Sport Psychology Tactics - What Are The Yips? Analysis & Treatment Interventions
About the Author
Ben Foodman is a licensed psychotherapist & performance specialist. He owns his private practice located in Charlotte North Carolina where he specializes in working with athletes to help them overcome mental blocks (the yips), PTSD, ADD / ADHD and achieve flow states through the techniques of Brainspotting & Neurofeedback. If you are interested in services, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!
Introduction: How Sport Psychologists Cure The Yips
I am fortunate enough to be able to work with a wide variety of elite performers at the collegiate, professional and Olympic level of sport performance. Out of this group of athletes, I work with baseball pitchers more than any other sport population. I don’t market my services specifically for baseball, but I have come to learn that the unique demands of the position oftentimes create a level of psychological stress that is very unique. Out of all the issues that baseball players seek consultation for, there is one in particular that has consistently affected this group of athletes the most, which is most commonly known as The Yips. Because this is such a common issue throughout the sport, I wanted to use this Training Report to explain what the Yips is, and how to treat it.
Quite simply, the yips is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when baseball players (and many other athlete groups) that have no identifiable physical limitations randomly and unexpectedly can no longer execute even simple sport performance movements. For example, a pitcher who had been performing at their baseline standard can’t even perform a simple throw to the catcher (e.g. the ball doesn’t even make it to the catcher, or it flies over the catcher). Usually these baseball players have been examined by the team physician, have no injuries but are unable to consistently complete simple throwing tasks. Because this event is ‘unexplainable’ they are then diagnosed by their coaches with the Yips and come to see a sport psychologist. Because this is such a common experience for Baseball players, I want to use this issue of the Training Report to cover several issues. For Part I. I will review how sport psychologists diagnose the Yips, for Part II. I will review the neuroscience behind the yips, for Part III. I will how trauma is connected to the Yips, for Part IV. I will review motor behavior approaches to help with the Yips, and for Part V. I will review how sport psychologists use Brainspotting to help potentially cure the yips.
Part I. How Sport Psychologists Diagnose The Yips
While the Yips is not an official diagnosis, over the years professionals within the field of sport psychology and mental health have continued to evolve on their opinions and understanding of this dilemma. Clinicians used to be settled on the idea that the Yips was actually conversion disorder and that simply employing cognitive behavioral distraction techniques was the best treatment approach. Fortunately a select group of performance psychology professionals have more effectively identified accurate scientific explanations for what is happening to athletes that experience the Yips. These factors include stored psychological stress, and poor implementation of motor behavior and skill acquisition principles. Let’s start off by exploring what stored psychological stress is.
Athletes are under immense psychological stress whenever they are training and competing. The stress response is exacerbated by the fact that sport environments are specifically designed to induce high levels of stress on both the brain and the rest of the body. If you have ever seen someone with the Yips (or you struggle with the Yips yourself), you are essentially watching a human brain experience an ‘error signal’ that manifests itself through disjointed athletic movements. What the exact cause of the Yips is will vary from individual to individual (e.g. unprocessed trauma, interpersonal relationship issues, financial stress, etc.). But the underlying ‘neuroscience’ is fairly consistent across the human species, and we can safely assume that an individual’s survival response system is (or has been) on full activation.
Part II. The Yips: What It Is & Understanding The Neuroscience Behind It
The human brain’s primary directive is to make sure that the host survives. Basic survival needs include things such as finding shelter, safety, food, sex, urinating, pooping and creating internal maps that help accomplish these objectives. If we are not accomplishing these survival needs (or unconsciously perceive ourselves as not surviving) then we begin to experience psychological disturbances. One of the driving forces for initiating a survival response are the primitive parts of our brain, the limbic system and the brain stem (a.k.a. our emotional brain). The emotional brain is first in line to access information input and then determines the severity of the information. If the information is not threatening, our pre-frontal cortex provides a rational response to the situation (it’s important to note that all athletes experience the Yips but the manifestation is different depending on the sport).
When we experience stress events that exceed our individual threshold, we then become at risk for developing the Yips or trauma based reactions. After the stress threshold has been crossed, the emotional brain activates alarm systems which trigger stress hormone production and sympathetic nervous system activation, placing the host in either a fight, flight or freeze response. If there is too much accumulation of psychological stress or a violent burst of stress experience, the brain will store this memory as a type of book-mark that expresses itself through a body sensation. Hence, when athletes such as baseball pitchers exhibit the Yips, there is a good chance that the body is alerting the host that the so called ‘book-mark’ is in need of processing and release.
Part III. A Deeper Understanding Of The Yips And Trauma
In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author goes into great detail to explain how the Yips is created and its’ connection to stress from sports-related events. The author describes as follows ‘In parallel fashion, the brain attempts to always move toward a state of psychological equilibrium. Over the course of our lives, we are exposed to a variety of life experiences, some positive, some neutral, and some negative. Through a natural assimilation process, the brain adaptively processes these experiences so they are constructively integrated. What is useful from the experience is learned and stored in the brain with the appropriate emotion and is available for future use. When an experience is successfully assimilated or digested it is stored in the brain with little attached intense emotion or physical sensation. When we recall such an incident, we don’t reexperience the old emotion or sensation with it. In this way we are informed by our past experiences and memories but not controlled by them and with sports our present athletic performances are not burdened by emotional or physical baggage from the past, only learned experience. By contrast, trauma or any strongly negatively charged experience isn’t adequately assimilated or processed. Instead, the upsetting incident remains stuck in the system in broken pieces’.
