Topics: Mindfulness, Choking, Performance Anxiety
University: Miami University, Oxford
Researchers: Jenna Hussey, Robert Weinberg, and Arash Assar

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Choking is a constant concern and worry for athletes, performers, and coaches around the world. How would we define what it is? Online commentators, people in the mental performance space without appropriate training, coaches, etc., often define it incorrectly or simply make things up.

A useful definition from sport psychology research is by Mesagno and Hill (2013): “an acute and considerable decrease in skill execution and performance when self-expected standards are normally achievable, which is the result of increased anxiety under perceived pressure.”

Hussey et al. note that while choking is a common and perplexing phenomenon—and this is my editorial: it’s a phenomenon that can cost clubs, teams, individuals at the highest levels of performance thousands to millions of dollars—there are inconsistencies on the sport psychology literature on how to prevent it.

They first found a “choking-susceptible” athlete and used Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement (MSPE) with them. MSPE is a sport specific version of mindfulness training—designed for athletes and performers by Kaufman et al. (2018).

“Choking-susceptible” for the purpose of this study, is based on Mesagno et al.’s (2008) selection criteria, where an athlete has to score past a certain threshold on the Sport Anxiety Scale (SAS), Self-Consciousness Scale (SCS), and Coping Style Inventory for Athletes (CSIA). 

Researchers measured athletes scores at baseline (start of intervention), after 6-weeks (end of intervention), and after 6 additional weeks.

Interesting nugget: approach-coping needs to be higher than avoidance-coping to fit into this “choking-susceptible” criteria. You may think that approach-coping (engaging in behaviors that attend to the dysfunction) is always the best, but it really depends on the athlete and context. If attentional resources are already depleted in someone with high trait anxiety and self-consciousness, then avoidance-coping might be more beneficial because approach-coping would involve further taxing limited attentional bandwidth.

Researchers then took the athlete through a 6-week sport-specific mindfulness intervention.

The athlete improved his Sport Anxiety Scale (SAS), Self-Consciousness Scale (SCS), and Coping Style Inventory for Athletes (CSIA), along with scores on the Mindfulness Inventory for Sport (MIS).

Meaning?

That he was eventually classified as not susceptible to choking. Why? Recall that to be classified this way, there’s a threshold one must hit with scores to be classified.

We have a decent amount of evidence in sport and performance psychology that mindfulness helps athletes improve their attentional capabilities, cognitive, and somatic anxiety management.

As always with quality science,  it’s important to understand the limitations of research design and applicability and also not make grand-overaching claims before we go onto learning and application. With that said:

Mindfulness, at least in this athlete, improved:

The athlete was also able to use his mindfulness training to also PR at a track & field meet, even after he had a poor start. From James (the athlete): “I started out really bad, my first  throws were all under. . . . On the last throw I really felt I was pretty anxious—I just really wanted to get it and I couldn’t . . . the anxiety worked in my favor. . . . I slowed down and kind of grounded myself and then I PRed.”

If performers in your team or you individually struggle with consistently “choking” or underperforming, consider whether a mindfulness and acceptance-based intervention might be useful.

While this was a single case, the underlying mechanisms—attentional regulation, acceptance, anxiety reappraisal) are relevant across performance domains—specifically where pressure disrupts attention.

That’s it from us today.

See you next week.

Reference

Hussey, J., Weinberg, R., & Assar, A. (2020). Mindfulness in sport: An intervention for a choking-susceptible athlete. Case Studies in Sport and Exercise Psychology, 4(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1123/cssep.2019-0025