8 - Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement (MSPE): Development and Applications

Summary

Many traditional mental training strategies for athletes are based on the assumption that negative cognitions need to be altered or stopped in order to optimize performance (Gardner & Moore, 2006). However, attempting to change negative internal states may ironically lead to greater focus on these states, potentially increasing their frequency and interfering with performance (Wegner, 1994; Wenzlaff & Wegner, 2000). Rather than trying to control or eliminate them, athletes may thus benefit more from developing skills in present-moment awareness and nonjudgmental acceptance of negative internal states (Gardner & Moore, 2004, 2007; Kaufman, Glass, & Arnkoff, 2009). This paradigm shift is a central tenet of mindfulness-based interventions, which represent an emerging direction in sport psychology (see Birrer, Röthlin, & Morgan, 2012; Gardner & Moore, 2012).

There are various ways to define mindfulness. One definition, which stems more from Buddhist philosophy, is “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn, 1994, p. 4). This view of mindfulness involves maintaining attention on immediate experience while taking an orientation of openness, acceptance, and curiosity (Bishop et al., 2004). Langer (2000) has proposed an alternate conceptualization of mindfulness as “a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context” (p. 220). Her view entails observing the context in which one acts, actively processing new information, and recognizing that stimuli can be seen from multiple perspectives (see also Chapter 5). The former approach to mindfulness has been used more widely to date in psychological research and practice, and is the primary perspective underlying mindfulness-based approaches to sport performance enhancement. For a review of the literature on mindfulness and sport, including relevant studies and associations between sport performance and both conceptualizations of mindfulness, see Pineau, Glass, and Kaufman (2014).

The growing emphasis on mindfulness for athletes derives, at least in part, from an explosion of interest in mindfulness throughout the entire field of psychology and society at large. Due to its rapidly expanding popularity, mindfulness has become a media buzzword. For example, a recent cover story of TIME Magazine (Pickert, 2014) dealt with “The Mindful Revolution,” and a Huffington Post article (Gregoire, 2014) immediately followed, arguing that TIME had only hit the tip of the iceberg. This follow-up article boldly claimed that mindfulness is for everyone, regardless of gender, race, age, income, and culture.