Question 1

How could practicing mindfulness lead to better sports performances?

Keith Kaufman · Accepted Answer

As our colleague Peter Haberl from the U.S. Olympic Committee has said, “attention is the currency of performance.” Attention is limited and precious, and what we choose to focus on in a given moment goes a long way toward determining our effectiveness in any endeavor - in sports or otherwise. Mindfulness, at least as we think about it in Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement (MSPE), involves paying attention in a particular way that can promote optimal focus on the task at hand, without allowing the mind to be hijacked by the compelling, but often unhelpful thoughts and emotions that can arise and distract in performance situations (such as “what if I fail?”).

Gordhamer (2014) suggested that the “benefits of mindfulness practice as applied to sports are almost blindingly obvious. Focus, awareness, clarity of thought, and the ability to stay in the present moment are basic skills for any great athlete – and meditator.” Birrer and colleagues (2012) have discussed a number of factors like anxiety and fear of failure that can undermine athletic performance, and suggest nine components and factors of mindfulness that can play a role in fostering peak performance (including attention, acceptance and non-judgment, emotion regulation, exposure and willingness to endure uncomfortable physical states, non-attachment of happiness to outcomes and less rumination). In addition, a growing body of neuroimaging research has shown that mindfulness training may enhance areas of the brain that govern attention and emotion-regulation, which, as Marks (2008) notes, are “skills that allow for effective athletic training and make peak performance possible."

In a program like MSPE, athletes learn how to observe and relate to their mental events in a nonjudgmental way that facilitates connection, harmony, and absorption in a task. The core components of awareness and acceptance inherent in mindfulness may help lead to highly desirable performance states like flow or being “in the zone.” We describe a proposed model for how this process works in our book, Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement: Mental Training for Athletes and Coaches.

Question 2

What common problems do athletes experience on a psychological level and how can MSPE help?

Keith Kaufman · Accepted Answer

At least in my experience as a clinical sport psychologist, performance anxiety is one of the most common disruptive, daunting, and unpleasant psychological states that athletes can face. I sometimes equate the ruminative "what iffing” that can occur to tires spinning in the mud - the mind is generating and spending a lot of energy, but ultimately, the athlete isn’t making any progress toward controlling the situation.

It is important to note that MSPE is not psychotherapy, and is not intended as a treatment for “psychological problems.” Rather, it is a mental training program that can help athletes become more aware of and able to work with their minds to facilitate optimal performances and experiences within (and outside of) their sport. For example, MSPE participants can come to understand performance anxiety as a natural occurrence before and/or during high-pressure events, and that there is a way of relating to it more mindfully (that is, non-judgmentally, with greater acceptance), which can allow for letting go of, rather than getting trapped in or taken over by, the associated symptoms (such as “spinning in the mud”).

Research on MSPE has shown statistically significant decreases in sport anxiety, and program evaluations and interviews also typically reveal a number of participants who speak about being better able to deal with performance anxiety afterwards. Because the program takes a holistic focus, it is notable that athletes also report that mindfulness training helps with emotion regulation and coping with stress in their daily lives, including anxiety that can be aroused in academic situations.

Question 3

What does the “win or lose” nature of many sports do to athletes?

Keith Kaufman · Accepted Answer

Sport participation is complicated, and there are many ways to understand and assess what happens in a particular performance. Reducing our assessment to “win or lose” creates a dramatically oversimplified and reductive dichotomy that puts an unnatural amount of pressure on everyone involved (athletes, coaches, support staff, families, fans and more).

Naturally, winning is desirable and important, and we don’t endeavor to minimize its desirability or importance in MSPE. Rather, MSPE emphasizes the value of non-striving. That is, allowing events to be what and where they are and to unfold over time toward the outcome, which can maximize the sense of control and minimize the pressure felt by a performer. Athletes, like most people, prefer to feel a sense of control, and in particular want to control the outcomes that are most important to them. Winning or losing is an outcome - it only happens at the end of an event, once it is dead, done, over. But the reality is, no athletes can control that particular outcome, as there are too many variables involved for a single participant’s training, commitment, determination, or will to guarantee a win (in fact, any time we can guarantee a win in sport we understand that the game is “fixed” and we're no longer actually competing). There is great power and influence available, however, when focusing on what is happening while it is happening (for example, by adjusting a stride length, a throwing motion, a breath pattern), which, of course, are the essential ingredients that contribute to an outcome like winning.

