Now that the school year is over, I have even more time to be a youth sports spectator. I’m still waking up at 6am and doing a guided meditation from my favorite podcast, but instead of heading to the classroom, I’m heading to one of the many fields that I am only able to find with the use of GPS and even then there is no guarantee I will get there with ease. Nothing disrupts the Zen state of my morning practice like a missed exit and when I finally arrive at my destination, I am already dysregulated. Then it’s time to grab the obligatory chair, sling the Yeti around my shoulder and hope there is a scoreboard or Game Changer (even better) so I have a chance of following what is happening at said sporting event.
Once I find my spot, tell my kid to put on sunblock, and buy him or her a Gatorade even though we have a case at home, I continue a mediation via Airpods and try to regain my mindful state while the team warms up. Things are good for about 20 minutes until the game begins and the calming voice of my podcaster is replaced with the raucous sounds of the game. This is a welcome shift when the sounds are of players engaging in the sport they love, but it is not cool when my inner peace is disrupted by the sounds of a parents projecting the the pain of their wounded inner child onto their kid.
Ironically, the people who disrupt my mindfulness are the same people who claim to want the very best for their kids. In my experience, those who are the most concerned with having a competitive edge in sports are also those who present the greatest barriers to success for their athlete. The misconception is that competitiveness must be loud, forceful and intimidating but there is a place for quiet, peace and stillness as well. If it has been proven that mindfulness activities increase athletes’ overall health and performance, why are meditation, breathwork, yoga and mantras seen as anything other than integral parts of athletic training?
As a former student-athlete myself, I love the exhilaration of a win as much as the next person but for me the greatest takeaway from my athletic experience is the resiliency I built by coming back from defeat. When a winning mentality supersedes a growth mindset, no one gets better but there is a comfort level when it comes to sports psychology that few are willing to exceed. Members of the traditional sports world are satisfied with striving toward goals and placing mind over matter but they don’t see a benefit to stillness and inner peace. Some may even say that a mindful mentality may make an athlete “soft.” However, current research suggests otherwise.
According to Anderson et al. (2021), there is a distinction between mindfulness practices and traditional psychological skills training (PST) such as goal setting, visualization and mental rehearsal. Mindfulness is different from these other strategies in that it helps the athlete change their relationship to the thoughts and emotions they are feeling rather than trying to change the thoughts and emotions themselves.
Since the pandemic there has been a sharp increase in student-athletes struggling with anxiety and depression. The problem isn’t a lack of mental toughness, it is the stigma surrounding mental health that is exacerbating this problem. Thanks to athletes like Michael Phelps and Simone Biles, mental health issues are now addressed at the Olympic level. However, our high-school and college athletes are still silenced by a lack of dialogue when it comes to mental health. Many of them do not have the self-awareness or advocacy skills to seek help and many of the adults in their lives are compounding the problem. If adults are more willing to adopt mindfulness practices, then our student athletes will have a model for how to handle the pressures of competitive sports. If the overall well-being of our adolescents isn’t enough to convince coaches and parents to embrace mindfulness in sports, perhaps the fact that it helps treat and prevent injuries will.
According to Rosenkranz et al. (2016), long-term mindfulness meditation may reduce stress reactivity and could be of therapeutic benefit in chronic inflammatory conditions. All too often we wait until after an athlete is injured to explore their behaviors to identify the culprit. We ask ourselves if the injury could have been prevented if they had better eating, sleeping, and pre-workout habits. But we should also be paying attention to their state of mind before, during and after a competitive performance.
A common misconception about mindfulness is that a non-judgmental approach is synonymous with giving up or not caring about results -this could not be further from the truth. When an athlete mindfully approaches their sport, they are participating in the mental awareness that will allow them to perform at the highest level. Just because and athlete acknowledges that they are having negative thoughts, does not mean they will give in to them, in fact they will be stronger for overcoming them.
If mindfulness practices can help athletes manage the emotions that lead to poor performance why isn’t it as common on the playing field as pre-game stretches? From where I sit (in my CGI Outdoor Rocker), the answer is clear that many adults are uncomfortable with idea of a mindful approach to life and unfortunately they are depriving their kids of an valuable skill as a result.
