A pilot study on the effect of Mindfulness PLUS PPDs on the performances of athletes.

Peter Chappell, Onno Nieveen; 2011.

Abstract

Listening to PPDs has a profound effect on the mental and physical performances of athletes. PPDs are mp3 files with subtle resonance-based information that is embedded into sea wave sounds you listen to. PPDs are created to impact body cells in a way they can resolve/process the information intelligently.

Analysing the results of all array data shows that several different mental and physical factors were strongly affected. Changes in sleep, energy level, self esteem, learning capacity, concentration / focus during training and last but not least increased sport performances were observed among the participants.

It seems that specific issues of the participants in their daily (sports) life has an relation with the outcome of the pilot.
For exemple, an athlete with choking potential showed progress in that realm, while others with eating problem got more control over their appetite.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Analysing the generated data the following picture comes up for athletes after listening to PPDs:

• Improvement in mental wellbeing
• Consistent increased performance (in relation to previous period)
• Better focus and concentration
• Less attention and time spend on their mistakes / failures
• Better sleep and / or wakening up refreshed
• Increased speed in some way relevant to their performance
• Increased creativity and enjoyment
• Increased energy in their sport activities
• Improved eating habits
• Improved learning capacities both in their personal and sport life

Introduction

1. Humans in hyper alert state
The inner human situation at the beginning of this 21e century is the result of our history. When studying the last hundred years one can easily come to the point this part of history is one of extraordinary and systematic violence against the human race on a scale possibly never seen before. Around a hundreds of millions of people were deliberately killed and exterminated, and thousands of millions people have been intimidated and threatened by this process. Most people are still not aware of the scale of what happened (and still is happening!) because there has been a long period of denial lasting 50 to 100 years. Many countries ruled by dictators simply rewrote the history books. Other democratic countries chose consciously to hide it and get on with living, or did not think it relevant because of emotional illiteracy. These effects are inherited by what is now known as the Epigenetic process.

The result is that the survival instincts in every human being are on chronic alert. They are chronically over activated, and everyone is living as if their life is on edge, death is just round the corner, starvation could happen at any moment…. Whatever it is, it is about to happen.
Survival instincts underlie normal emotions and limiting beliefs and magnify them. The result is that people have become overwhelmed by the intensity of their emotions. It limits their life needlessly.

These hyperactive survival instincts are creating hugely increased emotional responses in us, as we feel unsafe in all aspects of our lives. Without our having any knowledge why we have these strong powerful feelings inside us, we are experiencing inner violence or the opposite: feeling threatened, intimidated by authorities, and so on.

2. Effects through the generations
There is a process by which hyped up survival instincts are passed down through the generations.
People mostly do not realise that this even happens. Parents pass this on to their children unknowingly and un-intentionally by the way they parent.
In hundreds of little ways, parents, while intending to be loving, kind and compassionate, also over-control, shut down, repress, and scare their children every hour of every day and teach them to internalise the fear and violence and, consequently, over activate the child’s survival instincts. This goes on generation after generation. The consequence is that people in general are underperforming in every field of human endeavour and personally in every way.

Essentially, they have been intimidated into acting in a cowardly, limited, restricted way and are completely scared of living their dreams. As a reaction they are over-compensating, hard-driving, threatening, uncaring, money orientated, and so on. Maybe 50% of us are also under breathing, which is the result of the freeze survival instinct, which make us ‘smaller’ than our potential. In sports this seriously limits performance.
To resolve this we need to resolve the hyped up survival instincts within the human race and inside almost every human being. Resonance is the technique to do this.

3. How and why Mindfulness PLUS PPDs Work
Resonance works like this. It amplifies the problem briefly for a few milliseconds in a safe and specific way. It causes the survival instinct – for example food, the idea of starving to death, which is probably the root of all eating disorders and all overeating – to increase. By amplifying it briefly, the natural pattern recognising processing faculties in the brain register it and see that the response is unrealistic and does not correspond to reality.
The natural processing then goes to work and files away anything that the resonance shows to be useful, resolving, dissolving and binning the rest. It is all done within milliseconds. It sees the food situation is OK, not urgent, and not likely to be a problem — there is no shortage, the shops and the fridge are still full — and effectively bins this idea by resolving it internally. This is how resonance works. If this process is done systematically using different specific resonances, the survival instincts calm down gradually.

