The Benefits of Mindfulness in Sport and Exercise

Inspired by an 800% increase in academic interest over the last three decades, this article aims to outline the evidence-base for the use of Mindfulness in sport and exercise. Testing the reader’s patience, a lengthy description of the general approach precedes a comprehensive summary of the benefits of contemporary Mindful sport and exercise practices.

Whilst it cites randomised controlled trial findings evaluating the effectiveness of Mindfulness-based programs and interventions (including those utilising emergent technologies^{(1., 2.)}), the theoretical underpinnings and particulars of commonly used protocols will appear in a future article.

The article concludes by affirming the effectiveness of five to eight weeks (3.) of Mindfulness training for sport and exercise enthusiasts looking to boost their sport performance process, and general wellbeing.

Readers are advised that the information contained herein applies only to un-injured individuals; those recovering from physical injury may find this previous article to be of interest.

The 2500-year-old polysemous concept of Mindfulness (sati in the 1880s Pali translation of Theravāda Buddhist texts) has an equally tenebrous history, with even the original English translation (memory) said(4.) to have been amended by Siddhartha Gautama (‘the Buddha’) to include the notion of ‘lucid awareness’ such that it connotes more a ‘constant reflection on the changing nature of time’ than an act of remembering.

Clearly, the word ‘mindfulness’ has burst its semiotic banks to become a floating signifier. For clarity, this article adopts capitalisation to differentiate between Merriam-Webster’s 1. ‘being conscious or aware of something’ and 2. ‘the practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis’.

Of additional noteworthiness for readers, this article does not consider the numerous non-Theravāda Mindfulness analogues (that evolved through the Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna branches of Buddhism e.g. Taoist Chán, Japanese Zen, and Tibetan Tantric practices) as neither the criteria nor standards for judging the degree of ‘coherent resemblance’ are as yet extant(4.).

The Theravāda branch of Buddhist doctrine asserts that suffering (dukkha) is omnipresent in the human experience and that it can be transcended by the wisdom (paññā) reached through meditation.

Importantly, this article refers exclusively to Mindfulness meditation as differentiated from concentrative meditation (where mantras are generally used) by numerous neuroimaging studies that reveal significant differences between the two in their effects on brain activity^(6.).

Additionally, despite the above soteriological connotations, Buddhism is not a theistic religion, with the Buddha himself rejecting the idea of a creator god and Buddhist philosophers even arguing that such a belief is nothing but a distraction for humans seeking enlightenment.

Mindfulness for the masses

Like many countries in South/Southeast Asia in the 16th Century, colonial influence meant that elite middle-class locals started showing a growing interest in Western ideals like science and education while also opting for a national identity more closely affiliated with Buddhism.

Beginning with efforts to spread Buddhism to laypeople, subsequent multiple reforms to Buddhist institutions during the 19th and 20th centuries were catalytically responsible for repositioning meditation as the new ready-for-export centrepiece of a vastly simplified version of Buddhism.

To wit, the quintessential Mindfulness meditation script(7.):

Sit comfortably. Close your eyes. Notice your breath. You do not need to slow it down or change it in any way—just notice it. You may notice how your belly expands and contracts, or the feeling of air passing through your nose. Whenever a thought pops into your head, just notice it. Remember, “Why do I have so many thoughts?” or “This exercise is stupid!” are also thoughts. Try not to judge whether the thought is good or bad—just notice. When you notice thoughts, gently bring your attention back to your breath. Go ahead and do this for 1 min.

How often did your attention wander from your breath? How often were you distracted? If you are like the rest of us, probably quite often….

…and a common pocket version:

Trait vs. state Mindfulness

Within Mindfulness, there is a distinction between a disposition and a state. The Mindful state is composed of the behaviours exercised when the individual is acting Mindfully, whereas the Mindful disposition, or trait Mindfulness, is the individual’s stable capacity for Mindfulness in daily life(8.).

