In this lecture we are going to
take a look at mindfulness and
what role it might play in sport
or enhancing sport performance.
So why might we
look at mindfulness?
Well interest in the concept of
mindfulness has been exploding
for the last few decades in
psychology and particularly
applied psychology.
Lots of new psychotherapies and
psychological treatments tend to
involve some
aspect of mindfulness.
Just the presence of mindfulness
in our research literature has
been growing exponentially
over the last 20 years or so.
Some of the things we from
the applied psychology and the
clinical psychology literature
include things like mindfulness
is associated with a variety
of positive health and mental
health outcomes, less
depression, less anxiety, less
sub issues, all sorts of
positive outcomes.
And there's also very good
evidence from the treatment
literature that mindful
meditation is useful at reducing
pain reducing anxiety and
reducing depression, so we are
seeing mindfulness being
useful in lots of other
areas of psychology.
We also know that the experience
of mindfulness the mindfulness
state shares a lot of
characteristics of peak
performance and flow states
that are associated with
excellent performance.
Things like a relaxed body, a
calm and clear mind, a focus in
the present that feels free
of distractions and a non
judgmental focus that
people don't feel you know
self-conscious and constantly
judging but just feel free.
A lot of those things are the
descriptors you might recall we
talked about associated with
peak performance and flow states
that lead to good human
performance so it might make
sense that mindfulness is sort
of a fertile ground to look for
how to create the ideal
psychological states
for performance.
So what are we mean exactly by
mindfulness well mindfulness
itself we can describe as a
state of consciousness or a way
of being as defined as paying
attention on purpose in the
present moment without judgment.
That's what I mean by being
mindful or being in a state of
mindfulness, paying attention on
purpose in the present where the
non judgmental stance.
Mindfulness can also have trait
like properties so sometimes
well talk about a construct
or a literature called
trait mindfulness.
And what that means is that
some people are just naturally
more mindful.
Their personality is kind
of mindful by nature and so
mindfulness sometimes we
refer to as a almost like a
personality trait.
And then there's
mindful meditation.
Mindful meditation is the
application, the intentional
practice of trying to create
and practice recreating the
state of mindfulness.
That's all it is, it's all
mindfulness meditation is.
Now a lot of times when people
think about both mindfulness and
meditation they get kind of
associated in our minds with
perhaps eastern
religions or that sort of thing.
But it's important to know that
mindfulness and meditation are
not associated necessarily with
any religion or any spiritual
practice, it can be an
entirely secular psychological
phenomenon, not having anything
to do with spirituality.
That's not to say that there
certainly are some religions and
religious practices that do have
meditation or meditation like
practices that are a part of
their spiritual traditions.
I put a couple of images here
on the slide that's to
reflect and the more
stereotypical ideas of the
Buddha pose for
doing meditation.
Completely not necessary to
actually do or use meditation
but often it's what people
think of, it's that pose.
And I have on here what's called
a labyrinth which is actually a
practice in some Christian
traditions like the tai zeit
Christian tradition that
involves walk in the labyrinth,
kind of this maze like
path that's a trance like or
meditation like experience for
folks as a practice within a
Christian tradition.
So there's all kinds of
different religious traditions
that have things that look a
lot like meditation or that may
explicitly talk about meditation
or mindfulness but that's
not really not we are
talking about here today.
We are talking about just a
psychological phenomenon a
psychological practice that
doesn't need to be tied to any
particular religion or
spiritual tradition.
So mindful meditation as we
mentioned is the intentional
practice of that mindful state
of awareness, it's about trying
to practice that state in a
focused way to try to be able to
recreate it on an ongoing
way in ones daily life.
In that way it's much like
relaxation strategies we talked
about a different lecture where
the more you practice them the
more it becomes easy to quickly
get into that state of being.
Well meditation is the same that
the more you practice mindful
mediation strategies the more
quickly you can get yourself
in to a mindful state when you
want to be or catch yourself
being non mindful and move
towards more mindful state,
perhaps during a sport
competition for example.
Now mindful mediation can be
really simple, it doesn't have
to be elaborate, it doesn't
always require a meditation room
or meditation clothes or one
of the things I sort of get
frustrated with is when you find
like meditation audio scripts or
YouTube videos or whatever, they
seem to always have the you
know the mood music in the
background and the really quite
therapist voice or whatnot.