Paying attention this way, to the present moment in a meaningful high-pressure situation, can be incredibly difficult. Many athletes want to win (or not lose) so badly that they become highly vigilant of signs along the way that might predict the eventual outcome – which only serves to pull their attention toward the future, and away from what is currently controllable and helpful. This is why mindfulness training programs like MSPE are so unique and important. They provide systematic training that can allow athletes to resist that pull, and instead empower them to choose to focus on the step they’re at. Maximizing that step - and each subsequent one as it arises - is ultimately what raises the odds of winning. This is a much more complicated but authentic reality for athletes to embrace.

Question 4

How is mindfulness in motion distinct from sedentary practice?

Tim Pineau · Accepted Answer

It is and it isn’t. When we’re talking about formal mindfulness practice (such as meditation), the task at hand is simply to anchor attention in the present moment and continually return attention to that anchor when noticing the mind has wandered. This process can happen if your anchor is the breath while sitting still, or the sensations in your feet as you walk. In this sense, the only distinction between mindfulness in motion and sedentary practice is the motion itself. But in some ways, that’s an oversimplification.

A common recommendation for anyone starting a meditation practice is to begin with optimal conditions, which means choosing a location and a posture (such as sitting still in a quiet room) that will minimize the stimuli that pull on our attention. This starting point makes perfect sense as we consider the parallel to physical training. If an athlete shows up to join the track team wanting to run the 400m hurdles and they’ve never run a day in their life, they won’t be jumping over any hurdles their first day of practice. They initially need to establish the fundamentals of running, then jumping while running, while also working on the flexibility and mobility required to get over a hurdle – and of course the stamina and endurance required to sprint for 400m. All of these capacities come together in the final integrated performance, but a lot of discrete training needed to take place first.

So sedentary practice can be considered “the fundamentals,” and mindfulness in motion a more complex application of those fundamentals. Consider the rationale for mindfulness-based attentional training. Our brains spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about the future or the past. Evolutionarily this can be helpful, as we recall past experiences to make (hopefully) more accurate predications about the future. But we have limited attentional resources, so any bandwidth we devote to the past or the future leaves fewer resources for the present. However, when one’s concern is the optimization of performance in a specific instance and not long-term survival, we are far better off spending that attention on what’s most crucial in the here and now.

Our brains are not accustomed to focusing in this way, so we need to train them to be able to let go of the distractions that can pull us out of the present moment. Similar to any other form of training, you start light and simple and then add load and complexity. So at first, we minimize distraction as much as possible, and then as we enhance this capacity of letting go of distraction and returning our attention to the present-moment task at hand (our mindfulness reps), we can add weight to the bar, so to speak, and invite in more distracting stimuli (like those that occur with movement).

There is another factor that we emphasize in Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement (MSPE) that distinguishes sedentary from motive practices, namely that motive mindfulness practice more closely mirrors the actual lived experiences in which we could benefit from being more mindful. It’s important to note here that formal mindfulness practice such as meditation is different than being/living mindfully – the former is training for the latter. Thus, for performance enhancement purposes, mindfulness in motion also serves as an important bridge between formal practice and being mindful during an actual performance.

Question 5

How do athletes practice mindfulness when engaged in fast-moving contact sports such as football and ice hockey?

Tim Pineau · Accepted Answer

It’s important to draw a distinction between practicing mindfulness (meditating) while performing a sport and mindfully performing a sport. In our program, Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement (MSPE), we build up to a sport-specific meditation that uses core skills of a sport as anchors for attention. This is an example of meditating while performing a sport, and is included in our program as an important bridge between the mindful awareness trained in other meditations (a breathing meditation) and applying mindfulness in the highly charged, chaotic domain of competition.

We propose that this gradual build up to a sport meditation is important because the types of judgments and attachments that mindfulness training helps us to let go of tend to be stronger when they are in reference to something that is closely tied to our identity. So the kinds of judgments and attachments that may come up when we’re sitting in a quiet room watching our breath are likely to be very different (and less intense) than the judgments and attachments that come up when we observe ourselves performing a sport we strongly identify with (and the outcome of which we care deeply about). In MSPE, we feel it’s important to encounter these inevitable reactions in the context of a formal meditation to provide an explicit training ground for the practice of letting them go, but we do not encourage athletes to meditate while they are competing. We want to enable athletes to perform mindfully, and repeating discrete sessions of practicing mindfulness while performing (the sport meditation) is just one aspect of the mental training program that facilities mindful performance.

