Sports Performance Therapy in Eagan

If you are looking for personalized sports performance therapy in Eagan, or throughout Minnesota, I can help

Therapy for Athlete Burnout

Are you an athlete who’s feeling burnt out, anxious, or unfulfilled by your sport?
Have you experienced a setback or injury that has changed your relationship to your athletic performance?
Or does it just feel like you’ve lost your love of the game?

Athlete burnout can feel overwhelming. You might be wondering, “where do I even start?” As athletes, the relationship we have with our sport will evolve over time. We can feel deeply passionate and invested at certain points of our athletic careers—and then suddenly experience injuries, stressors, toxic team dynamics, or self-doubt that make us question our abilities. In many instances, these feelings affect our athletic performance in the moment, leading to freezing up and negative self-talk. If any of this sounds familiar to you, I understand the dread or panic you feel about a sport you once loved.

Especially if there is pressure on you to keep training or striving toward a specific goal when you just want to pause and cool down, you may feel like you have no other option than to overtrain, people-please, and push far past your limits.

As a therapist who views stress and anxiety through the lens of perfectionism, sports performance and psychology are some of my specializations. My work with athletes in counseling involves learning how to overcome an anxious, negative inner dialogue while developing a connection to a sport that makes sense for your life.

Have a question or want to schedule a session? Reach out

Athlete Anxiety: The Hidden Struggle

Athlete anxiety can appear at any time, any place. No matter if you’re sprinting toward the finish line, going for the goal, you’ve all heard it before: just keep pushing. And while this mentality can be very useful from time to time, it’s easy to become the dominant narrative. When it does, the cycle of perfectionism and burnout becomes inevitable.

Yet as athletes, we’re not trained to admit we’re struggling—we’re trained to push past our limits. Blaming ourselves often seems easier than slowing down, asking for help, and getting to the real root of the problem.

The reality is that you are more than just an athlete; you are a whole, complex person with emotions and needs. Underneath your fears and worries are meaningful human experiences that likely need to be processed, and you deserve support in your healing.

Therapy offers you a space to explore your athletic anxiety, the psychology behind your sports performance, and how other stressors may be factoring into your challenges. Working together, we can enhance your skills and mindset so that you can get what you want out of your sport—and out of your life.

Sports Performance Therapy: Tailored to Your Needs and Experience

Sports performance therapy can be what you want it to be. It can be a place where you receive validation, process your emotions, learn about sports psychology, and explore the patterns behind your athletic challenges. My services are available to adults, as well as teens 16 and older.

What To Expect

A major aspect of sports performance therapy involves improving your psychology by giving you the tools you need to regulate your emotions and enhance your mindset for game time. Especially if you have trauma around a specific athletic incident, we will work on targeting the negative self-talk that has developed.

And while our work together will center around skills building and sports-specific objectives, my role as a therapist is to help you overcome challenges not just related to your athletic identity, but to your identity as a person. The knowledge you gain from therapy is likely to extend off the field or the court and into every area of your life.

Some of the approaches I use in counseling for sports psychology are Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), which you can read more about on my Therapy for Perfectionism page. These modalities are uniquely designed to help regulate the nervous system and challenge unhelpful thought patterns.

You may believe you can think your way out of your performance anxiety, but therapy goes beyond the thinking part of the brain so that you can meaningfully change your relationship with your sport. It’s possible to strike a balance between the intensity that is needed to meet your goals and the self-compassion required to create the mindset and life that you want.

Frequently Asked Questions About Therapy For Sport Psychology

How can sport performance therapy sessions help me?

My treatment approach works to build a strong therapeutic relationship quickly while also processing the stress and emotion behind your performance challenges. Once I have an idea of what’s impacting your psychology around your specific sport, we can devote early counseling sessions to bolstering concrete skills to manage acute anxiety.

What is different about my approach is I also use a therapy called EMDR, or Eye Movement Desentization and Reprocessing, which can help find the root of your performance issues and resolve negative thinking patterns.

What issues can sports performance help with?

Sports Performance Therapy can help with a variety of issues:

Managing fear or other emotions around injury
Freezing during competition
Burnout
Managing identity crises
How to balance sports with other responsibilities

What does a sports performance therapy session look like?

We will begin by assessing what your particular situation looks like and where you are having some struggles. It’s not easy to admit you’re wanting support! I use skills from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy , which helps you tolerate distress and learn to rearrange things in your life to match what YOU want out of it. And discuss what led you to your sport to help you reconnect with what you love.

Then, if there are some lingering negative beliefs or upsetting incidents that are leading to some frustration or negative feelings toward your sport, we can resolve that too – using a specialized therapy called EMDR.

Get Back In The Game with Sports Performance Therapy online and in person in Minnesota

My counseling practice specializes in addressing challenges related to perfectionism, including working with athletes who may be struggling with performance anxiety and other aspects of their sports performance. For more information, contact me.