Misleading thoughts will pop into our minds and can distract and disrupt effective performance.

We do not control the thoughts, and connected emotions, that randomly appear.

Thoughts and emotions, both wanted and unwanted, can inform constructively or wreck performance.

“Today I escaped from the crush of circumstances, or better put, I threw them out, for the crush wasn’t from outside me but in my own assumptions.”

Great wisdom for athletes, performers, and all other human beings. Who came up with that? Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, somewhere between 170 and 180 AD. Yep, over 1,500 years before most of today’s sports and psychology science were created, and sage wisdom for people of any era.

It’s our assumptions, judgments, and opinions that create the bulk of emotional ‘crush,’ not the actual circumstances. A team is going to lose, a hockey goalie is going to let a puck slip by, and a ballerina is going to stumble.

As Epictetus, a Greek philosopher of over 1800 years ago, expressed it:

It isn't events themselves that disturb people, but only their judgments about them.

It isn't events themselves that disturb people, but only their judgments about them.

Exactly. It’s the mental judgments that emerge from those events that can be problematic. The thoughts, stories, etc., our minds feed us that are the real culprit. Performers able to effectively respond to that potentially distracting mind chatter and the emotion and body sensations that tag along with them are able to minimize ‘emotional crush,’ enabling their ability to move on and performing the skills and other things required of their endeavors.

The process and ability to do that is a major component of what contextual behavioral science (CBS) terms psychological flexibility (PF). Time for a closer look.

Psychological Flexibility Explained

There is a boatload of PF definitions. Getting past psychological mumbo jumbo for practical purposes, we’ll go with this one:

The ability to pursue valued goals despite the presence of distress.

The ability to pursue valued goals despite the presence of distress.

–Kashdan, Disabato, Goodman, Doorley, & McKnight (2020).

Dovetailing that with the insights of Aurelius and Epictetus, it’s the ability to pursue valued goals despite the presence of thoughts and emotions—pleasant or unpleasant. Wanted and desired feelings can both create a "crush" that can distract athletes, disrupting optimal performance.

Psychological flexibility is often connected with resilience, grit, and mental toughness, but as Ross White (2025) points out, those terms are misconstrued and lack scientific foundation. Psychological Flexibility, associated with acceptance and commitment training (ACT), is a research-backed concept and process for effectiveness.

Marcus Aurelius captured the essence of the pursuit of psychological flexibility, well before the advent of modern-day professionals, with this:

“We must corral not only unnecessary actions, but unnecessary thoughts, too, so needless acts don’t tag along after them.

“We must corral not only unnecessary actions, but unnecessary thoughts, too, so needless acts don’t tag along after them.

Judgments, opinions, and assumptions are going to show up. We don't control that. It’s what we do with it that results in a variety of responses. Disappointment when we fail, exuberance when we succeed, frustration and anger with disagreed coaching or officiating decisions are all normal emotional reactions. It’s how we respond to them that makes the difference between being effective or ineffective. Either workable or unworkable as ACT phrases it.

Those thought infused emotional moments are choice points. We can respond impulsively and make bad decisions or take a brief pause with a deep breath to reflectively notice, and make an informed, effective choice. What ACT calls committed action.

Take football quarterbacks as an example. They drop back, take a brief pause to notice, assess their surrounding circumstance, and then decide what to do with the ball. Do they have thoughts and emotions running through their minds? Of course they do!

Thoughts permeating the quarterback's mind of getting sacked by an aggressive 350-pound defensive end, and the fear connected with that, can result in the QB freezing up and getting sacked or if effectively utilized, scrambling out of the pocket and tossing a touchdown. Mind chatter centered on being a hero, and the accompanying excitement, about tossing a 50-yard touchdown bomb, can result in a game-winning score or throwing into quadruple pass coverage, resulting in a game-losing interception.

Good or bad results can happen, depending on whether the decisions stem from emotion induced impulse or wisely based with well-informed choice. The bottom line is that thoughts can inform but must be used wisely.

Athletic and other performances is much like driving a car. It requires rapt attention and wise committed actions. Allowing random thoughts and accompanying emotions to decide for you is like handing over the keys of your car to a 3-year-old. How would that work?

Make informed choices.

Thoughts, judgments, opinions, and the emotions that naturally accompany them, are going to pop into your mind. They can provide valued material that inform a productive decision. They can also result in impulsive poor choices.

What needs to be done is what ACT calls “cognitive defusion,” meaning the ability to separate oneself from bothersome and pleasant judgments, assumptions, opinions, etc., and accompanying emotions, that result in behaviors that work against effective outcomes.

The athlete who thinks “we got hosed by the refs” and impulsively curses at a referee or the team that gets caught up in the narrative “we’re going to win, we’re going to win,” becoming overexcited after hitting a three-point basketball shot, distracts them from playing the game and a focus on what’s important now—WIN—an acronym coined by famed college football coach Lou Holtz.

ACT has names for those two scenarios. Getting caught up on distressing thoughts and emotions is called “hooked” and being stuck on pleasant cognitions and feelings is termed “emotional clinging.”

Defusing—separating—from that distracting inside stuff requires exquisite awareness skills done with a breath-infused pause and informed noticing to enable the ability to choose what’s important, now. How to do that will be explored in a future post.

Meanwhile, be aware when you’re "hooked" or "emotionally clinging" so you can pivot out of that distracting stuff and perform the committed actions needed for what's important now.

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