Mental Fatigue in Collegiate Athletes: A Behavioral Science Review of Stress Appraisal, Competitive Anxiety, and Resilience-Related Regulation

Mental fatigue is an increasingly important concern among collegiate athletes whose academic–athletic roles require sustained cognitive effort, emotional regulation, and recovery across overlapping performance contexts. This structured narrative review synthesizes behavioral science, sport psychology, and athlete mental health literature to clarify how perceived stress, competitive anxiety, and psychological resilience may interact in the development and regulation of mental fatigue among collegiate athletes. Rather than treating mental fatigue as simple tiredness or an isolated performance symptom, this review conceptualizes it as a cognitive–emotional and psychobiological outcome shaped by stress appraisal, attentional load, effort regulation, and resource depletion. The main contribution of this review is to integrate previously separate lines of research into a collegiate-athlete-focused behavioral science framework in which perceived stress is positioned as an upstream appraisal-based condition, competitive anxiety as a proximal emotional mechanism, and psychological resilience as a dynamic regulatory resource that may buffer fatigue-related vulnerability. Tennis and Chinese/non-Western collegiate sport contexts are used as illustrative applications rather than exclusive empirical targets, highlighting how individual accountability, academic–athletic role demands, cultural expectations, and support structures may shape fatigue processes. This review also distinguishes established empirical evidence from theoretical inference and identifies key gaps in measurement heterogeneity, methodological transparency, longitudinal evidence, and culturally diverse collegiate athlete research. By refining the stress–anxiety–fatigue pathway and identifying resilience, recovery, and contextual support as important regulatory factors, this review provides a conceptual foundation for future empirical testing and for more targeted behavioral interventions to support collegiate athlete well-being and performance sustainability.