In other words, even meditation-naïve people may display, in varying degrees, the five hallmarks of the Mindfulness mode of relating to one’s present-moment ‘internal’ (thoughts, feelings, sensations) or ‘external’ (objects of perception) experiences(9.):

• observing (noticing or attending to experiences)
• acting with awareness (attending to activities of the moment rather than running on automatic pilot)
• describing (expressing/labelling experiences in words)
• non-judging (refraining from evaluating experiences as pleasant or unpleasant)
• non-reactivity (allowing experiences to come and go without being caught up in them)

Importantly, research based on numerous validated ‘measures’ of Mindfulness including the Comprehensive Inventory of Mindfulness Experiences (CHIME(10.)) has demonstrated that Mindfulness may be cultivated through everyday experience or processes other than formal meditation.

Mindfulness resonates with the public health field’s emphasis on causally “upstream” salutogenic (i.e. focusing on health and not on disease) approaches that foster preventative health behaviours and build individual and systemic resilience, enabling communities to ‘withstand known and novel threats and that thrive every day’(4.).

The literature is replete with reviews and meta-analyses(11.) providing neurobiological evidence in relation to numerous health and wellbeing outcomes including:

The development of effective emotion regulation

On the whole, it seems Mindfulness practices help the individual to experience emotions more like a selective process rather than an involuntary take-over of the mind. Improvements in insight/interoception (more on this later), working memory efficiency, cognitive and emotional reactivity, self-compassion, psychological flexibility, and the capacity to recover after being provoked in a stressful or otherwise negative situation have been demonstrated and correlate significantly to reductions in anxiety and depression symptoms including worry and rumination.

Improvements in interpersonal relationships

Maintaining attention in the present moment in a non-judgmental way is positively correlated with relationship satisfaction, emotional intelligence, and more frequent utilisation of constructive approaches to interpersonal stressors including conflict.

Physical improvements

Increased immune functioning, better sleep, and stress management improved wellbeing biometrics and reduced psycho-physiological distress are primarily attributed to neuroplastic changes (the brain’s physical alteration following experience) induced by Mindfulness practices, something that suggests that the more one trains in Mindfulness, the more beneficial the effects could become.

Peak performance is meditation in motion.

Greg Louganis

Historically, Psychological Skills Training (PST) has been the most widely used intervention for enhancing athletic achievement^(12.).

Predominantly gain-driven^(13.), PST comprises four training domains: visualisation or imagery, positive self-talk, goal setting, and arousal regulation.

Based on strikingly similar tenets, Mindfulness has unsurprisingly gained attention among sport and exercise psychologists, with proponents of Mindfulness contending that non-attachment to present thoughts may provide a better pathway to performance optimisation than PST.

This contention is based on the hypothesis that increased engagement of suppressed thoughts via PST’s emphasis on controlling, changing, and re-framing internal processes may in fact cause a paradoxical reinforcement of undesired outcomes.

When things get tough and our bodies start to react, we need mindfulness to reset our internal north star. We need to be quiet, listen, and practice conscious breathing to bring ourselves back to the present moment and activate the parasympathetic nervous system, putting the brake on and slowing things down in our bodies.

George Mumford, The Mindful Athlete: Secrets to Pure Performance. (2016). USA, Parallax Press.

Importantly, most practitioners do not consider the two approaches mutually exclusive or hierarchical, with many recognising the synergistic benefits of combining the two to accommodate both the unique demands of particular sports and the varying temperaments of each individual participant.

If you can quieten your mind and prevent stress impacting your performance than you’re almost halfway there.

Seattle Seahawks NFL coach Pete Carroll.

On a holistic level, Mindfulness allows an athlete to gain emotional stability and learn to maintain focus on what is occurring ‘in the moment’, leading to:

• Less: stress and anxiety (lowered cortisol levels^(14.)), fatigue (decreased lactate concentration^(15.)), fear of re-injury, inflammation, and burnout.
• Better: sleep quality, injury-recovery, pain tolerance, basic level of cognitive (thought processing) function, and resting heart rate.

Although a wealth of evidence^(16.) suggests that practising Mindfulness results in significant improvements in a range of athletic performance indicators in many fields across multiple degrees of competitive involvement, by and large, the impact of mindfulness training on objective performance outcomes is mixed and more research is needed to identify how different types and durations of Mindfulness practices might benefit performance in various sports. The results of specialised research is now accessible online for those interested (e.g. significant improvements in dynamic balance have been demonstrated in professional dancers^(17.)).

