We all know that psychology plays a very important role in our everyday life, but there are some fields where it is more important than others. Psychology is the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behavior in a given context.  This is seen in the field of sports. Sometimes, athletes are not a having a good season or a good day and they do not  realize that their minds are the key to change. It is very important that they  and the coaches know the effect that positive and negative thoughts have on their performance. We can see this in elite athletes who have a sport psychologist to help them outside of the practice time. Although the concept of sport when we are young is more focused on recreation, as the years go by, this recreation mind changes to the competitive side and that’s where psychology appears to help them to control their problems. However, people also do exercise to feel better and disconnect from the routine. This is the example of people with medical problems who need rehabilitation in order to improve their mood. The importance of psychology is huge in life but even more when we are dealing with moments where our mind has a lot of influence, like in sports. But also, sports can have a positive influence in our mind.  Psychology can be seen in many positive and negative aspects throughout sports and is essential to the development of children and athletes. However, sports can also influence people’s mental health and be beneficial.

Many athletes see the importance of the way they think during practice. If they are going through a rough set or just when they do not feel like that it is their best day, it the mind that is usually the first thing to go. It is also the coaches job to encourage them to be positive in those moments. As Chen Lung Hung said in “Gratitude and Adolescent Athletes Well-Being: The Multiple Mediating Roles of Perceived Social Support from Coaches and Team,” “multiple-mediators analysis indicated that both perceived coaches and teammates social support partially mediated the relationship between gratitude and athlete’s well-being.” (Chen Lung) This means that your teammates can also motivate you to be positive and make things better. Out of practice, beside coaches, there are people who also help to deal with these problems; these are sports psychologists. A lot of athletes do not want to take advantage of sport psychologists because people might think that they are crazy or because they think that they can fix any problem by themselves. They are there to help not only to be better at practice, but also they help them prepare for the competition and everyday life. 

It is known that athletes have to deal with a lot of pressure and emotions when they are getting close to the big meet that they have been training for the whole year. That’s why this encouragement and this external support from sports psychologists is important. A lot of research has been done about this influence to make everyone aware of the benefits or sporty psychology. Some of these studies were about the brain and what functions develop each part of it. Dr. Goldberg, a sport psychologist that has worked with elite swimmer, talks about “The Importance of the Mental Side” using swimmers as references. In one of his chapters from the “Competitive Edge,” he explains how the different sides of the brain work and when should we use them depending on what are we looking for. He explains that the side of our brain which related to voluntary movements and thoughts, should be used while we are in practice, where all the mistakes can be made in order to improve for the competition. However, there is another side in our brain where all the involuntary movements and actions come from. That’s the one that should be used at the competition. Once there, you don’t have to think about any strategies or what you have to do, just have fun. Athletes should have these concepts present every moment.

 Our minds are very powerful and we can see that in our everyday life. Has it ever happened to you that when you are in bed, you start thinking about the day of the competition and you start to get nervous just from thinking about it? Well, that was only your mind that made you have those feelings. Some elite athletes use this technique to approach the competition and be more prepared. Christopher Clarey, at “Olympians use Imagery as a Mental Training” gives an example of the American bronze medalist, Erin Hamlin, use of imagery or visualization to better know how the meet is going to be. “I’ve tried to keep the track in my mind throughout the year,”(Clarey) he said. “I’ll be in the shower or brushing my teeth. It just takes a minute, so I do the whole thing or sometimes just the corners that are more technical. You try to keep it fresh in your head, so when you do get there, you are not just starting at square one. It’s amazing how much you can do in your mind.” She argues how helpful it is to imagine that moment of the race and feeling it. As it explains in this article, for the Winter Olympics, the Canadian Olympic Team came with eight sport psychologists while the United States Olympic Team brought nine. Before the race and in order to be ready for it, athletes analyze every movement that they are going to make, every yard they are going to swim or run. Cook, another Olympic in this event, had a crash with several broken bones and he was helped by a sport psychologist. He also used “imagery” as a way to recover and start thinking about the competition and it worked. “I would say to the recorder: I’m standing on the top of the hill. I can feel the wind on the back of my neck. I can hear the crowd,” Cook said. “Kind of going through all those different senses and then actually going through what I wanted to do for the perfect jump. I turn down in the in-run. I stand up. I engage my core. I look at the top of the jump.” All of these feelings that he had were only due to his mind; here we can see the importance of sport psychology. 

Another psychological component which depends only from the athletes itself is confidence. There are different ways to gain confidence, some people trust on what they’ve trained, others think that they are the best and they only need to think in order to perform well. This was not necessarily the case for nine year old Heather Benjamin. Heather was a gymnast for many years and has traveled the country and won a significant amount of awarded. ¨But last year she developed a fear of jumping from one bar to the other in the uneven bars event. So she did something familiar to professional sports stars-she talked to a sports psychologist¨ (Pennington). When asked about her experience she said, it made such a difference. It was later found out that Heather had a phobia develop. According to her mother, it was a mental block that hindered her ability to compete. ¨ With the help of Dr. Alan Goldberg five-month counseling, Heather was able to overcome her fear and surpassed here previous scores by three ability levels. This type of help is the what athletes need and where psychology is present. 

