Mental health awareness has been rising in the past decades and more and more people are realizing that they need to take care of their mental health if they want to live the best life they could possibly have.
With that said, scientists have done a lot of research to learn more about how a person can keep their mental state healthy and positive.
The question becomes, Can soccer contribute to the factors that keep a person’s mental health in good shape? Yes it can.
Soccer has a tremendous amount of mental health benefits on any person. Soccer can help you connect with other people, it can increase your physical activity, it can help you acquire new skills and abilities, and it forces you to live in the moment. All these gifts from soccer can positively contribute to a person’s mental wellbeing.
To learn more about how soccer can help cure a person’s mental health issues, we need to learn more about what a person should do to take care of their mental health.
According to the National Health Service(NHS) of the UK, the following 5 steps can help a person maintain mental wellbeing.
- Connect with people
- Be active physically
- Acquire new talents and skills
- Be kind to others and give to others
- Live in the present moment
So we now know that these 5 actions can help a person improve their mental health. Guess what, soccer can allow you to practice all of these 5 actions on a regular basis.
Soccer helps you connect with other people.
As you may already know, soccer is a group sport. In order to play soccer, you need to connect with other people.
Soccer is a great way to interact with old friends. It is also a great way to make new friends and create new connections and bonds with people.
Personally, I have made a lot of friends because of soccer. Whenever I visit the beach and find a bunch of people of my age playing soccer, I ask if I can join them. The answer was yes most of the times I asked.
Some of the people that I played with on the beach are now my best friends.
It is also worth noting that whenever you want to play a soccer match with your friends, you’ll have to communicate with them in order to come up with a plan to beat your opponent. You’ll also have to communicate with them while you’re on the field.
These forms of communication can help you strengthen your relationship with your friends and create stronger connections with them.
Soccer requires that you engage your physical body
Soccer is a physical sport. Soccer isn’t a violent sport and it requires a lot of physical effort from the players. This is a perfect combination for anyone who wants to workout.
If you want to play soccer as an attacker or a midfielder, prepare yourself to keep running during the whole match.
If you want to play as a defender, prepare yourself to be sprinting towards your opponents and sliding to take the ball from them.
If you want to play as a goalkeeper, prepare yourself to do crazy jumps in order to prevent the ball from going inside your team’s net.
As a soccer player, you need to run, jump, slide, sprint, kick, rotate and so much more in order to be a good player.
All of these physical activities are a great way to improve both your mental health and your physical health.
Soccer helps you learn a lot of new skills.
If you know a lot about soccer, then you already know that to be a good soccer player requires that you gain a variety of skills.
A good soccer player needs to gain huge skills in keeping their balance. When you play soccer, you need to keep your balance when you run shoulder to shoulder with your opponent, when you jump to hit the ball with your head, and when you kick the ball.
There are so many actions in soccer that require you to keep your balance, which helps you learn a new skill.
If you want to become a good soccer player, you’ll need to learn how to do the following:
- Keep your balance when jumping, running and kicking
- Aim and kick a ball to hit a very small target
- Take quick decisions on the field
- Hit the ball with your head and launch it towards a small target
- Take the ball from an opponent
- Jump and block the ball from reaching your goal
- Stand in the right position at the right time when you do not have the ball
These are some of the skills that you learn when you play soccer on a regular basis. With that said, soccer can help you learn new skills which in turn helps your mental health situation.
Soccer allows you to be kind to others.
Soccer isn’t just about kicking the ball and scoring a goal. It’s about being respectful and kind with your teammates and your opponents.
When you’re very close to the goal to the point that you can easily score a goal, but you decide to pass the ball to your friend to allow them to score the goal instead, then that’s a great act of kindness.
When your opponent falls down during a match, but instead of keeping the game on, you throw the ball outside of the soccer field and run towards your opponent to check if they’re okay, then that’s another great act of kindness.
When you acknowledge your friend’s talent if they score a great ball or block a potential goal against your team, then that’s a great act of kindness towards your friends.
When you cheer up your friend if they miss a great chance to score or if they mess up while blocking the ball, then you’re helping them overcome their mistakes during the match and that’s a great act of kindness too.
What I am trying to say here is that soccer allows you to be kind. Being kind to others and seeing the smile on their faces can turn your mood 180 degrees and it can help you overcome any mental issues that you are going through.
Soccer helps you live in the current moment.
If there’s one thing that you can think of when playing a soccer match, it’s how you can win the game. That’s it.
When the soccer match starts, you disconnect yourself from the world around you and focus on the game itself.
If you’re a defender, you only focus on the ball and try to prevent it from reaching your goal. If you’re an attacker, then all of what you need to focus on is your opponent’s goal, and so on.
The point here is that whenever you’re in a soccer match, you forget about all your troubles, all of your irrelevant responsibilities, all of your fears, and you only focus on one thing and that’s winning the current game. Everything else becomes meaningless.
Thus, soccer gives you the chance to pay attention to the present moment and live every second of it to the fullest. And as mentioned at the beginning of this article, such an experience can help your mental health by a lot.
With that said, I’d like to end this article by encouraging every reader to go and learn more about soccer right now. Go play soccer whenever you get the chance to do so, and make sure that you have fun while doing so.
To summarize
Soccer is a great way to improve a person’s mental health. It can help them make new friends, live in the moment, give to others, learn new skills, move their body and so much more.