What Sports Does To Your Mind
One of the reasons everyone should watch and participate in sports is that it demonstrates why one must always cultivate hope. Why one should never give up. If you keep your willpower intact and keep pushing beyond your limits, further than you believe you are capable of, you can make history. You can reach a point you never thought possible.
This is what sports does to the mind. It reprograms it into believing in the impossible. When you are taking a leap of faith, you need immense belief, to the point of delusion. You refuse to entertain any and all negative thoughts. And so you need to know what it is like to visualise only success, what it is like to push yourself past the boundaries of your comfort zone. What it is like to conquer the extremities.
Most people have grown too rational and therefore too soft. The competitive spirit has vanished from their hearts. For them it is acceptable to lose and insignificant to win. They may not be entirely wrong, but winning is not an event. It is a habit, an attitude you cultivate, and sports helps you inculcate exactly that.
Even video games carry a similar effect on the mind. They make us competitive, and the never-give-up spirit only sharpens with time. So if you are feeling low, if you feel you are not good enough, you need to introduce some conquests into your life. You need to go through the lived experience of winning.
That is why progressive overload in the gym so often does wonders. It gives you the feeling of winning, of conquering weakness, of accumulating strength. Before you feel it in your muscles, you feel it in the mind. Refusing to quit when you are exhausted and pushing through for just one more rep transforms you. Beyond sports, the gym is the most accessible arena for developing the spirit of never giving up.
Play sports whenever possible. It is one of the surest ways to overcome your weaknesses. It is a quiet tragedy to go through life never knowing that you could have become the strongest version of yourself, physically as well as mentally.