The Hidden Side of Coaching: Protecting Your Mental Health

Coaching demands emotional presence as much as technical skill. You guide athletes through highs, lows, and everything in between, often without pausing to consider your own wellbeing. This post looks at why your mental health deserves attention and shares a strategy to support your wellbeing in the day-to-day reality of coaching. 

Why Coaches’ Mental Health Matters Just as Much as Athletes’

Coaching Is More Than Technical Instruction

Coaching is not just about drills and tactics. You routinely act as educators, motivators, mentors, and performance managers (Baumann et al., 2024). With growing awareness around mental health, you’ve also taken on another role: supporting athletes’ emotional wellbeing (Warden et al., 2024).

You see your athletes more often than any other professional. You know their habits, their moods, and their worries. That closeness means you inevitably carry part of their emotional world and often without realising how heavy it becomes.

When Your Wellbeing Stretches, Everything Stretches

When you’re tired or overwhelmed, you still show up. But the quality of how you show up can shift in subtle ways.

Under stress, things like communication, patience, and connection. Can change (Baumann et al., 2024). These small shifts can increase athletes’ anxiety, which is itself a known risk factor for burnout.

It creates a cycle:

The hidden coaching stress cycle

You Can’t Water a Garden with an Empty Can

Imagine trying to water a garden with an empty watering can. You tip it, shake it, try your best. Nothing comes out. Not because you don’t care, but because you’ve run dry.

Coaches are the same. You can only give emotional nourishment when your own wellbeing is topped up.

Prioritising your wellbeing isn’t self-indulgent. It’s an investment in your coaching practice, and it models healthy behaviour for athletes. They learn from what you do, not just what you say.

When you set boundaries, take breaks, and protect your mental health, you show athletes that wellbeing is a normal and accepted part of thriving in performance environments.

Practical Step: Use Reflection to Support Your Mental Health

Why Reflection Helps

Reflection is one of the simplest ways to look after your mental health as a coach. It helps you slow down, make sense of what’s happening in your sessions, and notice what’s lifting you up or wearing you down. When you understand how your emotions show up in your coaching, you can respond with more intention rather than reacting on autopilot.

Research with experienced coaches shows that reflection works best when it’s done on purpose. Not just thinking about things in passing, but taking a moment to pause, check in with yourself, and use a few simple prompts to guide your thinking (Nash, MacPherson and Collins, 2022).

How to Build Reflection into Your Week

Reflection doesn’t need to be deep or time-consuming. Try taking a couple of minutes after a session to ask yourself:

Three questions to pause and reflect

These small check-ins can reduce stress, boost clarity, and help you stay grounded across a busy week.

If you prefer a bit more structure, the SPRINT Project’s Interactive Emotional Awareness Tool offers a simple guided process you can follow.

Sharing your reflections with a colleague or mentor can make them even more powerful, helping you spot patterns and feel more supported (Nash, MacPherson and Collins, 2022).

Want to Go Further?

If you’d like to explore more practical ways to build mental skills into everyday coaching, this guide is a great place to start.

It offers accessible tools and reflections that support both your wellbeing and the environments you create for your athletes.

Final thoughts

Looking after your mental health strengthens the way you show up for your athletes. When you invest in your own wellbeing, you create a healthier, more sustainable coaching environment for everyone.

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Written by Aimee Nash - University of Birmingham Student Physiotherapist.

References:

Baumann, L., Schneeberger, A.R., Currie, A., Iff, S., Seifritz, E. and Claussen, M.C. (2024) Mental health in elite coaches. Sports Health, 16(6), pp. 1050–1057. https://doi.org/10.1177/19417381231223472

Nash, C., MacPherson, A.C. and Collins, D. (2022) ‘Reflections on reflection: clarifying and promoting use in experienced coaches’, Frontiers in Psychology, 13, p. 867720. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.867720

SPRINT Project (n.d.) Interactive emotional awareness. Available at: https://www.sprintproject.org/interactive-emotional-awareness (Accessed: 20 May 2026).

SPRINT Project (2025) Mental skills matter: your guide to learning, applying and sharing them. Published 5 September. Available at: https://www.sprintproject.org/post/mental-skills-matter-your-guide-to-learning-applying-and-sharing-them (Accessed: 20 May 2026).

Warden, S., Doncaster, G., Greenough, K. and Smith, A. (2024) ‘Examining sports coaches’ mental health literacy: evidence from UK athletics’, Sport, Education and Society, 29(7), pp. 908–922. https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2023.2214160