Mental health | sportanddev

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Sport plays a significant role in boosting mental health by releasing endorphins, reducing stress, and promoting social connections. While it can have positive impacts, it can also have negative effects on players, such as anxiety and burnout. To effectively support the mental health of diverse populations with sport, including refugees, people with disabilities, and women and girls, we need tailored approaches to sport programming.

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Mental health benefits of sport
Mental health risks in and through sport
Mental health and sport across populations
Trauma-informed programmes
Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) in Sport for Development (S4D)
Safeguarding Mental Health in Sport
Key links, resources and tools

Mental health benefits of sport

While sport is widely recognised for improving physical health, it also plays a fundamental role in boosting one’s mental health for a variety of reasons. Mental health refers to the health of our emotional states, our patterns of thinking, and our ability to regulate stress and manage difficulties in life.

When the body is moving, it makes endorphins and stress hormone levels go down. Sport can help players of all levels put aside worries, feel less anxious, and sleep better. A systematic review of studies involving athletes across recreational and elite levels found that participation in sport can build resilience, self-confidence and a sense of purpose. Team sports can be especially helpful to one’s mental health, as they support social connection and teamwork. Individual sports can also offer an easier entry point to play for those who may feel social anxiety or who prefer a lower-pressure environment. Additionally, research shows that staying engaged in sport for the long-term engagement can lower both chronic stress and risk of depression for participants in sport.

Sport for Development practitioners and some sports clubs have designed programmes to purposely build on these and other known strengths of sport for supporting mental health.

Beyond the immediate mental health benefits of participation in sport and SfD programmes, many of those who work and learn in spaces adjacent to sport programmes also experience mental health benefits from their livelihoods, their learning, developing positive relationships through sport and by contributing to their communities. This includes coaches, SfD practitioners, policymakers, students and scholars.

Outside of doctors’ offices and clinics, mental health is also sometimes called ''well-being'. Some people may hesitate to use the term mental health if they are not a medical professional, but mental health is everyone’s concern and we do not need to be experts to learn and talk about it. Both the terms 'mental health' and 'well-being' are used in this article. In the linked resources and literature you might also encounter the more academic term Mental Health and Psycho-Social Support (MHPSS).

Mental health risks in and through sport

While it is clear sport can positively impact mental health, it can also impact players negatively. The environment in which a given sport is played is a critical factor that influences mental health outcomes for sport participants. Competitive pressure, playing just one single sport and coaching that is only focused on results are linked to athlete burnout and anxiety. This is very relevant among young people, as it often leads to lower enjoyment and young people leaving or "dropping out" of their sport. Carefully designing and implementation sport programmes helps to shape a positive experience. This includes using trauma-informed coaching, considering the design of the play environment, and more.

In addition, comparison culture and body image can cause psychological harm. Sport environments that value physical appearance and/or ranking, often heightened by social media, can contribute to low self-esteem and unhealthy relationships with sport and exercise. These risks are avoidable, though. Programmes designed to be inclusive, encouraging, and intuitive can greatly lower the risks.

Mental health and sport across populations

While some psychological conditions call for clinical mental health expertise—such as from psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers—everyone in a participant’s environment plays a vital role in supporting mental health and safeguarding well-being. Coaches, teachers, youth workers, and parents are uniquely positioned to provide day-to-day psychosocial support, recognise early warning signs of distress, and foster inclusive, emotionally safe environments. Adding mental health promotion into the program cycle equips these frontline actors with the tools to support participants, ensuring care is continuous rather than purely reactive.

Mental health needs and outcomes vary significantly across populations, and populations often need tailored specific support to achieve mental health benefits from their participation in sport.

Sport can be used as a powerful tool for trauma recovery and social integration among refugees, displaced persons, and those in conflict-affected areas. These individuals are at high risk of experiencing poor mental health due to stressful, traumatic events. These circumstances–alongside language barriers and lack of legal documentation–can serve as additional barriers to sport participation. However, successful engagement in sport and physical activity can produce positive psychological results.

For example, when delivered in a safe and trauma-informed way, sport can support refugees' mental health by helping helping people in situations of displacement to build social connections and navigate the integration process within new communities.

The Olympic Refuge Foundation had developed a database of good practices with over 100 examples and free resources for using sport to support mental health of young people experiencing displacement.

The Coaching for Life programme by Save the Children and the Arsenal Foundation uses football to improve health outcomes, including mental well-being, of displaced children in Jordan’s Za’atari refugee camp. The programme provides structured coaching sessions that address emotional regulation, resilience, and self-esteem.

For young people, competitive and elite sport can aid in development but it can also be a source of intense pressure, with the potential to impact long-term mental health. Across all populations, the challenges are often related to performance pressure and anxiety, and mental health challenges can arise when an individual’s self-worth becomes tied to their athletic results.