The author continues, ‘ The body instantly memorizes the physical experience of the trauma in exquisite detail, including the body sensations of the impact and pain, along with the associated sights, sounds, smells and tastes. The attached emotions and where they are felt in the body are frozen as well. The brain is overwhelmed and instead of getting digested, all of the information attached to the injury, including the negative thoughts is stored in the brain in exactly the same form it was initially experienced. Days, week, months or even years later when the athlete is in a situation reminiscent of the original trauma or experiences prolonged stress, the upsetting experience may be unconsciously activated, thus interfering with the performance of the moment. These components represent all of the sensory details from the earlier event that were frozen in the brain and body in their original disturbing state: the images, lighting, emotions, physical movements, sounds, or smells. The unique sensory details later returning to consciousness cause the performance disrupting symptoms so common in mental blocks.’
In the book The Body Keeps The Score, Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk goes even deeper explaining how the mechanisms of the brain respond to stress, which in turn create the symptoms of the Yips: the emotional brain has first dibs on interpreting incoming information. Sensory information about the environment and body state received by the eyes, ears, touch, kinesthetic sense, etc. converges on the thalamus where it is processed and then passed on to the amygdala to interpret its emotional significance. This occurs with lightning speed. If a threat is detected, the amygdala sends messages to the hypothalamus to secrete stress hormones to defend against that threat. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls this the low road. The second neural pathway, the high road, runs from the thalamus via the hippocampus and anterior cingulate, to the prefrontal cortex, the rational brain, for a conscious and much more refined interpretation. This takes several microseconds longer. If the interpretation of threat by the amygdala is too intense, and/or the filtering system from the higher areas of the brain are too weak, as often happens in PTSD, people lose control over automatic emergency response, like prolonged startle or aggressive outbursts.
In summary, the brain has built in mechanisms that create involuntary responses which are defensive in nature. Much of what Dr. Grand and Dr. Van Der Kolk discussed in their respective books, is how the human brain is sensitive to the environmental changes around us, and how even in an ‘untraumatized’ brain, we are always on the look out to protect our personal boundaries. When these boundaries are violated through traumatic experiences, we adapt and create new defense mechanisms. These neuroscience-based explanations give us a much clearer understanding of how the Yips is in fact a survival response, designed to protect the athlete by generating such an intense sensation of discomfort, that will compel the athlete to want to retreat from performance. Now that we have reviewed what psychological stress is, we need to understand how motor behavior principles affect the Yips.
Part IV. Sport Psychology & Motor Behavior Curing The Yips
Motor behavior & skill acquisition refers to the psychology of movement. Experts within this field essentially identify and apply the best learning and psychological performance practices that will help improve the efficiency of movement. An example of applying motor behavior & skill acquisition principles would be altering the practice environment to mimic the intensity and pace of a regular sport performance competition. During practice, many athletes place too much emphasis in breaking down technique in a systematic and regimented approach. Unfortunately, because a significant portion of athletes structure the majority of practice this way, they will not be prepared when competition arises (athletes can also have undiagnosed inefficient oculomotor functions, but we will cover that in a separate Training Report).
As previously mentioned, sport performance environments are specifically designed to be problem solving events that induce high volumes of psychological and physical stress upon its’ participants. While practice environments should offer opportunities to fine tune motor movements, they should also be structured in a way that allows athletes to experience game like scenarios. Athletes need to incorporate artificial ‘psychological stress’ repetitions as much as possible to minimize unfamiliar or recognizable situations. Any situation in which an athlete has no experience will require larger than normal amounts of mental energy to effectively process what is happening. If the particular event is too distressful, than the limbic system overrides prefrontal cortex operations and creates error signals and ‘survival-like’ responses.
Part V. How Sport Psychology Uses Brainspotting To Cure The Yips
In order to successfully help athletes achieve positive treatment outcomes with ‘The Yips’, a multi-facetted approach will be required that involves both clinical interventions as well as live practice modifications. First and foremost, athletes should undergo a thorough clinical and mental performance assessment that is conducted by a licensed clinician with advanced training in sport science. The athlete and clinician will need to rule out all underlying clinical issues and medical health concerns (e.g. bipolar disorder, depressive disorder, ADHD, poor oculomotor functioning, unprocessed trauma, history of surgeries, etc.). Once a diagnosis has been established, a triple segmented approach should be utilized to help the athlete move through this issue: establish therapeutic rapport between client and clinician; analyze athlete’s psychosomatic self-control abilities; utilize EMDR and/or Brainspotting to process mental blocks.
Simultaneously the athletes practice environment needs to be evaluated, and if necessary altered to incorporate more simulated stress events that mimic live competition scenarios. For instance, relief pitchers should utilize stand in batters while practicing in the bull pen to desensitize themselves to the experience of competing against live batters. Another example would be kickers in football using randomized times and positions on the field to practice field goals in the same way they would be asked to do so during a live performance. While extensive in nature, this approach is necessary as the Yips is a manifestation of subcortical brain activity, meaning that logic structured conversations won’t pierce the mental block that is preventing physical performance outcomes. Should athletes and coaches utilize this approach, they will be on their way towards mastery of ideal motor control function and improved confidence during intense performance!
Note To Reader:
If you are an athlete reading this segment of the TRAINING REPORT, hopefully this content was helpful! I put the Training Report together because I felt like many of the discussions on issues such as the Yips/mental blocks, strength training & other subject matter on athlete performance concepts were really missing the mark on these ideas (e.g. how trauma is the direct cause of the Yips). If you are interested in learning more, make sure to subscribe below for when I put out new content on issues related to sport psychology & athlete performance! Also, if you are looking to work with a mental performance specialist, you are in the right place! USE THIS LINK to reach out to me to see if my services are the right fit for your goals!
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