It doesn't require any of that
to do mindful meditation you
know, regular people wherever
you are in your daily life can
do mindful meditation without
any of those sort of meditation
decorations that tend to
come along with those
sorts of things.
Meditation is just a state of
intentional awareness in the
present but without judgment,
you can do that anywhere anytime
in whatever clothes you happen
to be wearing and actually with
whatever kind of music you like
to listen to, or none at all.
There's a lot of variety in some
mindful meditation you know it's
not always about in fact mindful
meditation rarely has the
mantra, you know you might be
thinking about people repeating
a simple word like Om or
something that's really not
what mindful meditation
typically does.
Mindful meditation is really
about just directing your
awareness and so some
mindfulness meditation
practices involve just focusing
on breathing, just trying to
really give your attention to
your breathing, pay attention
to it the sensations of air
coming in, the sensations of
air going out, and your chest
rise and lowering as you breath
and those sorts of things.
And that's all there is to
it, is bringing awareness
to something that you are doing
all the time, but almost all
the time is completely
outside of your awareness.
So just directing your awareness
to something simple like
breathing is an example
of mindfulness mediation.
Some mindfulness meditation
scripts use a body scan, similar
to the muscle relaxation
strategy we talked about
in a different lecture.
This can involve just simply
scanning the body and
paying attention to the
sensations or perceptions.
How do your feet feel
in side of your shoes?
How does your butt
feel on your chair?
What are you feeling in
your fingertips right now?
Can you feel the air moving
across your face from the air
conditioning or
something like that.
Just something paying attention
to, your body and the sensations
and the perceptions that might
be there all the time and again
are outside of our awareness.
There are meditations that
involves just scanning cognitive
content or your thoughts.
There's a very popular
meditation practice called
leaves on a stream where you
are asked to sort of visualize
fallen leaves passing on a
stream and you see your thoughts
as kind of those leaves.
That a thought comes in your
mind it's just a thought you
don't have to act on it, you
don't have to judge it, it just
sort of passes right by pretty
soon it's down the stream and
there's new thoughts
to pay attention to.
That's an example of non
judgmental thought observation
type of meditation.
And another that is sometimes
used is actually meditation
about movement.
So paying really close attention
in the present moment to what
your sensations are when you
go through certain movements.
Those movements might be things
like yoga poses or stretching.
You can actually practice
mindful mediation as an athlete
while you are stretching to
prepare for practice or a match,
just by simply directing your
attention to the sensations
and the movements of
the stretching process.
You could also do mindful
meditation about about your
own sports skills, so you can
have the mindful meditation
experience you know rehearsing a
golf swing or a tennis serve or
running around as a receiver
whenever that might be actually
while you are making those
movement, just paying mindful
attention to those in the
present without judgment,
you are doing
mindfulness, that's it.
You are meditating right
there just as simple as that.
So how are we seeing
mindfulness applied to sport?
Well sport psychologists have
really been interested in this
for many many years, dating back
at least the 1960's when a thing
called transcendental meditation
or the transcendental movement
was a big thing, that was a
different kind of meditation
brought in by some practitioners
of eastern religions.
But in modern days we are seeing
a couple of new developments for
example there's the mindfulness
acceptance commitment approach
of Frank Gardener and Moore,
they derive their approach
directly from some innovations
in the psychological treatment
literature in
clinical psychology.
They are looking at acceptance
based behavior therapies
as an example.
There's 3 main parts to their
approach, first of all they use
techniques to train mindful
awareness and that includes
simple exercises that look like
the mindful meditation we talked
about in the previous slide.
Then there's also a focus on
identifying the athlete's values
and what their goals are related
to those values and trying to
really keep their attention on
those values, and those values
aren't always being a champion
or winning, those values might
be being a good role model those
values might be expressing their
talent, you know
whatever that might be.
And there's also a variety
of techniques that are
cognitive in nature related
to promoting acceptance and
cognitive diffusion.
What we mean by that is
trying to take a nonjudgmental
acceptance view of thoughts as
they occur and realizing that
our thoughts are not the same
thing as reality, that's what we
mean by cognitive diffusion,
your thoughts are not reality.
Let me give you a quick example
of that let's say you are an
athlete and frequently find
yourself frustrated with the
officiating, which happens in
a a lot of different sports.