Besides all of this positive effects that psychology has in sports, sometimes it can have a negative influence depending on how it’s applied. We saw that a nine-year-old girl worked with a sport psychologist to deal with her fear and it was successful, but sometimes, at this age, sports psychologists have noted that it may not be a good idea to have your child participate in competitive sports. It is obvious that all parents want their children to be successful in the sport that they play and sometimes they take it more seriously than the children themselves, as Dr. Marty Ewing argues, ¨Parents tell me that they have put so much money into their child’s athletic development that they are not going to leave any stone unturned if it might help them achieve. ¨ Parents influences on their children can be negative in his or her development skills. Dr. Gould, a sports psychologist who is also the director of Michigan State´s Institute for the Study of Youth Sports question that the youth playing in competitive sports is possibly contributing to the professionalism of childhood. He said ¨these kids aren't playing for the New York Yankees. And worse, I worry that some parents are doing it just because their neighbor did it for his kid¨(Pennington). Dr. Gould makes an extremely valid point.  Many children are having too much pressure put on them. Dr. Jay Granat, a New Jersey sports psychologist, continues by commenting that “the root of the problem is often the triangle of parent, coach, and athlete and the conflicts created.” He adds the parents have the right intentions for their son or daughter in wanting him or her to be the best at his or her sport, but they are striving for goals that may not be reachable, such as their child being the next Tiger Woods or Serena Williams. These fantasies are getting in the way of their child’s mental development that sports can provide (Pennington). 

Many people may think that superstitions are not real, but this can be argued, especially by athletes, that specific thing that they do before every game or practice is part of the reason why they are successful. As Živanović, Nenad said, “ For that reason they are trying to find help outside themselves, in something supernatural, which might help them give their maximum and achieve their desired goal.” In research done by Lysann Damish, her “findings provided further insights into the psychological processes that are triggered by the activation of good luck-superstition. The increased levels of self-efficacy that result from activating a superstition lead to higher self-set goals and greater persistence in the performance task” (Psychological Science, 1018).  In an article written by Joe DeLessio, he mentions how professional athletes such as star hockey player, Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins, have superstitions before game such as putting his equipment on in the same order, right to left. “These all may seem like strange inconsequential beliefs, but research shows that superstitions can actually be inked with improved performance…because they grant players a psychologically important illusions of control over events that often come down to random bounces here and there” (DeLessio). George Gemelch, a professor at anthropology at the University of San Francisco has studied superstitions in baseball for many years. Mr. Gmelch says, “what they’re really doing is giving themselves confidence. If I do these little rituals, then I’m going to feel confident going into this activity, and I can succeed and do well” (DeLessio). Dr. Paul van Lange, a professor of psychology at VU University in Amsterdam is the author of a paper titled, “The Psychological Benefits of Superstitious Rituals in Top Sport: A Study Among Top Sportspersons.” He explained that superstitions help cope with uncertain results in the future, especially if these results are important to them. He add that’s his argument is that superstitions “strengthen feelings of control and confidence that may be otherwise lacking” (DeLessio).  

After seeing all the aspects where psychology influences sports, we can argue that it is something really important in athlete’s everyday life. However, not only psychology influences sports, sports can also influence psychology. With this I want to say that exercising and playing a sport can improve, apart from people’s physical health, it can improve people’s mental health. It can be reflected principally in people with some type of injury that doesn’t let them enjoy life as before or as they would like. “Previous studies reported that ISCI (spinal cord injury) showed higher incidence of depression and anxiety, and lower quality of life, compared with able-bodied persons,”(S. Muraki, 309) S. Muraki stated in his study about “The effect of frequency and mode of sports activity on the psychological status in tetraplegics and paraplegics.”. This type of injury restricts people’s movements and most of the times, it can make changes in their mood. This new mood that they get is not usually a good one and here is when they should start exercising. Apart from the benefits that sports have for their injury, “many investigations in able-bodied persons supported the psychological benefits of sports activity on mental health including reduction of stress, depression and on improvement on mood.” (S. Muraki, 309). This means that people with spinal cord injury should exercise o play sports, always between the limits, in order to improve their mood and take their injury in a different way.

Apart from the effects in spinal cord injury active people, there are positive aspects behind the connection between the brain and sports. When we think about learning and intelligence and how can we get them, we think about remembering names, adding numbers, writing poetry or learning a new language. But what people don’t know is that learning a new motor skill can also help us to gain them. “Past neurological studies in people have shown that learning a new physical skill inn adulthood, such as juggling, leads to increases in the volume of gray matter in parts of the brain related to movement control.” (Reynolds) Everyone knows that sports are more beneficial as the age increases, as we saw for mental health and also for physical health. Gretchen Reynolds, in his article called “Learning a new sport may be good for the brain”, explains that “regular exercise likewise changes the brain, as I frequently have written, with studies in animals showing that running and other types of physical activities increase the number of new brain cells created in parts of the brain that are integral to memory and thinking.” But even for athletes, the fact of learning a new sport can be related with their improvement in concentration while they are studying or even during practice. Here, as we see at the beginning of the essay psychology starts to be important. 

Overall, the effects of psychology in sports is a vast subject. Both parents and coaches are one of the keys of this effects but the most important one is the athletes himself. He is the last person that will make this effect to influence in a positive or a negative way. Coaches and parents support can make the difference in athlete’s performance by encouraging them to have positive thoughts. Besides this effect of psychology in sports, we saw that sports also have an effect in psychology, which means that it playing sports or just exercising can have a positive impact in people’s mental health. It can improve injured people’s mood and help adults to improve their learning skills. Related to athletes, it’s like a cycle that never ends, psychology influences them, but also their sport affects their mind. 
