Sport Psychology Tactics - How Golf Athletes Use Brainspotting To Beat The Yips (AKA Mental Blocks)
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: Golf Athletes, The Yips & Why Mental Blocks Are Obviously Connected To Past Trauma
Golf has garnered a reputation as being a sport that truly tests an athlete’s psychological capabilities. People often talk about ‘the mental game’ of golf, which is followed by no shortage of experts and gurus ready to provide mental skills for golfers that can help them elevate their game to the next level. One topic that is consistently discussed within the world of golf is how to overcome the Yips (AKA mental blocks), and there is no shortage of false, misleading information on this topic.
There are too many misconceptions about what one should or shouldn’t do if they are plagued by this issue in their game. The truth is that there is a very simple answer for what the Yips is and how to deal with this mental obstacle. While I have talked about this in previous Training Reports, I want to take the time to review the following: in part I. I will define what the Yips actually is, in part II. I will review the neuroscience behind the yips, and in part III. I will provide interventions that can help with this issue.
Part I. Defining The Yips (AKA Mental Blocks) In Golf
There has been a plethora of research that has explored how golf athletes should deal with the Yips and how the sports psychology community should define what the Yips is. If you search on Google or YouTube about the Yips, you will be presented with a wide range of opinions that suggest the yips can be overcome through methods like ‘positive self-talk’, that the Yips is a neuromuscular issue or an involuntary muscle spasm. All of these opinions are 100% incorrect. In order for something to be considered ‘the yips’, it has to occur in a sports-performance situation. For instance, if this was a neuromuscular issue then we would most likely be seeing these symptoms in life outside of sport. So when we dig deeper into the neuroscience behind the Yips, it becomes easy to see how these mainstream sport psychology onions get this wrong.
Ultimately, the Yips are actually symptoms of unprocessed traumatic experiences from a golfer’s past life experiences or previous sports performances. This trauma can range from sports humiliations, to car accidents, surgical procedures, or interpersonal relationship conflict. In golf, this unprocessed trauma can present in many different ways. Common complaints that come up for golf athletes include being too tight on golf swings, hyper focusing on one spot for too long, overthinking shots, freezing before shots, extreme symptoms of anxiety, or dissociating during shots. But it’s not enough to just say that the yips is a product of trauma, we need to understand why that is the case. Let’s review the neuroscience behind this psychological phenomenon.
Part II. Golf Yips, Sport Psychologists & Neuropsychology
It hasn’t been until very recently that sport psychologists have begun to explore the neuroscience behind mental blocks. So far as we can tell, trauma occurs when an individual’s stress threshold capacity is overwhelmed by the extreme nature of the environment that they are operating in. The region of our brain that drives us into survival mode following an extreme challenge to our stress threshold floods the rest of our brain and body with stress hormones, rendering our logical brain useless during these moments. However, even when the extreme stress event has passed, our subcortical brain is still unaware of the event is truly over. Because of this, our subcortical brain will leave our brain and body in a hypervigilant state until the memory is processed through the correct approach. In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author goes into great detail to explain the neuroscience behind this process: ‘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. Mistakenly sport psychologists for the longest time have tried to deal with these trauma by providing coping skills that help athletes ‘manage’ the moment, but never truly address the underlying issue. It wasn’t until recently that a new psychotherapy was developed that can actually address the true nature of the Yips.
Part III. How Brainspotting Helps Golf Athletes Clear The Yips
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.
Brainspotting is a relatively new therapy technique that evolved from EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing). However, there is new research that is emerging that supports the treatment efficacy outcomes of Brainspotting. Regardless of the approach that athletes take when trying to work through mental blocks, it will be vital for them to select an approach that deals with the underlying issues rather than provide band-aid coping skills techniques. If you are interested in learning more about Brainspotting, use the link here to get more information!
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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