To more directly answer the question, the “how” for fast-moving sports is essentially the same as for self-paced sports in that athletes intentionally anchor their attention to task-relevant stimuli with an open and non-judgmental attitude, and continue to return their attention to those stimuli whenever they notice their attention wandering. Of course, it may feel more challenging in a fast-moving sport because there are more stimuli calling for our attention, and not all of them are going to be task-relevant. A recent review by Brams et al. (2019) found consistent research support for the information-reduction hypothesis to explain the connection between perceptual-cognitive skills and expert performance. This hypothesis proposes that experts (which would include highly trained athletes) produce expert performance by selectively allocating their attentional resources to task-relevant stimuli while ignoring irrelevant stimuli. Importantly, this is precisely one of the things mindfulness-based programs like MSPE train athletes to do, as choosing where to put their focus without attention being pulled away by distraction is practically the definition of performing mindfully. And learning how to do this is the same as learning how to do anything – practice, practice, practice.

But that, of course, is a terribly unsatisfying answer, though only because it doesn’t address the whole question. Really, in order to understand how to be mindful in the specific context of a fast-moving sport, we also need to know what are the task-relevant stimuli in that specific context. That, of course, will depend on the sport. For instance, a recent study by Lin and colleagues (2021) compared expert and novice tennis players to help determine the specific stimuli that experts attend to when receiving a forehand or backhand shot, which could have implications for the specific anchors that mindfulness-based tennis training programs would use. In addition to looking for this kind of empirical evidence for specific sports, I also want to suggest some general guidelines for how to think about this in fast-moving, interactive sports.

In particular, I want to highlight one of the MSPE performance facilitators (that is, the performance-related capacities that are trained through mindfulness): establishing a sense of harmony and rhythm. This performance facilitator is based, in part, on the long history in the sport psychology literature connecting superior performance with rhythm (Hanley, 1937). All sports involve coordination, which can be assessed on three levels: (1) intrapersonal coordination, or the degree to which our muscles work in concert (such as the sequential muscle activation required to throw a ball); (2) interpersonal coordination, referring to the interactions between athletes (such as throwing a ball to another athlete who then catches it); and (3) extrapersonal coordination, or the interactions athletes have with the environment (such as adjusting one’s throwing to adapt to very windy conditions). In fast-moving, interactive sports like ice hockey or American football (or football/soccer, for that matter), practicing mindfulness (creating a sport meditation) could involve going through each level of coordination and determining task-relevant stimuli to act as anchors for a formal practice. With this explicit training, athletes would then be in a better position to tune in to the different levels of coordination with a non-judgmental awareness while they are competing, allowing them to experience the harmony and rhythm typically associated with optimal performance.

Question 6

Can MPSE be applied to non-sporting practices such as the performing arts?

Carol Glass · Accepted Answer

Yes! Many sport psychologists and mental performance consultants consider themselves to be “performance specialists,” dealing with the mental components of the pursuit of excellence in a wide range of domains – and work not only with athletes but with performing artists (such as dancers, musicians, and actors), business executives, and people in high-risk professions.

Both athletes and performing artists devote years to training and experience similar pressures to perform, demanding practice, rigorous competition, performance anxiety, emotion dysregulation, body-image issues, pain, and the risk of career-ending injury. On the suggestion of our editor at American Psychological Association Publishing, we included a chapter on “Performance Applications Beyond Sport” in Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement: Mental Training for Athletes and Coaches, considering how mindfulness-based interventions like MSPE that were designed to enhance peak performance in sport may also be useful when working with musicians, dancers and actors.

MSPE was designed to be customizable for any sport, so similar adaptations can be made when working with performing artists. For instance, the rationale for mindfulness training presented in the first session can be tailored to include different career-relevant examples, such as identifying well-known musicians or actors who meditate, or using an audition as the hypothetical context to highlight mindfulness concepts. The final MSPE “sport” meditation could instead apply mindfulness skills to core aspects of performance in other domains, such as anchoring attention on the movement of the bow for a string musician. And, just as having the coach on board can be crucial to MSPE success, having the support of teachers and directors (ideally including them in the training too) will convey the message that learning mindfulness is to be taken seriously, and will facilitate the integration of mindfulness-based mental training into regular practice/training/rehearsal routines.

