Investigating the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation and clinical hypnosis for injury-related pain management in competitive athletes: A replicated single-case experimental design

The two brief interventions (described below) being compared comprise five training sessions of 20 minutes in length, delivered across five consecutive days. Athletes are randomised to condition and will only receive one of the two trainings. The training sessions will be delivered as audio recordings via Qualtrics so that athletes can listen to the recordings (via headphones) in a location of their choice. Participants can choose to listen to the recordings either in a seated, lying down or even standing position, whatever is most comfortable to them. Participants will also have access to the recordings during the post-training maintenance period. The length of the baseline period and maintenance period will be randomly assigned as either 5-days, 10-days, or 15-days in length such that the total duration of participation for all participants totals 25 days. The treatment period immediately follows the last day of baseline monitoring, and the maintenance period immediately follows the last day of treatment. Adherence will be tracked by the researchers via a function on Qualtrics. Both interventions will be recorded by A/Prof Melissa Day, a endorsed Clinical and Health Psychologist, with the same recording listened to by participants in each condition on each day of treatment and following treatment. Condition 1: Mindfulness Meditation (MM): The MM recording will be adapted from Day (2017). It will first instruct the listener to anchor attention on the breath while being mindfully aware of any physical sensations that arise throughout the body. The listener is then encouraged to explore sensations with non-judgmental attentiveness, without attempts to change the sensation in any way. This will implicitly provide training in mindful acceptance. Finally, the listener is instructed to simply label any thinking that arises as "thinking", before returning to the object of the meditation. Condition 2: Clinical Hypnosis (HYP): The HYP recording will be adapted from Jensen (2011). It will take the listener through a standardised self-hypnosis practice that includes an induction, followed by tailored suggestions. Specifically, the HYP session aims to take the listener through four basic ideas: 1) an induction to get the individual into a state of readiness to accept new ideas; 2) instructions to go to a favourite place to deepen the induction and provide a context for feeling heat while being relaxed; 3) linking suggestions for reducing automatic behavioural inhibition system and behavioural activation system (BIS-BAS) activation in response to stressors and enhancing awareness of when to activate each system; 4) suggestions that target enhancing self-confidence in pain management, well-being and the rehabilitation process; and 5) alerting.