On a psychological level, the evidence-based benefits include:

• Fewer task-related worries and task-irrelevant thoughts and distractions, particularly related to Mindfulness training emphasising breathing and posture exercises (e.g. a yoga component).
• Increased psychological flexibility allows refocusing on performance goals, that is, Mindful athletes can more easily adjust their behaviour regardless of the (often distorted, temporary) thoughts and feelings they experience^(14.).
• Less rumination and error-negativity: Mindful athletes were found to experience fewer counterfactual thoughts about how personal or situational factors could have improved outcomes^(18.). Additionally, research^(19.) indicates that consistent Mindfulness meditation addresses a variety of maladaptive cognitive styles (e.g. pessimism and neuroticism) that affect sport-related coping factors in athletes (e.g., concentration and arousal regulation).
• Better inhibitory (impulse behaviour) control via neuroplastic effects (increased activation of the insula and medial prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortexes^(15.)).
• Improved Executive Control (the higher order or metacognitive functions responsible for top-down processes aimed at achieving goal-directed behaviours that are utilised to regulate a self-directed set of purpose-oriented actions in novel or nonhabitual situations).
• More ‘Flow’, or ‘in-zone’ time– Mindfulness has been found to be positively associated with flow in athletes, regardless of gender or sport type^(15.). Flow, associated with a greater possibility of achieving peak performance (especially when an athlete is overly anxious^(20.)), is characterised by a feeling of mind–body fusion, a sense of mastery, deep concentration, increased confidence, and an overall release of tension^(8.). Mindfulness-induced non-judgmental awareness and refocusing are essential components of the flow experience^(21.).
• Greater endurance: measured by maximum oxygen consumption (VO2max) and exhaustion duration, Mindfulness-trained athletes exhibit significant superiority in this domain^(15.).
• Improved emotion regulation: according to the Individual Zone of Optimal Function (IZOF) theory, athletic performance can be diminished by reactive/suppressive responses to long-lasting and high intensity emotions as well as thoughts^(28.). Mindfulness training can dampen emotional reactivity and can boost emotion regulation capacities among healthy and clinical populations^(40.) i.e. individuals develop an acceptance of thoughts/emotions as natural experiences, acknowledging pleasant or unpleasant emotions and thoughts without judgment.
• Enhanced parasympathetic activity: Consonant with Polyvagal Theory, and causally related to the emotional reactivity dampening described above, Mindfulness promotes Parasympathetic Nervous System dominance, resulting in a reduction in sympathetic vascular tone (enhancing blood flow and and breathing depth), and improvements in (striatum dopamine-mediated) substrates for motivation including attitude and coping skills^(22.).
• More resilience: defined as the ‘capacity to bounce back after stressors’ Mindfulness fosters psychological resilience, as documented in theoretical discussions and reviews^(4.). Indeed, the contemporary ‘new wave’ of resilience therapies, programs, and interventions heavily co-opt Mindfulness principles, practices, and exercises.
• Better interoception: defined as the interactive process of receiving, accessing, appraising, and integrating inner bodily signals dependant on past experiences and current individual mindset, interoception mediates the conditioned appraisal of body sensations as threat signals. When practiced successfully, Mindfulness inhibits the conditioned association between sensory signals and cognitive appraisals^(23.), that is, it promotes more adaptative behavioural responses (e.g. less avoidant) to body sensations.
• More flexible attention: lauded as an athletic virtue and closely related to the effects of Mindfulness on interoception, improved flexibility of attention/focus (as demonstrated in insular and parietal cortices neuroimaging studies^(24.)) has been observed in individuals who regularly practise Mindfulness. This benefit is especially attractive for sports judges as well as participants^(8.).
• Greater ‘Locus of Control’: as a mediator of resilience, self-confidence and emotion regulation, Mindfulness positively influences locus of control^(25.) (essentially the degree to which people believe that they, as opposed to external forces (beyond their influence) have control over the outcome of events in their lives). For instance, an individual who is aware and focus on the present moment will demonstrate great ability in controlling certain events in their lives and as well reduce the perception that barriers to goal accomplishment are indications of incompetency.
• Less performance anxiety: whilst a degree of emotional arousal is beneficial for sporting performance^(22.), negative future-oriented emotions (induced by conditioned patterns of thought e.g. catastrophising) and even uncertainty (highly related to panic sensations and anxiety) correlate negatively with performance outcomes, as unnecessary usage of mental resources produces, for example, slower reaction times^(26.). Again, Mindfulness extinguishes these maladaptive anticipatory responses.
• Less competitive state anxiety: a particular type of performance anxiety, competitive state anxiety involves additional complications to an athlete’s interpretation and assessment of the environment^(3.). Many studies in this area^{(15., 19., 26-28.)} demonstrate the effectiveness of Mindfulness in this context, although most investigate specialised adaptations (such as Mindfulness Sports Performance Enhancement (MSPE)) not included in this article that address the apparent paradox of superiority/winning vs. non-judgement/acceptance.
• Better motivational mindset: by reducing critical self-judgment, Mindfulness promotes the more positive mindsets associated with performance improvement^(29.).
• Less burnout and fewer injuries: Correlational and intervention studies^(30.) have provided preliminary evidence that mindfulness is an important protective factor of athlete burnout. Additionally, limited evidence (one study involving soccer players) suggests Mindfulness practice to be associated with a decreased incidence of athletic injuries.

