Mental Health Minute: Sports Psychologists

TWIN FALLS, Idaho (KMVT/KSVT) — While professional athletes are at or near the top of their game physically and mentally, their mental state can be different. This week’s Mental Health Minute examines how sports psychologists help athletes.

Simone Biles, Aaron Judge, Tom Brady and Michael Jordan. These are just a few professional athletes who have spent time with a sports psychologist in their careers, according to the University of Pennsylvania. But what exactly does a sports psychologist do?

“I always start with a whole-person assessment, so I’m still doing a general mental health evaluation and getting into a lot of that stuff, but then we get into the layers of an athlete’s sport, their community all those components there and we can do some performance enhancement, mental skills training so we can get very specific into how to improve their performance,” said Dr. Natasha Trujillo a sports psychologist and counselor.

Doctor Trujillo, who is from Colorado, works with college, professional and Olympic athletes, and she said that working with these athletes has made her realize something.

“Grief and loss within sports is just huge, and if you look at how much athletes truly do grieve, at the end of every season there’s usually only one team, one person that’s really happy, everyone else didn’t quite reach their goals and that’s a lot of grief,” Dr. Trujillo said.

With only one athlete or team at the top of the mountain by the end of the year, athletes have more to work on in their offseason, both physically and mentally.

In terms of specific things, Dr. Trujillo’s work with athletes varies from player to player.

“So from the sports performance side oftentimes it’s performance enhancement techniques, mental skills training. We do a lot of things like mindfulness training, self-talk intervention, how do you set goals. Learn to reset and refocus, how do you use visualization or imagery strategies so it can be a lot more solution-focused on how you employ these things,” Dr. Trujillo said.

Dr. Trujillo also said that while some of our favorite athletes can be larger-than-life figures, they sometimes deal with many of the same things we all do.

“They are people first. Sometimes it’s how can I deal with my anxiety or with my depression or with the family stuff I have going on in a way that allows me to still deal with that, but also show up to my job and optimize my performance,” Dr. Trujillo said.

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