Mindfulness Interventions Positive Effects On Collegiate Student Athletes

Collegiate student-athletes face a unique set of stressors and stigmas that affect their personal, social, academic, and athletic lives. Over the past decade, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has paid increasing attention to student-athletes' mental health — likely due to an increase in suicide rates among student-athletes in college — by ensuring they have access to resources on campus and promoting mental health services available on campus and online (Vidic et al., 2018). With the goal of helping student-athletes cope with stress more effectively on and off the playing field, one technique that has generally demonstrated positive effects on psychological well-being and has gained attention in sports lately is mindfulness

Athletic Performance It is an unfortunate reality that poor individual performance can diminish feelings of self-worth in student-athletes, especially for those competing at higher levels to keep or earn athletic scholarships. One of the most common factors identified by student-athletes that hinders their performance is performance anxiety, which mindfulness-based interventions can help reduce, ultimately benefiting athletic performance (Ford et al., 2016; Gooding & Gardner, 2009; Hut et al., 2021; Jones et al., 2020). When it comes to directly influencing athletic performance, Gooding and Gardner (2009) found a positive and significant relationship between mindfulness and in-game free throw shooting percentage among Division I basketball players, which was more important than the length or consistency of their routine at practice. Furthermore, increasing mindfulness training in highly skilled and experienced athletes decreases their sport anxiety and enhances their performance (Gooding & Gardner, 2009; Hut et al., 2021). However, Hut et

The hypothesis was that participants from the experimental group, who watched a guided mindfulness meditation video, would score better on the WRAT5. The data showed that the experimental group performed better than the control group on the math computation and sentence comprehension subtests of the WRAT5. However, the results indicated that the mindfulness intervention did not significantly affect academic performance. As aforementioned in the Introduction, one of the major flaws that exists in the current literature is the use of pre- and post-tests. If pretesting reveals the purpose of a study to participants in ways that affect their post-test scores, especially on subjective measures of variables like sleep quality, pain, and stress, participants may get better because they expect to get better, or they may display participant bias and either subconsciously or consciously answer post-test questions in ways they think will satisfy the researcher(s). These effects are also possible if student-athletes talk to their teammates about their experiences while a study is ongoing. This is a major limitation because mindfulness-based interventions that seem to benefit student-athletes in terms of athletic performance, injury prevention and recovery, sleep, and stress levels may not be as effective as they seem. It is more likely, however, that