Most notably, the findings suggest that mindfulness programs/interventions of short duration (1-4 weeks), , that are repeated regularly achieve the greatest performance gains.

Of additional note is the growing body of evidence^(31.) linking Mindfulness and esports performance outcomes, where adoption of the approach is unsurprising given the high degree of skillset overlap characterising the two modes of activity.

Based on previous research^(32.) that has shown that heightened dispositional Mindfulness is associated with the awareness of the importance of exercise, exercise self-efficacy, exercise motivation, and self-reported exercise level, more recent work^(33.) confirms the effectiveness of Mindfulness training in boosting the levels of intrinsic motivation (as opposed to external ‘pressure’) associated with exercise self-efficacy (i.e. better exercise engagement).

Additionally, Mindfulness training is associated with lower levels of psychological distress upon exercise and decreased exercise dependence/addiction.

Ethical concerns

Although Mindfulness entered the West through the teachings of Vietnamese monk Thích Nhất Hạnh in the 1970s, the oriental scholar Jon Kabat-Zinn^(34.) (whose 1979 Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program incorporated Hanh’s work) was instrumental^(5.) in bridging the gap between ancient Buddhist meditative practices (Vipassanā and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation) and twenty-first century Mindfulness as commodified by Western mainstream health, education, business, sports, popular culture, and religion.

That the abridged version ‘does not hew to an academic’s exacting standards of Buddhist philosophy or practice’^(11.), is something that Kabat-Zinn openly acknowledges:

It stems from Buddhist tradition, for sure, but is not a catechism, an ideology, a belief system, a technique or set of techniques, a religion, or a philosophy. It is best described as ‘a way of being’.

Indeed, the contemporary mindfulness movement in Western psychotherapy and medicine has been subject to critique^(35.) for “taking the Buddha out of Buddhism”^(5.) and for a marketing strategy that has been referred to as “McMindfulness”^(36.).

For better or worse, Euro-American public understandings of Mindfulness have been inescapably shaped by widespread commercial branding. Characterised as ‘the crossover decade for mindfulness’, the 2000s bore witness to an explosion of trademarked Mindfulness products ranging from bumper stickers and t-shirts to apps and vacations.

For those interested, an overview of ethical considerations is given by Ruan^(37.) (2023), suffice it to say that, in the words of one Buddhist monk^(38.):

Because the Buddha’s teachings are ultimately pragmatic, there is no real issue here: Buddhists have no exclusive proprietary rights to mindfulness, and those properly trained should feel comfortable sharing Buddhism’s pragmatic ethics as a potential resource.

Adverse effects

Overall, research for this article reveals widely varying estimates (from 6^(45.) to 60^(46.) percent) of reported ‘adverse’ experiences that, for the most part, may be re-interpreted as either positive signs of progress related to the process itself, or the result of (fairly normal) initial over-use by some individuals^(47.).

That is, “increased awareness of difficult feelings” can be both “unwanted and distressing” and “a part of personal growth”.