For example, when a parent of a young child who is crying reacts inside to that crying by feeling irritation, this is the parent’s survival instincts kicking in. The parent cannot act with compassion until their own survival instincts are calmed down. Until then, the parent will be compelled to act as if survival is at stake, unwittingly teaching their child that crying is related to survival rather than to just getting over a trivial scrape. Perhaps the parent is being only a tiny bit threatening to their child about the crying, but to the child, being completely dependant on the parent, it literally scares the child to death, and he stops crying. He or she comes to link fear (of survival) with crying.

The overactive survival instincts show up not as core basic survival instincts, but as a large variety of limiting personal traits. There is this endless range of limiting and restricting thoughts and emotions of the “I can’t do this” variety. It might be as simple as being too nervous to perform in front a school class; it might be about being too scared of making a mistake in an exam or at a sport competition; it might also be about doing the opposite: acting forcibly, not caring, forcing an issue, cheating, or lying.

It is either underplaying your ability or overreacting and overplaying it, but both reactions are just as bad, as they limit personal ability. Athletes for example can push themselves over the top, and get injured, or show ADHD symptoms or are too nervous, freeze, under breathe and do not perform well during important games / finals.  Either gets in the way of achieving one’s personal best.

4. Innovative new concept: Mindfulness PLUS PPD
Talk therapies, coaching, training and other therapies of this kind work mainly on the frontal lobes of the brain: on logic, reasoning, feelings and emotions. They do not (actually) reach the survival instincts and survival memories. Survival instincts reside in our primitive animal brain.
There are five basic instincts called the 5Fs: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Food, Fsex.

From the primitive animal point of view, if you meet another creature, you either fight it, kill it and eat it, escape, freeze (in the hope that the other does not see you), or have sex with it. We all have versions of these responses. This part of the brain does not respond to being talked to. It is deeply instinctive, and reasoning simply does not work. This is why ‘hide and seek’ is such a popular kids game. It is why teenagers dress up to go out. That is why we need new tools, or deeper tools, to deal with this.

PPDs use resonance in a systematic manner to work on the survival instincts. They are an innovative new concept and way of applying resonance. It is called PPD Resonance Technology. Because of recent advances in e-technology, brain science, etc. their development became technically possible.

Materials & method

During a 4 month test period a group of athletes were listening to a PPD sequence on a daily basis. The athletes were competing at Olympic level and in (inter)national competitions. They were active in different sports: arching, heptathlon, wrestling, sprinting, hammer throwing, long-distance running and high jumping.
All the participants were active as individual athletes, chosen as they have definite performance markers like, running time, length or height of jump, score, etc.
Each athlete had his/her own personalised PPD set to listen to. Every PPD was listened to for minimum 9 days. No athletes involved had any experience with PPDs before and in some cases there was a strong disbelief that PPDs could achieve anything. The results were scored in a spectrum covering a normal life: physical and mental situation, results shown at training and during competition. The results were based on interviews / question lists filled out by the athletes and trainers. The total number of athletes in this pilot was 10. Everybody was given PPDs with the active resonance frequencies included. In this pilot no placebo’s were used.

Results and discussion

It showed that almost all the athletes were effected by listening to the PPDs, and these results are in different parts of the spectrum of their lives.

1. Personal Bests
60% of those who could achieve personal bests in a clearly measurable way did so during the period that they were listening to PPDs.

