Sport and Performance Psychology

Where mind and body meet.

At Health in Tandem, our motto is “where mind and body meet.” What does this mean? That our mind and body are connected - we cannot transform our mental health without incorporating physical wellness and we cannot improve our physical functioning and performance without utilizing mental skills. 
As you continue to read this page, we’ll do a deeper dive into what sport, health, and performance psychology is, how our integrative, mind-body approach differs from “traditional therapy,” how we implement it here in Lakeview, Chicago, as well as virtually across Illinois, and how anyone—not only collegiate athletes or high-performing professionals—can benefit from the psychological skills that drive peak performance, resilience, and well-being.

Why this matters

• Movement, exercise, physical functioning, and athletic performance are deeply intertwined with mental, emotional and social health.

• Whether you’re an athlete, someone committed to their personal fitness, or a person engaged in a demanding job with high expectations, there are common skills that drive optimal performance. These include focus, resilience, emotion regulation, motivation, confidence, goal setting, self-talk, imagery, and recovery.

• We aim to break the notion that “sport psychology is only for elite athletes.” In fact, it’s our belief that sport and performance psychology skills are beneficial to individuals of all ages and activity levels, as well as a variety of performance contexts - sport, exercise, business, tactical - not just elite athletic competition.

What is Sport & Performance Psychology?

Sport and performance psychology is a field that uses psychological knowledge and skills to address optimal performance and well-being.

According to the Association for Applied Sport Psychology, “Today, achieving peak performance involves more than reaching peak physical fitness… Potential isn’t realized by chance. The field … focuses on providing every performer with the resources to power their inner edge by strengthening the ability to perform, as well as the ability to thrive.” 

Sport Psychology isn’t just about athletic competition or perfectionism. It’s about being a consistently excellent performer in whatever arena you choose to perform in. Through confidence, focus, self-talk, imagery, and resilience, any individual can perform both physically and mentally at their best, without burning out, punishing themselves through “tough love,” or setting overly optimistic expectations that are impossible to achieve. 

Key areas of intervention
Some of the most common psychological-skills interventions in sport and performance psychology include:

• Goal-setting

• Mental imagery/visualisation

• Self-talk

• Confidence enhancement

• Concentration, focus and mindfulness

• Arousal regulation and anxiety management

• Resilience in adversity

• Team dynamics, communication, leadership (in team sports and corporate team settings)

Who benefits from Sport and Performance Psychology?
Sport psychology isn’t just for elite athletes, it’s for everybody, including: 

• Youth, high school, club sport participants

• Adult recreational athletes

• Creative performers (music, dance, theatre)

• High-performance professionals (business, tactical settings)

Anyone seeking better health, fitness, movement, recovery, or mental-physical performance

How Sport Psychology Skills Can Be Used by Anyone

Mental health exists on a spectrum that ranges from mental illness to mental excellence. While mental illness involves distress and dysfunction that interfere with daily life or performance, mental excellence reflects optimal psychological functioning—where individuals demonstrate resilience, focus, confidence, and emotional regulation. 

In therapy, we often identify the symptoms and triggers that are causing mental illness and distress. By identifying these triggers and setting goals for treatment and recovery, we’re working to help individuals slide up this spectrum, toward mental health and excellence.

Sport and performance psychology operates across the other end of this spectrum, not only helping athletes and performers overcome mental health challenges but also enhancing well-being and maximizing potential. Just as physical training strengthens the body, mental skills training strengthens the mind, fostering both recovery and peak performance.

Not convinced that sport and performance psychology can be universal? Let’s look at some examples of how the “athlete mindset” translates to broader life, health and wellness.

• Goal-setting: Just like a soccer player might set a season goal to score a certain number of goals and break a record, you might set a goal for your wellness journey.

For example, you might want to integrate weekly cold plunges and time in the sauna. You might want to increase strength so you can do 10 push ups. Or you might want to  reduce the level of anxiety you feel going into meetings with your boss. 

Goal setting creates structure around the different aspects that will help you to perform at your best.

• Mental imagery: Research shows that when we visualize performing well, it’s more likely to happen! In fact, your muscular strength can even improve simply from imagining yourself lifting weights - how cool is that? 

As part of their “mental” practice, many athletes visualise their upcoming games to be better prepared for their competition. 

Not an athlete? You can visualize going on a date, asking for a raise at work, your body healing from illness or injury, or the stress leaving your body.

• Focus and mindfulness: In sports you can “be in the zone.” This means putting life aside and placing all of your attention on what is in front of you - the current play, the competition, your next move. Focus and mindfulness is critical in sports. Without the proper attention, you can misstep or fail to assist a teammate properly.

