being released can help reduce cortisol, or the stress hormone, which can aid in concentration and memory. When you do not have as many anxiety-provoking thoughts, it is easier to concentrate on the task at hand, rather than having something sitting in the back of your mind. Endorphins promote a relaxed mental state, which, in turn, helps improve cognitive function, clearer thinking, and better memory retention.

These cognitive improvements often translate beyond the field or court, helping individuals perform better in school, work, and everyday life by enhancing productivity and minimizing distractions.

Emotional Benefits

As humans, we all experience overwhelming emotions that we must release, preferably in healthy and constructive ways. While there is no “one-size-fits-all” coping strategy, sports can offer a powerful and positive outlet for releasing those emotions in a constructive way. Engaging in sports provides:

• Sense of Belonging: Becoming part of a team, means becoming part of a family. During the season, athletes spend a large amount time with their team, competing, becoming friends, and experiencing life together. By experiencing every exciting moment and heart wrenching loss together, teams learn to have each other's backs. Everyone on a team has a different role, meaning every person has a place where they belong. By supporting one another through every triumph and setback, friendships bloom and lifelong connections are made, further establishing a sense of belonging.

• Improved Self-Esteem & Confidence: Athletics provides various benefits to an individual’s self-esteem and confidence. Self-esteem can be improved via positive feedback from coaches and teammates, feeling capable of competing, and learning to be unconditionally proud of yourself. Athletes begin to differentiate losing a game from overall improvement and success, which can increase their overall confidence. It has also been shown that adults who were once high-level athletes often feel more confident incorporating creativity into their work lives and feel more optimistic in their ability to overcome life’s challenges (Eather et al., 2023).

• Mood Boosts & Stress Reduction: Engaging in enjoyable physical activity provides a healthy outlet for emotions. It can clear your mind, which makes it easier to feel better about yourself, your body, and life overall. This strengthened outlook can enhance your mental health and elevate your mood. In addition, exercise eases stress by serving as a temporary break from anxious thoughts. Participating in sports encourages a consistent routine, which can lower stress levels by providing structure and reducing uncertainty in your daily schedule.

Experiencing the emotional benefits of sport can help promote joy in various aspects of life. It allows an outlet to release negative emotions and promote social interaction. Sports encourage teamwork, buildsconfidence, and provides a healthy way to cope with stress. If participating regularly, individuals can develop a stronger sense of self and belonging, which positively impacts their overall mental health and happiness.

Lifelong Skills

By participating in sports while young, athletes can begin to develop many lifelong skills and strategies which they will carry with them through their schooling, career, and personal life. The nature of sports encourages athletes to strengthen and develop:

• Cooperation and Team Work: Through sports, individuals must learn to work with their peers to accomplish their common goal. Utilizing teamwork and communication, individuals in the workplace can better combine their strengths, knowledge, and perspectives with those of their colleagues, enhancing productivity, finding more creative solutions to problems, and creating better outcomes than when working alone.

• Time Management: Athletes often have busy lifestyles due to the demands of practices, games, and their other life commitments. To be able to fit everything in, while still maintaining schoolwork, jobs, friends, and family, athletes start to learn how to make the most of their time to ensure they are balancing everything in their life. In adulthood, individuals must balance a vast number of obligations, requiring effective time management. This allows adults to ensure deadlines at work are met, they can maintain relationships, and they can allot for any appointment or outing that comes up.

• Social Skills: Sports bring people together. By participating on a team, you spend a large amount of time with the same people, multiple times a week. This can help individuals overcome barriers in making friends by fostering a safe, familiar environment in which they are given the opportunity to partake in conversation, have shared experiences, and build trust. This can help lessen athlete’s social anxiety, further benefitting their wellness (Hiremath, 2019). As well, this can help an individual be more outgoing when in unfamiliar situations, such as starting a new job or meeting new friends at a mutual event.

• Discipline: In sports, athletes are expected to show up and give consistent effort, even when motivation fades. Quickly, athletes understand that success does not happen overnight but instead takes hard work and discipline to achieve your goals. This is the same situation in life. Work deadlines need to be met, numerous responsibilities need to be balanced, and you must continue to work hard to accomplish your dreams, even when lacking motivation. By developing discipline through sport, individuals can better navigate the various demands of life in adulthood.

• Resilience: With consistent experiences with hardship, athletes begin to develop the ability to bounce back and turn perceived failures into successes. They take in feedback from an unwanted occurrence, then jump back into practice to develop the skills they need to overcome what occurred. Resilience is invaluable to develop as throughout life, everyone will experience setbacks. When someone is resilient, they tend to view these barriers as more of an obstacle to get around, rather than a wall in front of them. Through sport, people are better equipped with the knowledge and understanding of the steps they can take to conquer, and prevail over, life’s difficulties.

• Leadership: Returning athletes typically have new teammates joining their team. This is when the returners begin to understand how to be a leader. They are upheld to the expectation that they will help incoming teammates by being welcoming, guiding them through skill development, and answering questions. When people learn how to be a leader from a young age, they tend to be more comfortable taking charge in their careers. This will help them participate in meetings, keep others informed of changes in the workplace, and be more comfortable holding a position of power in a company, allowing athletes to settle into leadership roles quicker and more comfortably.

• Communication: Well-functioning teams must have a high degree of communication amongst players, coaches, and parents. In practices and games, athletes and coaches must be able to give and listen to feedback, tell each other where other players/objects are (i.e. a ball), and keep each other motivated. Outside of practice, players, coaches, and parents must discuss transportation, times and days of events, and any time conflicts that may arise. Communication is necessary in both a person’s personal and professional lives. In relationships, communication must occur to inform the other of any situations that may arise. As well, professional workplaces require a high level of communication to run smoothly. One must be able to collaborate on projects, discuss questions and concerns that may arise, and it ensures that expectations are clearly understood.

Learning life skills is incredibly important, and at times, difficult. By beginning to learn the foundation of these skills in a fun, upbeat, and competitive context, athletes can tie these life lessons to good memories and begin to see skills as routine, rather than experiencing difficulties in attempting to incorporate them in their lives later.

Participating in sports results in far more than physical benefits. It enhances cognition in that better decisions can be made quicker, focus is improved, and memory is strengthened. Sports are also heavily influential on emotional health in that it gives athletes a space where they belong and are supported, improving many facets of mental health. Finally, lifelong skills are honed through the ideals of sport. These positive outcomes are seen in team and individual sports alike, therefore regardless of the sport you fall in love with, you can experience every advantage athletics has to offer.

References

Ali, A. H., Ahmed, H. S., Jawad, A. S., & Mustafa, M. A. (2021). Endorphin: Function and mechanism of action. Science Archives, 02(01), 09–13. https://doi.org/10.47587/sa.2021.2102

Eather, N., Wade, L., Pankowiak, A., & Eime, R. (2023). The impact of sports participation on mental health and social outcomes in adults: a systematic review and the 'Mental Health through Sport' conceptual model. Systematic reviews, 12(1), 102. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-023-02264-8

Hiremath, C. (2019). Impact of sports on mental health. International Journal of Physiology, Nutrition and Physical Education 2019, SP1, 14–18. https://www.academia.edu/64094006/Impact_of_sports_on_mental_health

Hogan, C. L., Mata, J., & Carstensen, L. L. (2013). Exercise holds immediate benefits for affect and cognition in younger and older adults. Psychology and aging, 28(2), 587–594. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032634