Written by The last few articles I’ve written here have been primarily focused on different Mental Skills and helping athletes reach their full potential and become the best athletes and people they can be. But we also understand that sports aren’t always sunshine and rainbows. Competitive sports can bring us some down times and struggles. Which is the realm I want to focus on this time. In specific, we’re going to be talking about something that both coaches and athletes can suffer from over time of being involved in sports.
I’m talking about Burnout. What does it look like? What does it do to us? What can we do to prevent it? There’s a lot of mystery surrounding this disorder, so let’s try to decipher some of that and gain a better understanding of what burnout looks like in the context of competitive sports.
‘Burnout’ has become somewhat of a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot, but in all actuality, burnout is a real, recognized mental health disorder and yet, somehow it’s still being ignored. Burnout can be defined as ‘overwhelming physical and emotional exhaustion from training and competing leading to loss of interest, and decreased ability to perform.’
This is so much more than being tired or worn out. It’s more than being upset or angry. Burnout is an extreme case of some of these things, but it can have an immense impact on every aspect of your life. Essentially this means that a coach or athlete’s amount of stress and anxiety surrounding their performance has become so overwhelming that it is beginning to impact not only their performance, but also their enjoyment of the sport, and other aspects of their lives off the field.
Burnout isn’t a ‘sport-specific’ illness. Burnout can be experienced by people in any profession and we often hear about this in other fields, but not as much in the world of competitive sport. But we are focused on teams and athletes here, so that’s the realm we’ll spend time talking about this time.
Yes, this issue gets ignored a lot, but I also want to make it known that just because you play or coach competitive sports for a long time, that doesn’t guarantee that you will eventually suffer from burnout. There are hundreds of factors that play into whether or not someone burns out from their particular sport. There are also tons of ways to prevent it from happening. And that’s what I want to cover by providing you with some signs and symptoms to look out for in yourself and your athletes, as well as a few things you can put in place to help prevent burnout from impacting anyone within your program.
As I said at the beginning, there are hundreds of factors that can impact whether or not someone is going to suffer from burnout, so it’s difficult to write a concise article covering everything possible. So instead, I’m going to give you lists of: Potential Causes of Burnout, Symptoms of Burnout, Dangers of Burnout, and Preventative Steps. All of this in hopes of giving you the broadest view possible to prevent this syndrome from impacting you or your athletes.
One person experiencing burnout will look drastically different from the next. Everyone will experience different symptoms and handle them differently, so you’re in a tough spot as a coach trying to manage all of this. The best course of action is to keep an eye out for these symptoms and notice if someone just doesn’t seem like themselves all of a sudden. Then taking steps to help them in any way that you can. You know your athletes better than most people, so you can probably notice when something seems off about them. Even the smallest changes could be early signs of burnout setting in for them.
The majority of these causes, symptoms, and preventative steps come from research presented throughout ‘Foundations of Sport and Exercise Psychology’ by Robert S. Weinberg and Daniel Gould. Anything not from that text comes from my own experience in this field helping myself as well as other athletes and coaches to combat burnout throughout the journey of their careers.
- Causes of Burnout
Sadly, there’s not one single reason that you or an athlete may burnout. It can be a result of one thing from this list, or a combination of many factors, and we’ll never really know until it happens.
Everyone has a different experience in their sporting careers and a different outlook on the situation as a whole. So something that you may never even consider stressful could be the exact thing that’s slowly pushing them away from the game they love.
This is far from a comprehensive list of ‘burnout causes’, but it is some of the most common reasons that athletes identify as being contributing factors to their burnout:
-Perfectionism
-Over Training
-Injury
-High Expectations
-Let Downs
-Poor Relationship with Coaches
-Poor Stress Management
2. Signs and Symptoms of Burnout
This list could be long enough to fill a book and I would still miss some of the symptoms and side-effects people may experience if they are dealing with burnout. But some of the most common are changes in the way you or your athlete approaches the sport. Are they more withdrawn and uninterested than usual? Do they seem to just be going through the motions? Do they dread going to practice when they used to look forward to it? Do they just not seem like themselves anymore?
