Do You Know How to Practice Mental Recovery?

As an athlete, you likely know the importance of physical recovery. You know that rest days are important opportunities for your body to recover after hard competitions or practices. But if those rest days are jam packed with the rest of your life—homework, extracurriculars, work—you may not be getting the mental recovery that you need. And mental recovery is just as impactful as physical recovery for athletes.

Here, TrueSport Expert and licensed clinical psychologist, Dr. Melissa Streno, is sharing what mental recovery looks like, and how you can find the right balance on your next rest day.

Rest is nonnegotiable when it comes to sports success. “There have to be rest days,” says Streno. “I see so many high school athletes burn out and exit sport because they’re doing too many sports and too many other activities in addition to a full load of classes, with no time off. It’s not sustainable. We need to break the stigma around resting and taking breaks.”

Given that physical rest and recovery is key to athletic success, athletes often focus on taking days away from sport, getting enough sleep, and taking some type of an off-season. But when was the last time you gave your brain a break? Unfortunately, student athletes struggle to make time for mental recovery even if they dedicate time to physical recovery, says Streno. That’s usually because you have a lot of demands on your time. Rather than taking a mental break, you end up doing more mental work than you do on a normal day.

But we need to prioritize those mental breaks as well because using mental energy actually requires physical energy, says Streno. You likely remember taking a test or spending hours working on a report, only to realize you felt depleted in the same way you would after a run or hard basketball practice. The body is still under stress whether you’re prepping for debate club or working on your three-point shot. “Stress is stress,” Streno explains. “If you take two days off of basketball practice to prepare for final exams, those are not really rest days.”