Enhancing Sports Performance With Hypnosis: An Ode for Tiger Woods
Leonard S. Milling and Elizabeth S. Randazzo University of Hartford
We present a comprehensive methodological review of controlled and single-case design studies of the effectiveness of hypnosis for enhancing sports performance. To be included in the review, controlled studies were required to use a between-subjects or mixed model design in which hypnosis was compared with a control condition or alternative intervention to improve sports performance. Single case-design studies were required to incorporate baseline and intervention phases, with multiple assessment points during the baseline phase to establish a stable trend for the target behavior. An exhaustive search of the PsycINFO database identified 17 studies satisfying these criteria. Hypnosis was shown to be effective for improving performance in a variety of sports, with the strongest support for enhancement of basketball, golf, soccer, and badminton skills. Common methodological limitations in the reviewed studies included a failure to fully specify the demographic characteristics of samples, to utilize a treatment manual, and to assess relations between hypnotic suggestibility and outcome. Two hypnotic interventions met criteria as possibly efficacious empirically supported therapies, thereby indicating that hypnosis can be a way of engaging in evidence-based practice in sports psychology. Practitioners who work with athletes may wish to consider the potential of hypnosis for enhancing sports performance.
Keywords: hypnosis, sports performance, effectiveness, methodology, empirically supported therapies
Competitive sports are played mainly on a five-and-a- half-inch court-the space between your ears.
—Bobby Jones, Co-Founder of the Masters Tournament
Since becoming a professional golfer in 1996, Tiger Woods has won 105 tournaments including four Masters Tournaments, four PGA Championships, three U.S. Open Champion- ships, and three British Open Championships, thereby cementing his legacy as one of the greatest golfers in the history of the game and earning him prize money of more than $132 millionworldwide(http://www.tigerwoods.com/ about-tiger). According to Forbes magazine, in
2010–2011, the average annual salaries of pro- fessional athletes were $1.9 million in the Na- tional Football League, $2.4 million in the Na- tional Hockey League, $3.2 million in Major League Baseball, and $5.15 million in the Na- tional Basketball Association (http://www .forbes.com). However, the excitement and challenge of competition are frequently men- tioned as the primary motivations for youth, high school, collegiate, and even elite profes- sional athletes. For example, Lionel Messi, soc- cer forward for FC Barcelona and captain of the Argentina National Team, has said, “my moti- vation comes from playing the game I love. If I was not paid to be a professional footballer, I would willingly play for nothing” (Duda & Treasure, 2015, p. 66). Clearly, the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for success as an athlete can be substantial.
The pressure on athletes to gain even a small advantage over competitors is often enormous. In the major U.S. sports (e.g., basketball, foot- ball, baseball, hockey, soccer), only about 6% of high school athletes go on to play in college,
This article was published Online First May 25, 2015. Leonard S. Milling and Elizabeth S. Randazzo, Depart-
ment of Psychology, University of Hartford. We thank Taryn Brandt and Dawn Neese for their helpful
suggestions in carrying out this project. Correspondence concerning this article should be ad-
dressed to Leonard S. Milling, Department of Psychology, University of Hartford, 200 Bloomfield Avenue, West Hart- ford, CT 06117. E-mail: milling@hartford.edu
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Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice © 2015 American Psychological Association 2016, Vol. 3, No. 1, 45–60 2326-5523/16/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/cns0000055
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and less than 2% of NCAA student-athletes later compete at the professional level (http:// www.ncaa.org). The boundary between success and failure is sometimes quite narrow. For ex- ample, at the 2008 Summer Olympics, U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps won an unprece- dented eight gold medals. Across the eight events, his average margin of victory relative to each of the 4th place finishers (who did not receive a medal of any kind) was a mere 3.84 s. Indeed, in the 100 m butterfly, the margin of victory over the 4th place finisher was a razor- thin .55 s. In view of the tremendous incentives for success and the fierce level of competition, it should come as no surprise that athletes often seek out every possible way of maximizing their abilities and performance.
Psychological Skills Training and Sports Performance
A variety of psychological interventions are commonly used to enhance sports perfor- mance, including visualization, self-talk, arousal regulation, and goal setting (Whelan, Mahoney, & Meyers, 1991). Visualization is sometimes referred to as imagery or mental rehearsal. It involves cognitively creating a new experience or recreating a past experi- ence to either practice a specific sport skill or to prepare immediately before competition (Vealey & Forlenza, 2015). Self-talk, or self- instructional training, is concerned with mod- ifying the ongoing thoughts and internal con- versations that athletes experience during preparation and competition, thereby reduc- ing negative cognitions and increasing confi- dence (Williams, Zinsser, & Bunker, 2015). Arousal regulation is a used to produce the optimal level of arousal, which might include arousal energizing techniques to increase arousal levels, as well as relaxation tech- niques to decrease arousal and anxiety (Gould & Udry, 1994). Finally, goal setting involves helping the athlete to establish specific, mea- surable, and realistic performance goals of moderate difficulty that result in improved performance (Gould, 2015). Evidence of the effectiveness of these interventions is mixed, but generally supportive (Gardner & Moore, 2006).
Hypnotic Enhancement of Sports Performance
Another psychological intervention that has been used to enhance sports performance is hypnosis. There are many definitions of hypno- sis, but we prefer the following one because of its clarity: “Hypnosis is a procedure during which a health professional or researcher sug- gests that a client, patient, or subject experience changes in sensations, perceptions, thoughts, or behavior” (Kirsch, 1994, p. 143). Another at- tractive feature of this definition is its neutrality with regard to long-standing, unresolved theo- retical controversies, such as whether people enter an altered state of consciousness when they are hypnotized (Kirsch & Lynn, 1995). According to Hilgard (1965), every hypnotic procedure consists of a hypnotic induction and a suggestion. The induction customarily consists of instructions for relaxation, along with state- ments that the person is becoming hypnotized. Thereafter, a suggestion or suggestions invite the person to experience some imaginary state of affairs (e.g., “you are feeling calm, confident, and powerful as you imagine yourself approach- ing the ball to take the penalty kick”). When a suggestion is delivered without a hypnotic in- duction beforehand, it is referred to as a non- hypnotic or imaginative suggestion (Kirsch, 1997a).
There are numerous anecdotal reports of well-known athletes using hypnosis to enhance sports performance. Undoubtedly, some of these reports involved the use of visualization, which was then inaccurately labeled as hypnosis in the popular media. Although hypnosis and visualization share some common elements, they are not the same. For example, visualiza- tion is not preceded by a hypnotic induction. Thus, visualization would be more similar to use of imaginative suggestions. However, there do appear to be some instances in which well- known athletes used hypnosis to enhance per- formance (e.g., Tiger Woods, Nolan Ryan). For example, in his biography of Tiger Woods, Lon- dino (2010) describes how a sports psychologist worked with Tiger Woods when he was a teen- ager, using hypnosis to sharpen his ability to focus in the moment on the golf course.
Empirical research has shown that hypnosis is a very effective intervention for a variety of problems and symptoms, including pain (Mont-
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