Sport Psychology Tactics - How To Overcome Anxiety With Brainspotting & Achieve Confidence In Sports
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 to stay calm under pressure in sports
I have said this before in multiple Training Report articles: all sports are problem solving experiences that are meant to induce both psychological and physical stress upon the participants. Usually, those who can solve the problem the most efficiently are those who can work through the pressure that happens in sports. However these experiences produce many frustrating issues for athletes such as pre-game jitters, performance anxiety, mental blocks, burnout, depression, trauma, the yips and a host of other issues that we are all somewhat familiar with.
When athletes go to work with sport psychologists or Certified Mental Performance Consultants (CMPCs) with the Association For Applied Sport Psychology (AASP), they often would rather focus on how to enhance confidence rather than deal with anxiety. But in my experience working with athletes you can’t achieve peak levels of confidence in sports without overcoming performance anxiety first. For this Training Report I want to explore how athletes can overcome anxiety in sports through Brainspotting, and why they have to do this first before focusing on achieving confidence. Let’s start by exploring more about how anxiety affects confidence in sports.
Part I. How Anxiety Affects Confidence In Sports
When athletes experience anxiety in sports, it can present itself in many different ways. Some athletes will experience increased heart rate, rapid breathing, excessive muscle tension, obsessive negative thinking patterns, an extreme fight, flight, freeze response, or temperature changes throughout the body. Many athletes try to brush this off as pre-game jitters and want to focus on strategies that will enhance confidence in sports. The problem with this approach is that the vast majority of the time, when athletes experience anxiety in sports it’s most likely because they are dealing with a mental block, AKA the Yips. Many coaches & sport psychologists make the mistake of thinking that mental blocks are the diagnosis, and that traditional sport psychology interventions such as self-talk, positive affirmations or even journaling will help deal with this issue. But the truth is that anxiety in sports is not the diagnosis, but rather a symptom of deep unprocessed trauma.
I have talked about this in previous Training Reports which I encourage you to read. Essentially, when we experience an excessively stressful event (e.g. sports-injury, car accident) our brain only partially processes the event, and will create behaviors such as anxiety to remind the athlete to finish processing the stressful event once they get through it. Which leads us to why athletes cannot focus on training confidence until they have processed the mental block first. Sports performances require that we give our body and our brain’s full focus capacity when performing. But if any part of our body or brain is still stuck on an unprocessed stress event, it will remind us of this through pregame anxiety symptoms. Furthermore, our the human brain is hardwired to process this pre-performance anxiety (AKA the Yips) in a very specific way, and no matter how much we try to ignore it, these pre-game jitters will not respond to repetitive self-talk.
Part II. The benefits of Brainspotting for athletes
Brainspotting is a brain-based psychotherapy that evolved from a sport psychology technique called Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR). This technique was developed by Dr. David Grand, and in Brainspotting we say ‘where you look, affects how you feel’. When athletes use Brainspotting, sport psychologists instruct athletes to find a relevant eye position in their field of vision connected to a body sensation that is around the issue the athlete wants to work on. In more simple terms, we believe that there are eye reflexes associated with mental blocks, and if we can identify those eye reflexes we can help athletes get rid of the anxiety and move right into confidence. So how does this work? When we have athletes process their anxiety by using their field of vision, we are bypassing the areas of the brain that are not involved in regulation and dysregulation behaviors (e.g. anxiety, mental blocks, etc.), and accessing the areas that are. When the athlete processes a stressful memory, their brain begins to access the areas where these ‘trauma capsule’ memories are stored.
By having athletes move their eyes in certain directions simultaneously, the optic nerve that passes through the limbic system is essentially scanning for the GPS coordinates of the anxiety memory file through the eye movement. This is a physiological process with psychological outcomes. But there is another way that I like to think about this. Anxiety is like a pitch black room. If this is your first time ever being in this pitch black room, you have no idea where you are in that room or what the dimensions of that room are. The ceiling could be 500 miles above your head, or the door to get out of the room could be 30 feet right in front of you. Brainspotting is the process of slowly feeling around the room, and creating a mental map. Once the mental map has been created, athletes usually overcome the anxiety and then begin to build confidence in sports performance. This technique is one of the most under-utilized methods in all of sport psychology, but has some of the best outcomes.
Part III. Consistently staying calm under pressure in sports
Over the years in my work with Major League Baseball players, NASCAR & Indy 500 drivers, Olympians and many talented athletes, I have always promoted the following core concept behind the benefits of Brainspotting for athletes: Where traditional sport psychologists give you coping skills to deal with anxiety, Brainspotting helps you get to the point where you don’t need to cope. When athletes have intense performances, I believe in order for them to achieve their highest levels of confidence in sports, they need to be doing as little over-thinking as possible.
Once athletes overcome their performance anxiety in sports through Brainspotting, I have found that on average they naturally feel confident in their performances. In summary, before athletes can begin to work on mental training to enhance their confidence and mental toughness, they need to work on their anxiety first. In my opinion by first directly addressing an athlete’s anxiety, the athlete will learn to become comfortable in discomfort and will then naturally begin to feel the emotions associated with peak athlete confidence which will translate to better sport performances!
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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