Dr Dobbin writes on Winter Olympics and Positive Mental Training

With the winter Olympics next month in Italy, I thought this might be a good time to reflect on Positive Mental Training which was developed from a programme for use by Athletes training for the Swedish Olympic team, applying these techniques to everyday life. The programme puts us in a special relaxed state and delivers a positive take on our lives, there is no need to concentrate, just follow the breathing instruction at the beginning and your mind can ‘let go’ of negative self-reflection.

I am no competitive sportsman, more the armchair variety, but as a GP working in Scotland, which at the start of the millennium had a rising incidence of self- harm, the highest in the UK, I became interested in various techniques for helping depression.  I attended a workshop run by a psychologist who was the Swedish Olympic team coach.  He was successfully using an audio-based Neurolinguistic Mental Training Programme (using spoken and positive visualisation word) to prepare the athletes for the Olympics which he found co-incidentally improved their Social, family and work lives.  I thought to adapt and try out the programme for my depressed patients. This was very successful and led to a clinical trial in primary care for depression which showed the programme was indeed effective for depression, particularly severe depression.  After a couple of  years of using our Positive Mental Training recordings as a family doctor to help my practices’ many depressed and anxious patients, I began teaching other GPs and primary care nurses to use the programme.  I ran a workshop for Community Psychiatric Nurses at our local psychiatric hospital in Edinburgh, and the audio programme became very popular, as much for male as for female patients. The link here, includes an interview with Kevin, talking about his path to recovery (see here Recovery and Sport: a Journey). He was very depressed, indeed suicidal, and was taken by his colleagues to the Edinburgh Psychiatric Hospital, where after assessment he was given the mental training programme.  He not only made an amazing recovery, feeling restored and re-invigorated but coincidentally within a month he became a Golf Champion and here he talks about visualising his shots.  He continues mentally fit and happy to this day. This demonstrates the amazing and surprising link between sports success and life success, that is, transferable skills, there are many crossovers between sport and social successes. Other videos are included in this link, including our animation, explaining how the programme works.

The UKs most successful winter Olympic sports athlete ever is Lissie Yarnold who won Gold medals at 2 consecutive winter Olympics, 2014 and 2018.  I had the good fortune to speak to Lissie in 2014 just after her victory in the ‘Skeleton’, a kind of hardcore tobogganing event where participants plunge down a slope at speeds of up to 90 mph.   Lissie had come to the attention of sports organisers after participating in a girls’ talent search workshop advertised in the University Library. She was identified as having potential for athletics and trained up. When training for the pole vault she developed a technique for describing her movements to her coach which enhanced her ability to visualise her performance.  Training for the Skeleton (tricky in the UK with no permanent ice run!) was done on a trolley in any available sloping area. I was very interested in her training technique at the 2014 Olympics particularly as the Skeleton contestants were only allowed to try the course once before the race, so once she had had her ‘run’ she visualised the course and as she did, she unconsciously  recalled the muscular sensations involved in each twist and turn, over and over, something she had learned to do while pole vaulting, and this prepared her for her run, see here.  She then repeated her victory in the 2018 Olympics, to become the only British person ever to achieve 2 gold medals in a winter Olympics, not bad for someone who trained on trolleys in car parks!

Another highly successful UK Olympic athlete (over 8 Gold medals) is the cyclist, Chris Hoy.  He would cycle the course the day before the event then go to bed and run over the course in his head at night often without sleep, and in the morning went to the event, sat in the saddle and just went into automatic pilot. In both these cases the athlete internalised the course and used their internal resources and experiences. These 2 huge successes are linked by both using positive visualisation, largely operating outside our conscious awareness, much like our patient.

Alistair Dobbin 2026