Injury anxiety in sports is when athletes, coaches, or family members feel worried or concerned about the possibility of getting hurt while playing sports. This can be a feeling that someone has all the time (like a personality trait) or something they experience in specific situations.
When it’s a trait, it means that a person tends to expect danger or risky situations during sports, which makes them feel uneasy or upset. They think about the consequences of getting injured and how they would handle it.
As a state, it means that in certain situations, like during a game or practice, different things become important in causing injury anxiety. These include how the person thinks and feels, the task they have to do, and how they see the social and environmental conditions around them.
Researchers have looked into injury anxiety to see if it affects how often injuries happen in sports (Wiese-Bjornstal et al., 1998) and how it influences the recovery process after an injury (Williams & Andersen, 2007). They found that injury anxiety, along with general anxiety, can partly explain why some people get injured more often (Kleinert, 2002a, 2007). They also discovered that injury anxiety can impact how someone pays attention, how tense their muscles are, and how they make decisions (Andersen & Williams, 1999). In the recovery process after an injury, injury anxiety can affect how much a person trusts in their body’s ability to heal and how they feel about their own physical and coordination skills (Wiese-Bjornstal et al., 1998).
To avoid getting injured again after going through a recovery process, it’s essential to consider reinjury anxiety, which is the fear of getting hurt again. Preventing reinjury anxiety is crucial for a successful post-rehabilitation period (Kleinert, 2002b; Walker et al., 2010).
Andersen, M. B., & Williams, J. M. (1999). Athletic injury, psychosocial factors, and perceptual changes during stress. Journal of Sports Sciences, 17, 735 741.
Kleinert, J. (2002a). Causative and protective effects of sport injury trait anxiety on injuries in German University Sport. European Journal of Sport Science, 2(5), 1 12.
Kleinert, J. (2002b). Das Stress-Wiederverletzungs-Modell: psychologische Ansa ̈tze zur Erkla ̈rung und Vermeidung von Wiederverletzungen im Sport (The stress-reinjury model: Psychological approaches to explain and prevent reinjuries in sport). Schweizerische Zeitschrift fu ̈r Sportmedizin und Sporttraumatologie, 50, 49 57.
Kleinert, J. (2007). Mood states and perceived physical states as short term predictors of sport injuries: Two prospective studies. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 5, 340 351.
Walker, N., Thatcher, J., & Lavallee, D. (2010). A preliminary development of the Re-Injury Anxiety Inventory (RIAI). Physical Therapy in Sport, 11, 23 29. Available from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ptsp.2009.09.003.
Wiese-Bjornstal, D. M., Smith, A. M., Shaffer, S. M., & Morrey, M. A. (1998). An integrated model of response to sport injury: Psychological and sociological dynamics. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 1, 46 69.
Williams, J. M., & Andersen, M. B. (2007). Psychosocial ante- cedents of sport injury and interventions for risk reduction. In G. Tenenbaum, & R. Eklund (Eds.), Handbook of sport psychology (pp. 379 403). Hoboken: Wiley.
