PSYCHOLOGICAL RESILIENCE AND MENTAL HEALTH OUTCOMES IN PROFESSIONAL ATHLETES

Abstract

Over the past few decades, psychological resilience has been defined as the role of the mental process in protecting the individual from negative things or stress. Research discovered a wide range of stressors that sports players face in the field of sports. These stressors are linked with the competitive sports performance of athletes, the organization within which athletes function and some non-sporting factors. As athletes experience many stressors during sports performance, researchers discovered the psychological resilience in players to understand why some athletes withstand or thrive on these stressors. The research study is based on primary data analysis to determine the data used smart PLS software and generate results, including descriptive statistics, correlation coefficient analysis and smart PLS Algorithm model between them.  Earlier studies demonstrated that athletes' poor performance highly depends on psychological resilience. In one study, it was demonstrated how basketball teams optimistic and pessimistic players recover from failure. The result showed that optimistic players were more confident, less nervous, and performed better than pessimistic players. In an additional study, it was checked that how three factors; confidence, societal support and managing skills affect the performance of national championship swimmers. Overall, the result found that psychological resilience directly and significantly affects mental health outcomes in professional athletes. The results showed that the swimmers who were able to bounce after failure had more confidence but less social support than swimmers who were not able to bounce back and had social support.