Just because they are dealing with some of these symptoms, that doesn’t automatically mean they’re burning out. They could potentially just be dealing with some off-the-field issues that’re pulling their attention away, and it could be a temporary slump. This is why it’s so important to form those strong relationships with your athletes so you can talk to them about what’s going on and determine if they’re just going through a rough patch, or if they are potentially burning out.
I’ll repeat it again… You should know your athletes extremely well, so if something seems off about them, talk to them, get to the bottom of it, and determine the best course of action to help them!
Keep an eye out for things like:
-Decreased Motivation
-Lack of Concentration
-Loss of Enjoyment
-Increased Anxiety
-Withdrawn Behavior
-Loss of Interest
-Poor Performance
-Decline in Self Esteem and Confidence
-Personality Changes
-Depression
-Poor Sleep
-Drastic Weight Changes
-Overall Decline in Mental Health
-‘Something Seems Off’
3. The Dangers of Burnout
Now we’ve talked about what burnout is and what it looks like, but what really happens to someone experiencing burnout? What happens next?
The most common outcome of burnout in athletes is the loss of love for the game. And this can be such a heartbreaking thing to experience. Something that used to be so integral and important in someone’s life that they would spend hours each day dedicated to it, all of a sudden becomes a burden for them… That’s brutal.
And this loss of love is really only the beginning. If they no longer love the sport, and dread going to practice, no longer enjoy the thrill of competition, what are they still playing for? This can often lead to them quitting or stepping away from the game.
Then potentially the worst part of it all… When they look back years from now after burning out, they will look at their experience in sports in a really negative light because it ended on such a poor note. No matter how much joy and excitement the game brought them over the years, if they end on a sour note, it’s difficult to see past that and remember all the great times.
So we want to do everything to help our athletes avoid:
-Loss of Love for the Game
-Ruined Experience
-Eventual Quitting
-Waste of Talent
-Negative Memories
4. How to Prevent Burnout
There isn’t any single scientific process to ensure that burnout never hits, but there are a few things that have been shown to help. All of these will depend on you, your athletes, and everyone’s situation, but at the end of the day whatever you can do to keep the sport fun and positive is a step in the right direction.
The most drastic of these steps is taking a break and stepping away from the game for a bit. This is why I’m still a big fan of athletes playing multiple sports (in most cases). It helps them experience something new every now and then instead of doing the exact same thing every day for 365 days each year. Keeping things fresh and interesting helps to prevent the sport from becoming stale and boring over time.
Many of the other strategies listed here are things that can be implemented in practice or throughout a season to put your athletes in the best spot possible to enjoy the sport, prevent burnout, and still be highly competitive at the same time:
-Time Away
-Keeping Things Fun
-Staying Positive
-Other Stress Outlets
-Modification of Training
-Changing Environment
-Taking a Holistic Approach
When I sat down to write this article I was trying to determine a topic,I was honestly shocked to see that I hadn’t done one over burnout yet. Like I said at the beginning, this is something that impacts far too many athletes and coaches every single year… And there are things we can do to help prevent it!
It’s also such an important topic to me because I went through it toward the end of my own baseball career…
I’ve loved baseball my entire life and still do to this day, but by the time I was a senior in college I was DONE. I was completely burnt out, tired of the endless days of training, and in all honesty, I couldn’t wait to hang up the cleats forever and never look back.
My burnout was a combination of a number of factors:
-I had 5 different head coaches in 4 years of college and had really bad relationships with most of them.
-College baseball was non-stop, we would play and practice from August until May, then I would play summer ball until the next August and start the process over again. There was very little time off.
-I had extremely high expectations for myself and very rarely lived up to them, and I definitely didn’t handle that very well. I was and still am a perfectionist, and at the time didn’t know how to handle that.
By this time in my career I had completely lost my love for the game, hated going to practice every day, and couldn’t have cared less whether we won or lost on any given day. Like I said… I was done and over it. And when I finally finished playing I was happy to be done and didn’t think I would ever pick up a baseball again.
But luckily a little over a year later, I got the opportunity to step into coaching and that child-like love I used to have for the game of baseball came flooding back… And the rest is history.
So take it from someone who’s been there and seen it from both sides, burnout really (and I mean REALLY) sucks…
Try to avoid it any way you can!