Examining the Role of Mindfulness in Stress Management: Interviews with Sports Coaches

Abstract

Despite working in a demanding, high-pressure environment and being accountable for their athletes’ performance, health, and well-being, sports coaches have not received the same level of attention as their athletes in the research literature (Carson et al., 2018). Recent research conducted by Pilkington et al. (2022) revealed that 40% of elite-level Olympic coaches reported mental health issues that would be best treated by a professional, yet only 6% of these coaches sought mental health support. In addition, Pilkington et al. (2022) also mentioned 14% of the elite-level coaches reported high to extremely high psychological distress, and rather than seek support for the significant issues they were facing – such as dissatisfaction with social support and life balance – the researchers discovered that coaches frequently turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms that are more socially acceptable, such as alcohol consumption.

Pearson & Baghurst (2020), wrote that “the majority of coaches have never received instruction or training on how to manage stress properly” (p. 134). Mindfulness (Norris et al., 2017) has been suggested as potential coping skill for coaches. A growing body of research demonstrates the efficacy of mindfulness interventions for improving anxiety (Fumero et al., 2020; Song & Lindquist, 2015), reducing stress (Goyal et al., 2014), decreasing depression and fatigue (Simpson et al., 2023), improving sleep and reducing rumination (Pawsey et al., 2021), and decreasing pain (Creswell, 2017). Engaging in mindfulness practices can assist sports coaches in managing their stress and serve as a means to replace certain informal and avoidance coping mechanisms they may rely on. Although there is limited research on the mindfulness practices of sports coaches across different levels of sports, the most significant observation is that none of the stress reduction interventions conducted with sports coaches involved the participation of coaches in developing the intervention. In addition, the majority of stress reduction interventions have been conducted on athlete samples (Longshore & Sachs, 2015; Lundqvist et al., 2018; Noetel et al., 2019), presenting an opportunity to contribute to a new field of research by investigating mindfulness and stress reduction for sports coaches.

The aim of the present study is to address the limitations of the existing literature on mindfulness-based interventions for sports coaches by (1) examining sports coaches’ existing stress-coping strategies and (2) identifying sports coaches perceived barriers and enabling factors to mindfulness practice as a self-care tool using the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF; Michie et al., 2005) to establish the foundations for developing an evidence and theory-based self-care intervention.