For those with pre-existing mental health disorders however, warnings of “dissociative episodes”, “blunted emotionality”, and ”fixation” should be topics for discussion with their treating mental health professional.

The broad expertise across many psychological fields, including, but not limited to performance, education, cognition, social processes, human development, and health as well as the interdisciplinary experiences with areas from medicine, human movement science, sociology, and cultural sciences suggests that psychologists occupy a unique position in comparison to other practitioners to deliver evidence-based approaches that optimally utilise Mindfulness practices to achieve the outcomes enumerated above.

A further salient point for those deciding which practitioner is best for them, is evidence^(5.) showing that practitioners themselves benefit greatly from having a mindfulness practice of their own (improving their personal lives and increasing empathy, compassion, and counselling skills).

Taught by practitioners in both the Sport and Exercise and Coaching^(39.) branches of psychology are a variety of skills that positively impact via numerous Mindfulness-related mechanisms:

Focused Attention (FA)

In FA, attention is disengaged from any distracting stimuli so that focus on a neutral meditative object (commonly the sensory experience of breathing) can be maintained. FA is thought to enhance attentional control in two ways: first by orienting attention to a pre-selected perceptual object, and second through conflict monitoring (also termed executive attention), that serves to prioritise among competing tasks or responses that disengage from those that are not congruent with goals^(40.). FA activities include^(41.):

• Breathing exercises: as described above, participants allow thoughts to pass unjudged whilst continuously re-focusing their attention on their breaths. Options accommodate individual preferences: for example, a participant may attend to the tactile sensations of air in the nostrils, or instead focus on the sensation of the movements of the abdomen.
• Body-scan exercises: during this type of exercise, participants would try to shift their attention towards different parts of the body from the soles of the feet to the top of the head while deeply breathing in and out. Every time there is a distraction, the attention is gently taken up again on the sensations of the body.
• Slacklining^(8.): designed to enhance concentration, this exercise involves walking across a narrow, taut strap attached roughly 30 cm above the ground. The physical challenge of maintaining stability while walking on an unfamiliar and unstable surface allows one to confront one’s attentional limits, to train one’s attentional flexibility, and to become aware of intrusive thoughts.

Open Monitoring (OM)

OM is about accounting for the constant flow of subjective phenomena: cognition, perception, and emotion. Rather than choosing an object on which to focus, participants are encouraged to engage in a choiceless awareness in which subjective experience itself is continuously monitored^(41.).

Indeed OM has been described as ‘the opposite of FA’^(40.). It is thought that by remaining receptively or non-reactively aware of emotion-provocative stimuli, the conditioned, automatic cognitive and emotional appraisals of those stimuli are diminished over time, leading to greater distress tolerance, non-reactivity, and habituation to difficult cognitive and emotional events and experiences.

Positivity-Journaling is a commonly used OM exercise. During this exercise, participants are asked to reflect back on a positive event that happened during that week, and focus their attention on the feelings that specific event evoked.

Yoga

Yoga/Qigong involve simple body exercises to relax tensions, unblock joint patterns and develop Mindfulness in movement, and are often enmeshed with self-care and self-compassion scripting.

Combining asanas (static poses), breathing, and meditation, there is growing evidence^(42.) to support the idea that yogic practices improve health via downregulation of the sympathetic nervous system and hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal system.

STOP^(43.) technique

Similar in format to the 3-R process described above, STOP is an acronym for:

• S: Stop or interrupt the flow of thoughts and behaviour and be aware of the emotion and the process it expresses.
• T: Take a moment to breathe mindfully.
• O: Observe the situation from multiple perspectives with no judgment.
• P: Proceed toward a new path forward in consideration of these multiple points of view, focusing on precise points under the individual’s direct control.

Building on the above are sport & exercise adjuncts including exercises involving mental imagery, walking meditation, and compassion training^(44.).

In conclusion

If you think you or a loved one may benefit from Mindfulness-integrated counselling/coaching, or are looking for a registered psychologist with training and coaching experience in the sport and exercise field, please feel free to contact us.

Editor’s note: The text and images comprising this article are for educational purposes only, are not intended to be a substitute for professional advice, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Brisbane Counselling Centre.

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