Exercise identity and psychological distress among university sport participants: the roles of self-compassion and training stress

Abstract

University sport participation is often assumed to protect mental health, yet sport can also become an identity-relevant source of pressure. This cross-sectional study examined whether exercise identity was associated with anxiety and depressive symptoms among university sport participants, and whether self-compassion and perceived training stress clarified this association. A one-wave online questionnaire yielded 363 eligible participants after consent, eligibility, and attention-check screening. Exercise identity was positively associated with anxiety and depression, whereas self-compassion was inversely associated with both outcomes and training stress was positively associated with both outcomes. In adjusted complete-case models ( n = 209), self-compassion showed the most consistent inverse association with symptoms, and this association was stronger under higher perceived training stress. Conditional indirect associations were evident at mean and high training stress. However, sensitivity analyses in the full core-variable sample did not reproduce the exercise identity to self-compassion association, the interaction pattern, or the conditional indirect estimates. These findings challenge a uniformly protective view of sport identity and identify self-compassion and training stress as relevant psychological correlates of distress in university sport contexts. Because the data are cross-sectional and partly complete-case dependent, the conditional indirect model should be interpreted as exploratory.