In life, you might “be in the flow.” Mihaly Csizszentmihaly defines flow as a mental state in which you have complete immersion and focus on a task at hand, leaving you feeling energized, focused, and joyful. Working on focus and mindfulness means you might spend less time scrolling on social media or procrastinating, and more time being present at work, with family, or on a hobby. 

• Positive self-talk: Athletes manage the inner critic as a means to bounce back from a play that got derailed or a missed goal. 

We all have an inner voice that narrates and responds to how we navigate life. If you’ve ever had thoughts like, “I’m not good enough, I’ll fail, I’ll mess up” then you could benefit from learning how to speak to yourself with more compassion and encouragement and less punishment and judgment.

• Arousal regulation & recovery: Performance isn’t only about getting psyched before a big game; it’s about balance, recovery, and resilience. 

When we prioritize sleep, nervous-system regulation, and mind–body practices, we’re more likely to succeed in any big life event, whether that’s a game or an important meeting, or a final exam.

• Team and leadership dynamics: Team sports require communication, camaraderie, and trust. 

Have you ever seen Ted Lasso? Teams also require respectful and assertive leadership. Even the best teams can crumble under poor leadership, and struggling teams can soar if led by a supportive, encouraging coach.

Even individuals perform in a context. We are supported by family, peers, group exercise coaches, a therapist - the list goes on. Recognising how the social environment supports or hinders performance in everyday life is key.

How Sport and Performance Psychology Differs from Traditional Talk Therapy

In some ways, sport and performance psychology is no different than traditional talk therapy. For instance, both services start with two people - a therapist/consultant and a client - meeting together to assist the client with their mental health goals. However, there are some key differences:

Traditional talk therapy tends to:

• Emphasize insight, meaning-making, processing past events, relational patterns, and attachment.

• Use modalities like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) or Internal Family Systems (IFS).

• Focus on symptom relief (anxiety, depression, trauma) and relational repair.

• Be applicable when an individual experiences a life event or situation that leads to a decline in their mental health.

Sport/performance psychology tends to:

• Focus on skill-development alongside emotional or relational work.

• Be more solution-focused and performance-oriented.

• Include systemic or integrative components, such as routines, imagery, focus/hyper-focus, recovery.

• Be applicable when the client is already doing “okay” but wants more - higher performance, better movement, more consistency. It’s typically not crisis-driven.

But: It’s not black and white

Many clients may transition between traditional therapy and performance-oriented work. As explained, talk therapy and sport psychology can be used in tandem, or it can be used at separate times in life depending on your goals and overall mental well-being. 

Top-Down vs Bottom-Up Approaches in This Context

In performance psychology (and holistic wellness), the integration of both mental skills and physical wellness interventions gives you more. In essence, you’re more likely to reach peak performance when body and mind are in tandem. This can be broken down into two approaches: top-down and bottom-up.

What are top-down and bottom-up approaches?

Top-down: Top-down approaches are skills and interventions that therapists and sport psychology consultants use to shift an individual’s mental and emotional processes - i.e. a person’s pattern of thought, their belief system, or the meanings and interpretations they have in response to what’s happening to them and around them. 

By identifying what mental and emotional processes are either helping or hurting the individual, and creating change when necessary, these interventions in turn have a positive impact on the individual’s physical well-being. 

In essence, the interventions work from the top (an individual’s mind) down to the bottom (a person’s body). Some examples of top-down approaches include increasing positive self-talk, reframing beliefs around failure, reducing stress or anxiety before an event or performance, and more.

Example: Using mental imagery to practice success in your next competition.

A sport psychology consultant or therapist might lead a client through a visualization exercise in which the client imagines themselves running a marathon. The client will begin by visualizing themselves at the start line, including how the air feels on their skin, how loud the cheering crowds are, how many people they can see around them, and other details of the event. The professional continues to guide the client through imaging the race, focusing on the athlete’s successes and perseverance through difficulty. By the end of the visualization, the athlete should feel determined, proud, and ready to run their next race.

Bottom-up: Bottom-up approaches are the opposite of top-down approaches - they focus on an individual’s body, nervous system, and overall physical experiences. 

By starting the focus on physical function and wellness, it can in turn have a positive impact on an individual’s mental state. 

Some examples of bottom-up interventions include mindful movement, progressive muscle relaxation to stimulate the release of physical tension, sauna and cold plunge use, getting “hyped” or increasing energy prior to an event or performance, and more. 

Example: Using progressive muscle relaxation to calm nerves before a performance

A sport psychology consultant or therapist might lead a client through an intervention called progressive muscle relaxation, in which tensing and releasing various muscle groups occurs in tandem with the client’s deep breathing. By starting with the facial muscles and moving all the way down to the muscles in a client’s feet, the client practices tensing every muscle group they can focus on, leading to an overall sense of physical heaviness and relaxation, as well as mental quiet and clarity. The client is able to begin their performance with a sense of calm and groundedness rather than jittery nerves.

