Athletes are taught, typically through meditation, to observe their thoughts and feelings without judgement or reaction, and then re-direct their attention to the things that matter, such as the movements of the opposition or their teammates. Mindfulness-and-acceptance approaches (MAC) in sport have been adopted to encourage athletes to accept the contents of their mind as perfectly natural and non-threatening, whatever they may be. So what can we do to help athletes keep their control during these stressful moments? A new approach in sport psychology suggests that the answer actually lies in relinquishing control. Trying to suppress these thoughts and feelings only makes them pervade your consciousness even more, and the chances of bouncing back and getting the win get even lower. When success seems to get further and further away, the majority of athletes will have a natural response of stress, anxiety, self-doubt, and so on. These are the uncontrollables, and they are likely to happen. Perhaps the referee makes a bad decision which gives a big advantage to your competitors. Perhaps your opposition is in the form of their life. The intuitive appeal of this approach is pretty self-explanatory, who doesn’t want to be able to be the master of their own mind? However, in the natural course of competition, problems inevitably occur. The goal is to reduce anxiety, to increase self-confidence, to regulate arousal so you’re at that sweet spot where you’re entirely trouble-free and ready to give it 100%. Some of the main techniques which are used by practitioners, such as imagery, self-talk, and relaxation, are all centred around trying to place oneself in an ideal emotional state for competition. Traditionally, sport psychology has placed a large emphasis on self-control through psychological skills training. This process might explain why sport psychology interventions are sometimes unsuccessful. Performance suffers, the undesirable emotions get worse, and you feel relatively helpless. Trying to suppress it when it is only getting stronger and stronger takes up a large amount of your cognitive capacity, and messes with your ability to concentrate on the things that matter when performing a particular task. The ironic process theory suggests that, when cognitive load is high, trying to suppress a particular thought or emotion actually makes the thought/emotion more intense and more likely to occur (Wegner, 1994). It’s pretty unavoidable, the more we try to suppress a particular thought, the more it seems to creep back into our consciousness. When reading a command like that, the majority of people invariably think of a pink elephant. The problem with self-control Written by Michael Roskams
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