A few examples:
– an international-level hammer thrower increased her throwing distance best from the previous three years by 64 cm (from 61,11 m to 61,75 m) and this was sustained in every throw, whether she was tired or not.
– an heptathalon athlete brought her best from 181 cm to 184 cm (+ 1,6%)
– a sprinter improved on her 100m from 12:96 to 12:61 (- 2,7%) and her 200m from 26:59 to 25:97 (- 2,3%)
– another sprinter got her best on the 100 metres from 12,54 to 12,46 (-0,6%)

2. Significant performance improvements
Many of them had consistently increased performance and consistent personal bests compared to previous periods. Even if they did not achieve personal bests, their performance steadily increased, competition by competition, in clearly obvious ways.

For example, in archery, the arrows were all more tightly clustered around the bull’s-eye consistently. Later, the archer shot up from nowhere in the rankings to No. 2 in the world while still listening to PPDs.

3. Calming down
In the final report athletes stated that they calmed down and subsequently:
– their focus and concentration improved, one of the clear reasons they performed better
– they paid less attention to their mistakes,
– were less stressed and nervous,
– less distracted by others, and could concentrate more intensely upon the task
– less time was spent ruminating over mistakes.

4. Better sleep and/or waking up refreshed
We could generalise that from better sleep, they were more deeply refreshed and able to face the day better.
One athlete, for example, who all his life had taken an hour to wake up, started consistently waking up refreshed to the amazement of his mother. This was a completely new experience for both.

5. Increased Speed
Almost all of the athletes reported an increase in speed in some way relevant to their performance.
For example, the paralympic archer could shoot faster, the time of aiming and hesitation reduced to good effect.

6. Increased Creativity and Enjoyment
In some cases, creativity markedly improved, and athletes reported
– developing new moves or remembering old ones
– performing just for fun
– enjoying their sport more
Coaches reported
– becoming more creative in their coaching
– enjoying it a lot more, as did their students.

7. Increased Energy
Almost all of the athletes reported significant increases in energy in their sport activities and also in their personal lives.

8. Time Management
Athletes reported:
– being able to do more things within the time available.
– taking up new activities like learning a language;
One athlete, for example, added another job to her schedule – training kids – and, to her surprise, still being able to organize her time effectively.

9. Improved eating habits
Several sports people reported improved eating habits as well as better control over their appetite.

10. Improved learning
Naturally, with the increased concentration in their personal lives, students also increased their ability to learn. It was very common to report enhanced learning ability and passing exams with greater calmness, composure, and so on.
In one extreme case, one athlete went from reading 10 books in his lifetime to reading three in a month while listening to PPDs because he could concentrate so much better.

Discussion

In the set up of the pilot there is a group of individual athletes with a differentiation in the type of sport. One of the next steps is to research the influence on a group of athletes within the same sport competition. Another step is testing different age groups within that one sport. One can suspect that there are differences in the impact of PPDs between different type of sports. Some sports need technical focus (athletic, speed skating), others ask for fysical and mental endurance (marathon). The is a group of sports that need extreme ability in terms of concentration (archery, billiard), or have great public interest (tennis, football, golf) and therefore stress is a major issue.
As a general remark one can say that PPDs are designed to influence the reptilian brain, which is regulating important basic parts of our life. Logically, the effect of PPDs is seen in many different (secondary) parts of life. Different people have different focus and issues in their lives.
Analysing the generated data the following picture comes up for athletes after listening to PPDs:

• Improvement in mental wellbeing
• Consistent increased performance (in relation to previous period)
• Better focus and concentration
• Less attention and time spend on their mistakes / failures
• Better sleep and / or wakening up refreshed
• Increased speed in some way relevant to their performance
• Increased creativity and enjoyment
• Increased energy in their sport activities
• Improved eating habits
• Improved learning capacities both in their personal and sport life

In parallel research done, PPDs were tested on children diagnosed with ADHD, people suffering from physical injuries, PTSS victims and business executives.
In most recent (pre-pilot) research done PPDs are listened to by grown ups while being in a fMRI scan. The fMRI outcome shows that people calmed down, when listening to a specific calming PPD. Simultaneously, the area of the brain connected to facial recognition / awareness was activated.