Sport Psychology Tactics - How Brainspotting Helps NASCAR Drivers Deal With Mental Blocks (AKA The Yips)
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: Sport Psychologists, NASCAR Drivers & Mental Blocks
NASCAR drivers approach races with a fighter-pilot mentality. They understand there are immense risks whenever they are about to race, yet maintain their focus on operating the race car to the highest ability possible. While most of the time there are no major issues that pop up during racing, occasionally drivers will experience symptoms that are consistent with a mental block (AKA the Yips). When this happens, NASCAR drivers will usually then seek help from a sport psychologist or an AASP Certified Mental Performance Consultant.
Most sport psychologists use standard approaches that are rooted in a technique called cognitive behavioral therapy. But some sport psychologists are beginning to operate on the cutting-edge of the field by using more advanced techniques to help drivers deal with these issues. For this Training Report I want to review what mental blocks typically look like in NASCAR in part I. In part II. I will explore the neuroscience behind these blocks, and in part III. I will discuss new techniques that these drivers use to work through these issues. Let’s first begin by defining what a mental block is.
Part I. Understanding What Mental Blocks Are For Motor-Sport Athletes
I have previously written about mental blocks in older Training Reports, but I want to review this topic through the lens of a NASCAR driver. From a clinical perspective, mental blocks have been defined as ‘sustained involuntary muscle contractions resulting in twisting, spasms, or flexing of a body part and can range from generalized, to focal, to task-specific’. Simply put, mental blocks are when athletes cannot move their body the way they want, despite no presence of an injury. What does this look like for NASCAR drivers? Examples can include difficulty with entry security, difficulty feeling how loose or tight to drive a car, pre-performance anxiety before races begin, difficulty executing simple decisions during a race, etc.
While it can be important to understand the symptoms of a mental block, it is even more important to understand why the mental block happens at all. The reasons for this can vary greatly, but a vast majority of the time mental blocks come from one of two places: unprocessed traumatic experiences or unchecked accumulation of stress stored in the body. Examples of this can include early childhood abuse, sports humiliations, car crashes, concussions and/or TBI’s, interpersonal relationship issues, overtraining syndrome, poor sleep performance, surgeries, etc. So how is it that unprocessed trauma or unchecked accumulation of stress can create mental blocks? Let’s take a look at the neuroscience to better understand this phenomena.
Part II. The Neuroscience Behind Mental Blocks For NASCAR Drivers
So what exactly is happening in the human brain that causes a mental block? One of my favorite descriptions on the neurological mechanisms’’ of a mental block comes from the book The Body Keeps The Score by Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk. The author states ‘‘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 author continues ‘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.’ Outside of non-motor sport related issues that NASCAR drivers experience, these performers are constantly dealing with the after effects of crashes that cause concussions/TBIs, performance pressure, & sports humiliations that may occur.
In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author provides us an explanation of the ‘sports perspective’ of psychological trauma in the following excerpt: ‘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.’ So knowing what we now know about this issue, what can drivers do to deal with this problem?
Part III. How Brainspotting Can Help NASCAR Drivers Overcome Mental Blocks
Brainspotting has become the new cutting-edge tool that athletes are turning to in order to overcome mental blocks. Brainspotting is a brain-based psychotherapy that evolved from EMDR. This therapeutic process has athletes process mental blocks and unresolved trauma in a way that helps them bypass the areas of the brain that are not involved with the creation of dysregulation behaviors, and directly access the areas of the brain that are. After all, since mental blocks are essentially symptoms of unprocessed trauma, it would only make sense that athletes would use tools to access the areas of the brain that are primarily involved with the creation of these issues.
Brainspotting has gained quite a reputation since it achieved notoriety in the field of sport psychology. With that being said, I always tell clients that Brainspotting can work for everybody but that does not mean it will work for everybody. There are many different reasons why this approach works well for some but not as much for others. With that being said based on my clinical experience working with athletes I have had more success helping performers such as NASCAR drivers clear mental blocks using this technique compared to other sport psychology interventions. Athletes that are interested in learning more about this approach can visit my website or go to the Brainspotting home page to get more information on this novel approach!
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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