While individuals may prefer to only use top-down approaches and others may prefer to only use bottom-up approaches, the truth is that many high performers, athletes and clients benefit from a combined approach. This means professionals work with them to both stabilize the body (bottom-up) and reframe the mindset (top-down), then integrate both into performance context.

If you only use top-down tools, but your nervous system is dysregulated (i.e. your body is tense, you’re anxious, you have a lot of fatigue), you may hit a ceiling in how helpful mental skills can be for your performance.

In turn, if you use only bottom-up tools but neglect mental and emotional processing, you may lack direction or meaning in your performance, leading to burnout.

How We Work at Health in Tandem

Our Services + Approach

At Health in Tandem, we bring together mental health therapy, performance psychology skills and body-based wellness modalities under one roof. Here are some of our offerings:

• Individual therapy sessions with licensed therapists who are trained in performance psychology principles and mind-body integration.

• Sport and Performance psychology workshops for teams in order to help teams build mental skills necessary to improve their physical performance

• Corporate Wellness workshops for corporate teams in order to improve employee wellness, team communication, and work-life balance, fostering a healthier and more productive workplace culture.

How a typical engagement might flow

1. Intake/assessment: We complete a full assessment of a client’s mental and physical history. Specifically, we look at a client’s mindset and mental-skills baseline, as well as their physical wellness and bottom-up toolkit (i.e. their readiness, recovery, nervous-system state, etc) through a performance context. By learning what “performance” means for the client, we set goals for the treatment.

2. Skill-training: Depending on the client’s starting point with both bottom-up and top-down skills, we spend time focusing on building their wellness “toolkit,” including focusing on increasing mental imagery, focus drills, self-talk, goal-setting, pre-performance routines.

3. Body-integration: This phase can happen simultaneously with the skills-training phase. We focus on bottom-up approaches, such as breathwork, mindful movement, somatic awareness, and recovery practices (biofeedback, cold plunge, sauna).

4. Application and integration: By putting the skills into the context of the client’s life, followed by reflecting and refining these skills as they occur, we continue to improve and hone the client’s mental skills, bringing the client closer to excelling in their mental and physical performance.

5. Maintenance and resilience: We build a sustainable system for performance and well-being through habit formation and consistent support. This helps clients to avoid burnout, shift between pushing for excellence and spending time in recovery, and regulating their nervous system for long-term well-being.

Considering what it might be like to engage in sport and performance psychology services, but still have some questions? See our frequently asked questions section below, or reach out to us at intake@healthintandem.com to learn more about how sport and performance skills could benefit you specifically, as well as learn about our current availability.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some common questions.

Q: Is sport, health, and performance psychology only for athletes?
A: No! Sport Psychology is an umbrella term used for numerous performance based activities. While rooted in athletic contexts, the skills can apply not only to athletes, but to individuals focused on their health and fitness goals, high performing workers, and creative performers (i.e. actors, musicians, artists, etc). Basically, sport, health, and performance psychology applies to anyone seeking to excel and perform (whatever that means for them). 

Q: I’m already in talk therapy—do I need this too?
A: Possibly. Sport psychology can be utilized in tandem with traditional talk therapy, or it can be incorporated into your talk therapy sessions if your therapist is familiar with sport psychology skills. Whether you’re in therapy or not, but you feel stuck with consistency, focus, readiness, or performance issues, sport psychology offers complementary skills. Conversely, if you’re drawn to movement, recovery, mental skills, but also hold relational or emotional issues, some therapists can weave performance psychology skills into your sessions so that you can focus on all of the mind-body goals you have for therapy. 

Q: What does “performance” mean for non-athletes?
A: It might mean showing up for work with clarity, managing stress with ease, recovering from challenges more swiftly, maintaining fitness or health goals, or thriving in adversity. Performance psychology helps you refine how you show up through goal setting, imagery, and values alignment.

Q: What is the difference between top-down and bottom-up approaches in this work?
A: Top-down approaches involve working with cognition, thoughts, beliefs, and mental skills. Bottom-up approaches involve body awareness, nervous system and arousal regulation, mindful movement and active recovery. It’s necessary to integrate both approaches because physical performance and mental wellness work in tandem!

Q: How do we measure progress?
A: We look at consistency, not perfection. Just as athletes track performance metrics (speed, strength, recovery time, etc), we track mental-skills growth and application, nervous-system regulation, ability to mentally focus and bounce back, feeling of confidence, and ability to remain focused.