Sports & Performance Therapy: Supporting Athletes Beyond Physical Performance
When people think about athletic performance, they often focus on physical strength, endurance, conditioning, and skill development. What is often overlooked is the significant mental and emotional pressure athletes carry both on and off the field. Athletes are frequently expected to remain mentally tough, push through pain, manage intense expectations, and continue performing regardless of stress, anxiety, injuries, or personal struggles.
While resilience can be an incredible strength, constantly operating in survival mode can eventually impact confidence, emotional regulation, relationships, motivation, sleep, and overall mental health. Sports and performance therapy provides athletes with a space to not only improve coping skills and mental resilience, but also address the deeper emotional and nervous system patterns that may be impacting performance and well-being.
At Connections Counseling, Brittany Katz, LCSW, works with athletes, performers, and high-achieving individuals using approaches such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), EMDR, and Brainspotting to support both performance and emotional healing.
The Mental Health Side of Athletics
Athletes face unique emotional demands that often go unseen by others. Many struggle with perfectionism, fear of failure, pressure to constantly perform, burnout, anxiety, injuries, criticism, or feeling like their worth is tied directly to success. Even highly successful athletes may privately experience overwhelming self-doubt, emotional exhaustion, or difficulty coping with stress.
In some cases, unresolved childhood experiences, relational wounds, traumatic coaching environments, injuries, or repeated high-pressure experiences can continue affecting an athlete long after the event itself has passed. These experiences may show up as panic symptoms, overthinking, emotional reactivity, performance blocks, confidence struggles, or difficulty feeling mentally “off” from competition mode.
Sports and performance therapy helps athletes better understand these patterns while also creating healthier ways to regulate stress, process emotions, and improve overall functioning.
Using CBT with Athletes
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) focuses on the connection between thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and performance. Athletes often develop intense internal pressure and negative self-talk patterns that can significantly impact confidence and consistency.
Thoughts such as:
“If I fail, I’m letting everyone down.”
“I have to be perfect.”
“I can’t make mistakes.”
“If I struggle mentally, I’m weak.”
can create chronic anxiety and emotional exhaustion over time.
CBT helps athletes recognize these thought patterns, challenge distorted beliefs, and build healthier mental frameworks. Therapy may focus on improving emotional awareness, reducing overthinking, strengthening confidence, developing coping skills, and learning how to respond to pressure in a more balanced and sustainable way.
CBT can also help athletes improve communication, navigate setbacks, and build greater flexibility in how they view themselves and their performance.
EMDR Therapy for Athletes
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is an evidence-based trauma therapy designed to help the brain process distressing or unresolved experiences that may still be affecting present-day functioning.
For athletes, trauma is not always what people traditionally think of as “big trauma.” Trauma can include repeated criticism, humiliation, injuries, emotionally invalidating environments, intense pressure, panic experiences during performance, or feeling unsafe emotionally within sports culture.
EMDR can help athletes process:
sports-related trauma
performance anxiety
injury-related fears
panic symptoms
confidence blocks
shame-based experiences
childhood trauma impacting self-worth
emotionally distressing performance experiences
Rather than simply talking about an experience, EMDR helps the nervous system and brain reprocess it so it no longer feels as emotionally overwhelming or activating. Many athletes notice improvements not only in emotional regulation, but also in confidence, mental flexibility, and their ability to stay grounded under pressure.
Brainspotting & Athletic Performance
Brainspotting is a brain-body therapy approach that focuses on deeper nervous system processing. It is often especially appealing to athletes because many athletes naturally experience stress and emotions physically within their body.
Brainspotting works with the idea that “where you look affects how you feel.” By identifying specific eye positions connected to emotional activation, Brainspotting helps access deeper areas of the brain involved in trauma, stress, performance blocks, and emotional processing.
For athletes, Brainspotting may help with:
performance pressure
emotional overwhelm
anxiety
mental blocks
burnout
focus and concentration
nervous system regulation
emotional recovery after injuries or setbacks
Many athletes appreciate that Brainspotting goes beyond traditional talk therapy and allows deeper processing without needing to fully verbalize every experience.
Mental Health is Part of Performance
Athletes are often incredibly skilled at functioning while emotionally overwhelmed. However, long-term stress, unresolved trauma, chronic pressure, and nervous system dysregulation can eventually affect both performance and overall quality of life.
Seeking therapy is not about becoming “less tough.” In many cases, therapy helps athletes become more emotionally aware, resilient, regulated, and mentally flexible — all of which can positively impact both personal well-being and performance.
Sports and performance therapy is not only about helping athletes perform better. It is about helping them feel healthier, more grounded, and more connected to themselves outside of performance alone.
Sports & Performance Therapy at Connections Counseling
Connections Counseling provides trauma-informed therapy for athletes, performers, and high-achieving individuals in person in Las Vegas and throughout Nevada via telehealth. Brittany Katz, LCSW, integrates CBT, EMDR, and Brainspotting to support athletes navigating anxiety, burnout, perfectionism, trauma, emotional stress, confidence struggles, and nervous system dysregulation.
If you are looking for support that understands both performance pressure and deeper emotional healing, sports and performance therapy may be a helpful next step.
