Sport Psychology Tactics - How Brainspotting Helps Actors & Musicians Break Mental Blocks And Enhance Creativity
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: Understanding How Mental Blocks (AKA The Yips) Affects Creativity For Professionals In the Performing Arts
Professionals in the performing arts are athletes in their own craft. When I say this to people there is initially confusion around this issue. People often ask, ‘how are actors or musicians anything like athletes?’. When an individual is engaged in the performing arts space, they are experiencing the exact same things that athletes experience in the sports performance environment: a stress test. As a result, these repeated exposures to the stress test of the performing arts can cause an artist’s worst nightmare: a mental block.
Mental blocks prevent individuals in the performing arts from achieving peak creativity, which is critical for their livelihood. Because this is such a misunderstood issue I wanted to use this issue of the Training Report to review this problem. In part I. we will review common mental blocks in the performing arts. For part II. we will review the neuroscience that explains this issue. Finally in part III. we will review interventions that professionals in this space can use to overcome mental blocks and regain creativity. Let’s begin by reviewing common mental blocks in the performing arts.
Part I. Common Mental Blocks In The Performing Arts
Whether you are a musician, dancer, actor or any type of professional in the performing arts, you will be at an increased risk for experiencing a mental block due to the high stress that can be involved with performances. Common examples of mental blocks that occur in the performing arts space include the following but are not limited to freeze responses, randomly being unable to play instruments, hyper focusing, chronically being unable to move smoothly, high bouts of anxiety, etc. All of these experiences prevent peak performances.
Professionals in the performing arts space commonly ask what is causing these issues and how does one overcome them? Most sport psychologists will try to explain this issue through what is known as a Cognitive Behavioral Framework (CBT), essentially arguing that these behaviors are just temporary lapses in focus and can be ‘cured’ through continuous exposure to more logical and positive-based reframes. This approach and perspective couldn’t be further from the truth. These mental blocks are actually the manifestation of unprocessed trauma.
Part II. How The Top Sport Psychologists Explain The Neuroscience Behind Mental Blocks
In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author goes into great detail to explain the neuroscience behind mental blocks and how they are connected to unprocessed trauma. 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.’ Now that we have a better understanding of some of the neuroscience behind mental blocks (AKA The Yips), let’s explore a specific intervention that performing arts professionals can use to clear mental blocks and enhance creativity: Brainspotting.
Part III. How Sport Psychologists Use Brainspotting To Help Clear Mental Blocks & Enhance Creativity
Creatives within the performing arts will have many options available in terms of helping them overcome their mental blocks to get closer to creativity. You could not name one intervention that I have not used when working with professionals in the performance arts space: cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, rational emotive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, neurofeedback, biofeedback, etc. By far and away my favorite intervention to use is Brainspotting. Brainspotting is a brain-based psychotherapy technique that utilizes the client’s field of vision to identify unresolved psychological issues.
In Brainspotting we say ‘where you look affects how you feel’ and through this process clients have the ability to access the parts of their brain that traditional psychotherapy approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy are unable to do. This results in clients being able to directly address the true ‘underlying’ issue (which we refer to as a Brain Spot) that has created conflict allowing individuals to move from needing to constantly cope, to not needing to cope at all. Through my work with professionals in the performance arts, I have had tremendous success helping these individuals clear their mental blocks which ultimately helped them regain their creativity! If you would like to learn more, use this link!
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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