For people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ individuals and women and girls, the mental health burden is compounded by social stigmas to taking part in their chosen sport(s), lack of safe spaces, and the constant need to advocate for their right to play. On the other hand, sport participation for these individuals can boost confidence, one’s sense of belonging and overall mental health.

Special Olympics counters these compounded stigmas through programs like Unified Sports, which fosters a sense of belonging by placing athletes with and without disabilities on the same team. Their Strong Minds initiative delivers adaptive stress-management tools directly on the sidelines, demonstrating how frontline coaches and peers can weave mental health support into daily sport participation.

Similarly, You Can Play supports LGBTQ+ participants through inclusion training and behavioral codes of conduct for coaches, teammates, and fans. By naming and getting rid of language that discriminates, these frameworks create a baseline of psychological safety, making sure participants can focus on their own well-being and sport participation without fear of exclusion.

UN Women’s Sports for All campaign protects the mental health of women and girls across Asia and the Pacific by advocating for gender-responsive programming and equal access to safe play environments. This initiative promotes positive body image and builds the self-esteem necessary to reduce anxiety and combat depression.

Finally, for older adults, sport and physical activity may feel unattainable, as injuries, age-related muscle loss or disease and illness lower one's ability to move freely. Still, participation in modified sports can be key in combating social isolation and boosting mental well-being. The Sporting Memories organization supports older adults in the UK by combining gentle, age-appropriate physical activity with structured sports reminiscence therapy. By using the shared love of sport to stimulate cognitive health, this approach creates inclusive spaces for those living with dementia, battling depression, or facing isolation.

Trauma-informed programmes

To understand why sport serves as a powerful tool for psychological healing, a useful starting point is understanding how trauma affects the brain. First, the brain’s alarm system, specifically the amygdala (also known as the brainstem) goes into overdrive. The brain’s fight-or-flight response becomes hyper-reactive, causing the individual to be in constant survival mode. According to Dr. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Model (NM), trauma healing interventions must occur in a specific order, following the brain’s developmental trajectory–regulate, relate, and reason. The other pieces of this model include mapping the brain’s functions and carefully planning programmes or interventions.

In sport, being familiar with the NM can guide effective coaching, training, and performance. The NM is a helpful tool for sport programmes, helping them provide healthy developmental experiences to youth and families or caregivers . One example of this is the Push to Heal program developed by an organization called Hull Services, in Calgary, Canada. This program leverages skateboarding to facilitate confidence, emotion regulation, and healing in youth through the sequential steps of the NM.

mental health in sport neurosequential model

Illustration created by Push to Heal showing the positive effects of skateboarding on the brain, based on the Neurosequential Model of the brain.

Image credit: Dr. Bruce Perry and the Child Trauma Academy (Source)

Additionally, the Olympic Refuge Foundation and the International Federation of the Red Cross have partnered to create Sport Coach+, a resource to provide coaches with tools to foster psychological safety for displaced young people.

Waves for Change, a non-profit based in South Africa, has developed the Take 5 Model to address the “toxic stress pandemic.” The five core components of this framework are belonging, safety, respite, self-regulation, and future planning. The organisation aims to provide competent mentors, safe spaces, and a supportive community for children and adolescents.

Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) in Sport for Development (S4D)

The Inter-Agency Standing Committee of the UN General Assembly has developed a Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) pyramid to help practitioners understand their role in supporting participants’ mental health and well-being.

Level 1: Basic Services and security. Focuses on the protection of all people’s well-being. Basic needs and services must be delivered in safe, participatory, and socially appropriate ways.
Level 2: Community and family supports. Focuses on creating a sense of belonging by activating social networks and strengthening social bonds.
Level 3: Non-specialised support. Prioritizes the psychological safety of people who need additional care, including those who have experienced trauma or displacement.
Level 4: Specialised services. Focuses on clinical care. For those with severe mental health conditions, sport is used as a psychosocial tool alongside specialised care provided by doctors and therapists.

Intervention pyramid for mental health and psychosocial support in emergencies. Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) (2007). IASC Guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings. Geneva: IASC.

Safeguarding Mental Health in Sport

Safeguarding in sport extends far beyond physical safety–it is also about protecting the psychological wellbeing of participants. Protecting the mental health of participants is a shared responsibility between sport organisations and their staff, coaches, mentors, and volunteers. In practice, this means:

Providing mental health literacy
Ensuring psychologically safe spaces
Normalising asking for help
Investing in workforce development
Strengthening referral pathways

A practical example of this is the Olympic Refuge Foundation’s Psychological First Aid in sport (PFAsport) initiative. PFAsport is a training program designed to increase the mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) capacity of people involved in sport. This initiative demonstrates that equipping coaches and volunteers with basic psychosocial skills is highly appropriate and urges that mental health and sport go hand-in-hand.

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