And you find yourself
really struggling with that it
distracts you, it gets you
off your game, it really is
not helpful.
Well one way to approach that is
to do this cognitive diffusion
thing where maybe you recognize
that having a thought go through
your mind as, that ref
isn't being fair to me, isn't
necessarily reality that's just
a thought that occurs to you,
that's just your brain
doing what brains do,
generating thoughts.
And it might be better to
recognize that might or might
not be a thing, I'll just accept
what's happened so far as what
has happened, and be curious
about what's going to happen in
the future but not being so sure
that for the rest of this match
that ref is going to be unfair
in their calls in the match.
So that's an example of
cognitive diffusion it's just
recognizing that our thoughts
are just thoughts that are not
reality and letting go a little
bit of initially predicting the
future based on the
content of our thoughts.
There's also an approach by
Kaufman and his colleagues
that's called mindful sport
performance enhancement which is
really more of a traditional
mindfulness approach, it really
focuses on just the strategies
to promote mindful awareness
moment to moment and it uses
a lot of different kinds of
meditation practices, body scan
meditations, yoga movement stuff
that focus on breathing,
that just focuses on
developing mindfulness.
So those are a couple examples
that are out there that are
being developed for trying to
enhance performance in the world
of sport, with mindfulness.
So what does the research say?
That might be interesting thing
to take a look at, well the
research basis is pretty small.
But I think it is growing, sort
of following the trends that we
see in the other main
stream psychology literature.
I found an interesting
meta-analysis from 2015.
You recall a meta-analysis
is a study of studies.
That's the study that tries to
gather all the information we
know from all the published
literature and look at what does
that tell us as whole.
So that was this meta-analysis
that Sappington and
Longshore published.
They found 6 case
studies, 2 qualitative review, 7
non-randomized trials, you might
recall those are studies that
may have a preemposed test
but no control group or no
randomization, and
then 4 randomized trails.
Those are the true experiments
that participants get randomized
one group or another
there's comparison and control
conditions then we see how
thing look by comparison.
I put the figure on the slide
here from their paper that shows
how complicated
these things are.
And if you look at the top
this figure here basically is a
flowchart to show how they
selected the study the got
included in their paper.
And what you notice at the very
top is they had to review almost
800 studies that they found
before they finally settled on
what is it 19 or so studies
that got included in the
final analysis.
And you can see the various
reasons why certain studies got
sort of excluded
from their review.
And I think it's sort of useful
to see how that happens in
meta-analysis that you start
with sort of getting your arms
around all of the literature
that you could find and then
whittling it down until you are
really focused on what are the
studies most relevant to
my particular purpose
for this study.
So they went from 800
studies down to 19.
Pretty interesting.
The up shot of their
meta-analysis was that they
found promising support for
the efficiency for mindfulness.
There was some good reason to
think this might be helpful and
should be studied further.
They found that mindfulness
is associated with reductions
in anxiety, can increase
experience of flow states.
Which are good for
sport performance.
And they may actually
improve performance some studies
included objective nourishes
of performance that there
were improvements on
after experiencing
mindfulness training.
Now overall they found that
quality of studies not great.
Kind of lacking.
But that's not at all uncommon
especially when a research
literature is fairly new or
young, what we might a research
frontier, often studies start
of kind of tentative smaller
samples not the most rigorous
designs and I would expect that
over the next 20 years or so we
are going to see a real dramatic
improvement in the quantity
and the quality of studies of
mindfulness and sport, just
given how popular it's becoming.
So the key take always form
this lecture, we know that
mindfulness is growing in
popularity and certainly growing
in sport application as it
is across all of psychology.
Mindfulness involves a lot of
qualities that are associated
with sport performance, it looks
a lot like flow states or peak
performance states, the
state of being mindful.
And so mindful interventions
I think it was a kitchen
sink intervention, Kinda
they included a little
bit of everything.
There were several
benefits to just one activity.
If you think about the various
benefits to mindful meditation,
you get some practice that focus
on concentration, some practice
at relaxation, some
practice with concentration.
There's a lot of really great
things that sort of go into
meditation that make it perhaps
an ideal intervention for
sport performance.
Not surprisingly sport
psychologist are developing new
application of mindfulness to
sport and I think those will
continue to develop and the
evidence so far is pretty
promising but we need a lot more
studying in the future and I
think those studies
are going to come.
