Hey everyone,
My name is George, and I am a Sport and Exercise Psychologist (in training) working for Verdant. I recently have had my scientific paper “Towards a Comprehensive Professional Philosophy in Performance and Wellbeing Psychology: Integrating Functional Contextualism and Relational Frame Theory for Esports and other High-Performance Environments” accepted for publication by an academic journal. In this post, I want to break down this world salad of title and summarise one of its main messages: let’s start using mindfulness and acceptance interventions to improve performance AND well-being.
As cliche as it sounds, sports, performance, and clinical psychology all try to help people live their best lives. We teach people to react to things differently and make better decisions in line with what is important to them. However, we disagree on how this should be done. Traditional clinical, performance and sport psychologists believe that actions are dependent on your thoughts, and therefore changing thoughts for the better changes actions for the better too (e.g., more confidence leads to better performances and better communication). This leads performance coaches in esports to use motivational self-talk and mantras (e.g., Ted Lasso’s “I am a strong and capable man”), relaxation, rationalisation, and even hypnosis. These techniques look to fix, control, or avoid uncomfortable thoughts, emotions, or feelings, and by doing so hope to improve performance – they make you feel better so you can do better. From my Twitter page and presentations by other practitioners in esports, this is the mainstream approach used by many performance coaches working within esports’ highest levels, with motivational self-talk being a strong favourite.
In my paper, I present mindfulness and acceptance approaches as an alternative. Mindfulness and acceptance approaches encourage people to become comfortable with discomfort as they work towards a meaningful life. This approach does not believe that thoughts precede actions, but instead that they occur simultaneously and can influence each other. Therefore, paying too much time and attention to try to expel a thought may mean you pay less time and attention to your actual performance. Instead of trying to expel uncomfortable thoughts or feelings, I encourage people to just watch them and see them for what they are: thoughts and feelings that your brain is giving you, rather than literal truths which define you. After detaching from their brain’s chatter, people can then reinvest their attention back to their current task. Mindful, accepting approaches encourage people to step into discomfort and learn from their experiences. It is normal to feel anxious before doing something that is important, but you do not need to run from these feelings. We do not need to create artificial confidence by repeating mantras to ourselves, we can build confidence naturally as we step into uncomfortable situations, mindfully accept anxiety and discomfort, and then realise afterwards it went okay and we can do it again.
Mindfulness and acceptance-based approaches are not only more effective but arguably more ethical than traditional, control-based performance psychology techniques. For example, academic reviews of self-talk interventions show more evidence for instrumental self-talk, which can help people stay mindful, than control-based, motivational self-talk (Hatzigeorgiadis et al., 2011; Tod et al., 2011); mindfulness is also approximately 3x as effective as self-talk in improving sport performances (Lochbaum et al., 2022). Mindfulness and acceptance approaches reject the assumption that you have to feel well to do well and thus free people from needing to struggle, control, or avoid their thoughts. No longer needing to suppress these negative experiences, people then can deal with them healthily and are much more prepared for them if or when they come up again – they do not need to hurry back to their performance coach or psychologist to get patched up. In an old critique, Cortlett (1996) argues that rigid sport psychology techniques, such as control-based self-talk, can prevent athletes from ever really playing their games. Mindfulness and acceptance interventions can conversely help people play their games with more flexibility, meaning, and joy.
Psychologists, performance coaches, players and members of the community, let’s be flexible and independent; let’s improve our performance alongside our wellbeing. Let’s embrace, accept, and celebrate our humanity rather than running away from it. We do not need to struggle; we do not need to control our thoughts, feelings or emotions. Let’s instead learn to be mindful of them as we pursue purpose and meaning in our lives. We need not suffer for our success.
If you are interested in finding out more about my approach please read my accepted article here
If you’d like to discuss more about my approach please send me a message at:
X: GeorgeHPsych
Discord: georgehorne
References
Corlett, J. (1996). Sophistry, Socrates, and sport psychology. The Sport Psychologist, 10(1), 84-94. https://doi.org/10.1123/tsp.10.1.84
Hatzigeorgiadis, A., Zourbanos, N., Galanis, E., & Theodorakis, Y. (2011). Self-talk and sports performance: A meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(4), 348-356. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691611413136
Horne, G., & Swettenham, L. (2024). Towards a Comprehensive Professional Philosophy in Performance and Wellbeing Psychology: Integrating Functional Contextualism and Relational Frame Theory for Esports and other High-Performance Environments. Journal of Electronic Gaming and Esports. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ckpby
Lochbaum, M., Stoner, E., Hefner, T., Cooper, S., Lane, A. M., & Terry, P. C. (2022). Sport psychology and performance meta-analyses: A systematic review of the literature. PloS one, 17(2), e0263408. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263408
Tod, D., Hardy, J., & Oliver, E. (2011). Effects of self-talk: A systematic review. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 33(5), 666-687. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsep.33.5.666
