The expanse of evidence for the positive health benefits of doing physical exercise is so prominent and redundant that it can sometimes be considered obvious, common knowledge. For instance, a review published in The Canadian Medical Association Journal, which analyzed 152 other studies and reviews, featuring an extensive number of participants in each study (ranging from 487 to 121,701 participants) provided evidence for increases in life expectancy and longevity, cardiovascular health, reduced cancer risks, and bone health.
Because of the variety of benefits of physical activity, the physical purpose of increasing health through sport may be obvious. However, often athletes do not prioritize their need for healthier lives as their core motivation and reasoning for playing the sport, leaving a gap in the understanding psychological values of playing a sport. This raises questions such as how is the mind enhanced when playing sports? Why are athletes so drawn to playing sports? Why are sports meaningful? What is the purpose of playing sports?
This article blends an objective, physiological analysis of the brain during playing a sport with a more subjective, logical interpretation of the importance of the psychological value of sports.
Brain Functioning
The first data point that demonstrates the importance of sport is that physical movement – the intricate coordination in the body – and vision – defining a target and looking for cues – account for most of the neurons in the human brain. Therefore, when playing a sport, the athlete is exploiting the maximal amount of regions in the brain.
Andrew Huberman, a Professor of Neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine describes the expanse of movement and vision in the brain:
“The whole reason for having a brain is so that we can control our movements in very dedicated ways. That is one of the reasons, perhaps the predominant reason, why the human brain is so large… when you look at the amount of real estate [space] in the brain that’s devoted to different aspects of life,” including creativity or thinking, “it’s mainly vision, our ability to see, and movement, our ability to engage in lots of different kinds of movements: slow movements, fast movements, explosive, et cetera.”
This ideology is based on the pioneering analysis of Charles Sherrington, a Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist in the 1900s, calling movement the “final common path” because the purpose of the brain is to generate complex movement that cannot be seen in other species of animals.
Play and stress reduction
Furthermore, sports involve the processes of play and stress reduction in the brain, which act as psychological tools for athletes for increased mood and state of mental well-being. By increasing learning and cognition, play is a form of experimenting and implementing creativity that is capitalized on in sports (read more about play). Stress reduction is also driven by the neurochemical state that is associated with doing physical activity. Neuroscientist and psychologist Alicia Garcia-Falgueras in the peer-reviewed British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science evaluates that athletes release endogenous opioids after an intense bout of physical exercise, which is linked with feelings of euphoria. Likewise, Serotonin a “neurotransmitter of the central nervous system associated with mood changes and antidepressive effects, is increased after physical exercise.”
Increase in energy
Andrew Huberman further notes that intense physical activity, especially that done in sports increases dopamine and adrenaline levels, which drive alertness. This can be linked with a psychological form of energy that is related to excitement, readiness, and willingness to move. While many people obsess over caloric energy as fuel because it is the unit that gets used up in the body, fueling the body with a lot of food does not necessarily mean increasing this readiness and alertness. For instance, if one eats and digests a big meal before a sporting event it may result in lethargy and neural energy taken away to process the food in the body.
However, because working out by doing moderately hard, intense work can inspire energy in the form of alertness, it is a fundamental and reliable way to increase energy and excitement in the body. Jocko Willink, a former United States Navy Officer, motivational speaker, and public figure of discipline, and energy describes his daily routine in which he does daily morning exercise that break a sweat, leading to more energy and motivation throughout the day. The reason why individuals would feel more tired is if they were tired before even starting the workout, not having adequate sleep or nutrition, not being fit or overworking to a “psycho” degree, which are variables that can undermine physical exercise, but cannot disregard the physical excitation and energy increases in a short bout of intense work. Nevertheless, Huberman supports this Willink’s ideology with his personal experience of increased mood after exercise and the connection to the neurochemical state: “movement and exercise give us energy.”
The value of precision and the ethic of admiration
Aside from the concrete neurochemical enhancements during playing sports, Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist for over 30 years proposes the meaning of sports at the level of intrinsic values and behavioral psychology that can be linked with primitive human behaviors.
Essentially, a sport is an arbitrary manifestation of the ancient evolutionary fulfillment of specifying a precise target, hitting it accurately, and arranging ourselves into groups to do that. But why would anyone bother with putting a ball through a hoop when that mere physical action seems pointless? Well, because scoring is “symbolic of hitting a target properly in your life.”
This is because the game specifies the value of hitting the target, the value of scoring, which then gives you a value that you can pursue such as to become more skillful and win the game, “but there’s something about that that’s even more important, which is the ethic that comes out of the proper way of conducting yourself while you’re pursuing things of value.”
“What you’re trying to do while you’re playing these games and practicing hitting the precise target properly with your high level of skill is to conduct yourself in the most admirable possible way while you’re doing that.”
Therefore, the real psychological engagement in playing the sport is the responsibility of fulfillment of this ethic as taking your role in society as someone “who plays properly” and admirably, which gives everybody else a lens of perception of who you are. Moreover, “the real winning isn’t whether or not you win or lose the game. The real winning is how you play while you’re winning or losing the game.”
“The point isn’t to get the damn ball through the hoop; the point is to be the best possible player…” And what qualifies the best possible player is not just the skill and quality of accuracy or precision, but how admirably they represent themselves. This then reflects their team, the sport, and society’s value of participating in the game.
This presents the ideology that the point of sport has nothing to do with the sport itself, but rather the pathway that the sport manifests for the athlete to express themselves in a way that is meaningful in society. This common feature of the necessity of skill and precision has been exercised as a valuable attainment in society throughout all human experience, with more primitive means such as hunting and craftsmanship to contemporary activities such as sports, mathematics, engineering, science, and art.
The meaning of sports expands beyond the physical aspect of the behavior. Psychological measures of the purpose of the brain, play and stress reduction, energy increase, and the societal values of precision and admiration are key to understanding the deep motivation of pursuing a sport. The motivation that guides athletes may be subjective and personal, but the universal meaning of sport can appear under similar psychological principles.