The potential transferability of MSPE to the performing arts could include: (1) training in present-moment awareness while performing, perhaps focusing attention initially while doing something very slowly (for example, playing or singing a single note, mindful moving) before increasing in speed; (2) accepting “what is” and letting go of mistakes without judgment, then refocusing on their performance; (3) formal meditation exercises (mindfulness of the breath, body scan) to practice noticing and non-judgmentally letting go of feelings and thoughts, seeing them as fleeting events and refocusing attention; (4) customizing other exercises for specific performers (such as a body scan that emphasizes awareness of the regions of the body used in singing, using a simple choreography routine rather than walking as a movement-based meditation); and (5) a focus on process rather than outcome, shifting from needing to make things happen while practicing or performing (thinking about the future - outcome orientation) to observing events as they unfold and responding to what is happening rather than what we wish to or are afraid to have happen (thinking in the present - process orientation). Mindfulness may thus be a particularly effective way to cope with performance anxiety, without attempting to perform as you “should” or to control feelings of anxiety.

Although most applications of mindfulness in the performing arts have been in the field of music, some exciting work has recently been done with actors, who can benefit from being able to access and release emotions. Dr Jacob Jensen, associate professor of kinesiology at California State University Northridge, has specifically adapted MSPE for working with this population. In a recent podcast interview on our Mindful Sport Performance podcast, Dr Jensen shared how acceptance can help actors stay present in the moment and not judge their performance, and bounce back from countless audition rejections. He suggests asking actors to practice mindfulness exercises both as themselves and also as the character they'll be playing, or do a walking meditation while they work on learning lines of dialogue to help them focus on and absorb the material better. Just as mindfulness can help athletes who suffer from the “yips,” Jensen finds similar benefits for actors who repeatedly freeze up, reducing self-judgment and helping them to stay calmer and more present.

Question 7

What is involved in the Mindful Sports Performance Enhancement (MSPE) program?

Carol Glass · Accepted Answer

Athletes and coaches know that peak sport performance is about more than just physical skills. There also is a critical psychological component, which encompasses attributes such as awareness, focus, emotion regulation, and motivation. As baseball great Yogi Berra famously said, “baseball is 90% mental. The other half is physical.”

Rooted in the traditions of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement (MSPE) is an empirically supported, six-session mental training program that can be adapted for any sport, as well as other high-pressure performance domains (such as performing arts and business). Each MSPE session includes educational, experiential, and discussion components as well as recommendations for home practice – with a special emphasis on incorporating mindfulness into everyday life as well as workouts, sport practice, and competitions. MSPE begins with sedentary exercises (such as mindful eating and breathing, and body scan) and progresses to increasingly motive practices like mindful yoga and walking.

MSPE culminates in a unique sport-specific meditation that allows athletes to apply mindfulness skills directly to core movements in their sport, such as a mindful passing exercise for lacrosse players or a mindful “rondo” drill with soccer teams. The key component of this practice is to collaboratively develop various physical anchors to which athletes can return their attention, like the feeling of the ball in their hands or their feet on the ground, or the sensations associated with passing and receiving the ball. Notably, this exercise is about engaging in a sport task with a mindful style of attention, not managing or refining form or technique.

For more information, our 2018 book Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement: Mental Training for Athletes and Coaches (published by the American Psychological Association) describes the complete MSPE protocol, along with the underlying science and best practices for delivery. The book’s companion website includes handouts summarizing each session, which are available for free download (for instructional or personal use). Additionally, recordings of all the exercises in the book are available on the Resources page of our MSPE Institute website: www.MindfulSportPerformance.org.

Question 8

Can you train someone to more easily get into the flow state (ie in the zone)? Are there objective or physiological markers of being in flow?

Tim Pineau · Accepted Answer

To the first question, the answer is yes (probably)! There is still a lot we need to learn about the causal mechanisms that underlie the experience of flow (Swann et al., 2018), and because of this knowledge gap it’s difficult to say conclusively whether flow is a controllable experience. That said, many factors that are associated with flow (such as preparation, optimal arousal) are perceived by many athletes as controllable (Swann et al., 2012), suggesting that someone could be trained (via these associated constructs) to more easily enter flow. To test this hypothesis, researchers have looked at interventions such as hypnosis, imagery, imagery with music, and mindfulness. While there are inconclusive results about hypnosis and imagery alone, there is a growing body of evidence supporting mindfulness training as a way to facilitate flow.

We review the connection between mindfulness and flow extensively in our book, Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement: Mental Training for Athletes and Coaches. In brief, multiple authors have identified a strong conceptual overlap between flow and mindfulness, as both emphasize present-moment focus with a non-self-conscious (accepting) attitude. This has been borne out in correlational research, which has found strong associations between mindfulness and flow (Pineau et al., 2014). Perhaps more importantly for the present question, intervention research has also demonstrated increases in flow following mindfulness training (Kaufman et al., 2009; Scott-Hamilton et al., 2016), suggesting that mindfulness training can help people more easily enter a flow state. Given these findings, it’s not surprising that one of the most prolific researchers and authors on flow in sport has said that an outcome of being mindful in a challenging situation can be a flow state (Jackson, 2016).

