Injuries are an inevitable part of sports, often striking at the most inconvenient times…but when is a good time for an injury? A sports injury can feel like the end of the world, especially when your passion and dreams are put on hold. You are often told to just work through it, but may not have the tools to help manage and regulate your moods or emotions.
Let’s explore strategies emotions during sports injuries, including emotional agility, the RULER method, and the Mood Meter.
Emotion Basics
Understanding how emotions work is crucial for effectively managing them, especially during sports injuries. When sidelined by an injury, athletes can experience a whirlwind of emotions ranging from anger and sadness to anxiety and even depression. It's crucial to acknowledge and validate these feelings rather than suppress them. Research suggests that denying or avoiding emotions can prolong recovery and hinder psychological well-being (Tamminen et al., 2016). So, let’s learn more about what emotions are and are not.
So, while affect, emotions, and moods are all important parts of our lives, we don’t always distinguish them from one another. For daily life, this is fine. If someone asks us how we are feeling, we can tell them and it won’t matter if we mean affect, mood, or emotion. It is just an interesting thing to note. Especially remember that emotions have a physical and quick!
Emotional Agility
Emotional agility, a term developed by Dr. Susan David, involves the ability to navigate one's thoughts and feelings with flexibility and resilience, rather than getting stuck in unhelpful patterns (David, 2016). The key here is to not get stuck in one emotional space. When you are injured, you may be stuck in sadness or frustration. Being stuck in any emotional space is not a good place to be.
Learning emotional agility encourages athletes to acknowledge your emotions without judgment, accept them as valid responses to challenging circumstances, and then choose how to act in line with your values and long-term goals. When you are more emotionally agile, you can adapt more effectively to the ups and downs of your recovery journey, mistakes/errors in your physical game, and the overall arc of your athletic career. You can emerging stronger and more resilient…even though it may not feel like that now.
The RULER Method
Dr. Marc Brackett, of the Yale University's Center for Emotional Intelligence, developed the RULER method to help teach people to be more emotionally agile (Brackett et al., 2012). His story is quite interesting and the basis of his work is that generally, humans have a limited vocabulary about our emotions. Think about the last time someone asked you how you felt, you probably said, “good” or “fine.” You might have been lying to cover up feeling bad.
For example, when you were first injured and people asked you how you are…did you lie just to not have to talk about your bad feelings? That makes sense! Not everyone gets the privilege of seeing our inner thoughts and feelings. Also, you might think that you need to feel a certain way at that time. You might have been masking your true emotions. Overall, we have a limited language around how we feel. The RULER Method helps us with that:
This strategy helps us feel what we are feeling. In game situations, we may have slightly different strategies. If you feel sad because you made a mistake, you can’t fully express that in the game by sitting down and crying. You have to regulate that so you can move forward and perform. Your recovery from injury is your performance…it is a very long “game” for you. So, let’s look at how to begin identifying emotions.
The Mood Meter
The Mood Meter was developed by Marc Brackett and Robin Stern (2013). If you do individual coaching with me, you’ve probably already learned to use this tool. It was a major help to me in my personal and professional life when I began to tune into my emotions more. I could usually easily tell if I was in a good or bad mood, but that was it. I didn’t know how to move forward from there. The Mood Meter categorizes emotions into four quadrants based on their intensity and pleasantness.
The Mood Meter developers have created a free app called How We Feel that makes this process easier. When you click a feeling, it defines it for you. For example, if you are working through rehabilitation exercises and one of them is particularly challenging, you might think you are feeling angry. You use the app and determine you are in a negative, high energy mood. After looking at the definitions, you determine that you are frustrated (upset because you cannot do something you want to do) not angry (strongly bothered by a perceived injustice). Seems small, but how you respond to frustration and anger are different. The app provides strategies for you for either staying in a feeling or moving away from it. Many of my clients use it regularly!
