Is Stress a Foe or Friend? Mindset Matters for Effective Stress Coping and Distress Levels

Eur J Sport Sci. 2026 Aug;26(8):e70221. doi: 10.1002/ejsc.70221.

ABSTRACT

Athletes continuously face stressful situations while pursuing their athletic goals. Thus, stress management plays a pivotal role in their athletic endeavor. While the subjective belief about stress (stress mindset) has substantial effects on their mental health, the understanding of stress mindset is limited in sports psychology, and further, the understanding of stress in sports settings is incomplete, with a lack of consideration that effective stress coping is exercised by “correctly” responding to the demands of the situations. To fill in these gaps, we conducted two studies. In a pilot study, we collected stressful situations for varsity athletes through situation sampling methods. As a result, 17 stressful situations were identified. By utilizing these 17 stressful situations, we conducted multilevel mediation analysis to examine the relationship between stress mindset, perception of coping effectiveness, and distress levels. Also, to examine whether and how the degree to which athletes utilize stress coping they ideally want to utilize contributes to the perception of coping effectiveness, we conducted multilevel response surface analysis. The results showed that the perception of coping effectiveness partially mediated the relationship between stress mindset and distress level. Furthermore, the results in response surface analysis showed that the degree of matching between ideal and actual stress coping contributes to the perception of coping effectiveness. The current study demonstrated the protective factor of positive stress belief on distress levels. Also, we revealed that athletes feel that they are effectively managing stress when there is minimal discrepancy between ideal and actual stress coping strategies.

PMID:42432777 | DOI:10.1002/ejsc.70221