As to physiological markers, some researchers have looked into this question, but clear evidence is still emerging. In some ways, it seems obvious that there would be physiological markers of flow given that heightened perception of the body is such a consistently reported aspect of flow (Swann et al., 2012), which could indicate that these self-reports are describing the subjective experience of these underlying physiological markers. However, having someone hooked up to any apparatus in order to measure their physiological functioning, which is necessarily self-referential, would seem like it could interfere with entering a flow state (which is often defined by the absence of self-referential thoughts).

Further, there is an unquestionably subjective aspect to flow, so any physiological measurement is contingent on the individual’s ability to accurately report when they are in a flow state. There are thus inherent challenges in studying these potential physiological markers – but that doesn’t stop researchers from trying! And there is some empirical evidence demonstrating elevated heart rate (Noy et al., 2015) or certain neurological processes (such as increased activation in the left anterior inferior frontal gyrus and left putamen; Ulrich et al., 2014) being associated with flow. Physiology is undoubtedly implicated in the experience of flow, but we are a ways off from having a constellation of physiological markers that can reliably identify when someone is in a flow state.

Question 9

Would mindfulness be enough for someone who has sports performance anxiety, particularly after a bad experience? Are other things recommended?

Carol Glass · Accepted Answer

While a moderate optimal level of physical arousal might be beneficial to prepare athletes for competition, anxiety before or during athletic events can be detrimental to performance. And as this question suggests, prior mistakes during a game can lead to thoughts and fears of future failure. Worries about letting your team down and how others are viewing your performance can lower self-confidence and make it harder to concentrate on the game. Rather than being “in the zone,” some athletes may even experience the dreaded “yips,” an unexplained inability to execute basic skills such as accurately throwing a baseball or putting.

Sport anxiety is a common reason why athletes seek assistance from therapists or mental performance consultants, and a number of cognitive behavioral mental training approaches such as positive self-talk/cognitive restructuring, thought stopping, and relaxation training are often used to help them reduce and control performance anxiety. However, Gardner and Moore (2004) suggested that trying to suppress or eliminate anxiety and negative thinking might actually lead to an increase in self-focused thoughts and task-irrelevant attention. So rather than trying to control internal experience, approaching things mindfully and changing how one responds to anxiety could result in enhanced focus, awareness, and more efficient responding to performance-related stimuli. While some see mindfulness and CBT approaches as incompatible, others such as Dr Robert Hindman have proposed that they can be successfully integrated, and that mindfulness compliments cognitive behavioral approaches by promoting awareness of, as well as the testing out of, thoughts and emotions.

Some elite athletes report benefits from meditating the night before competition to cope with pre-performance anxiety. While focusing awareness on the breath, catching the mind drifting off and gently bringing it back without judgment can help athletes increase their ability to "stay present" in stressful situations while performing and be able to similarly recognize and let go of negative thoughts and competition anxiety. In our book, Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement: Mental Training for Athletes and Coaches, we give the example of a basketball player at the free-throw line during a pressure-filled, end-of-game situation. He might have the thought, “I need to make this shot or I’ll let my whole team down,” which only leads to increased anxiety and muscle tension that could interfere with execution of the shot itself. While some anxiety could accompany any situation like this, mindful acceptance and staying connected to the present moment could allow him to have a very different experience. He could come to see that this event is no different from the thousands of other times he’s taken a foul shot when these negative thoughts and emotions weren’t present, let them go, and concentrate instead on the shot itself.

Our research shows that many athletes who have participated in MSPE training experience reductions in sport-related anxiety. They report outcomes such as staying more relaxed in times of stress, keeping a level head, learning to acknowledge and accept negative feelings rather than push them aside, approaching their sport being open to improvement rather than with a fear of making mistakes, being able to calm down during practice and competition, and being more able to “get into the zone” and focus attention on present-moment sensations in athletic performance. For example, MSPE training helped one college rugby player stay “fully locked into the present moment, aware, and focused on making the current play the best you can instead of being worried about the future or remembering the past.” These new mindfulness skills also helped athletes deal with mistakes without getting down on themselves (“giving your mind a break from self-criticism”), simply noticing and accepting things non-judgmentally and letting go and moving on, focusing on the present-moment and not the past. They similarly reported less frustration when teammates made mistakes.

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