Coping with the COVID-19 pandemic had implications for athletes’ mental well-being. This mixed-methods study examined the influence of self-compassion on athletes’ coping during the pandemic through the mediator of cognitive appraisal. The prospective design involved 90 athletes completing two online surveys 1 week apart measuring self-compassion, cognitive appraisal, and coping strategies. The PROCESS macro was used for the mediation analysis. A qualitative thematic analysis was used to explore athletes’ responses to the pandemic during the second survey. Self-compassion had an indirect negative effect on avoidance-focused coping by appraising the pandemic as less of a threat (95% confidence interval [−0.20, −0.001]) and had a total effect on emotion-focused coping (95% confidence interval [0.02, 0.40]). Based on the thematic analysis, athletes described many raw emotions and a variety of coping strategies during the pandemic. Self-compassion demonstrated promising benefits to athletes who dealt with the challenging situation of the pandemic.

应对 COVID-19 大流行对运动员的心理健康产生了影响。这项混合方法的研究通过认知评估的中介作用，检验了自我同情对运动员在大流行期间应对的影响。前瞻性设计涉及 90 名运动员，他们间隔 1 周完成两项在线调查，测量自我慈悲、认知评估和应对策略。PROCESS 宏用于中介分析。在第二次调查中，采用定性主题分析来探讨运动员对这一流行病的反应。自我同情通过将流行病评估为威胁较小，对以回避为中心的应对方式产生间接负面影响（95％置信区间[−0.20，−0.001]），并对以情绪为中心的应对方式产生总体影响（95％置信区间） [0.02，0.40]）。根据主题分析，运动员描述了大流行期间的许多原始情绪和各种应对策略。事实证明，自我同情对于应对疫情这一挑战的运动员来说有很大的好处。