Sport Psychology Tactics - How Professional Racecar Drivers In Motorsports & NASCAR Athletes Beat 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: Professional Racecar Drivers, NASCAR Athletes & Sport Psychology
NASCAR athletes and professional racecar drivers in motorsports face a wide variety of obstacles. Because the performance demands are so intense for these sports, drivers need to spend excessive amounts of time preparing their bodies and minds for racing competitions. While there are many different obstacles along the way that professional racecar drivers will deal with, one common issue that is not frequently discussed is when these athletes encounter a mental block, also most commonly known as the Yips.
For this issue of the Training Report I want to focus on explaining how mental blocks affect this athlete population. In part I. we will discuss common examples of mental blocks that come up for drivers during competition, in part II. we will review what exactly is happening in the brain that causes the Yips, and in part III. we will review strategies that professional race car drivers such as NASCAR athletes have used to overcome these obstacles. Let’s first dive into how the experiences in motorsports can cause these issues and what they look like.
Part I. How Motorsports Mentally Affects NASCAR Drivers & Professional Motorsport Athletes
The pressures that come with being a professional racecar driver in NASCAR and other motorsport promotions are unlike any other sport. There are multiple physical, mental and sociological pressures that an athlete must overcome not only during a race but both prior and after a race as well. Professional racecar drivers spend intense hours engaged in advanced strength & conditioning protocols, practicing for hours on simulators, consulting with nutritionists to maximize on electrolyte and nutrition performance, and have to constantly manage the expectations of their sponsors.
But even with all of the preparation and an army of sport science personnel supporting the driver, this oftentimes will not be enough to permanently overcome the potential of experiencing a mental block (AKA the Yips). Because professional racecar drivers are subject to high percentage chances of experiencing what could be considered traumatic experiences (e.g. concussions sustained from car crashes, body trauma from crashes or training, sports humiliations viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, abusive coaches or fans, constant pressure to perform, etc.) the athlete’s body has built in defense mechanisms to protect itself.
Part II. What Happens In A Professional Racecar Driver & NASCAR Athlete’s Brain During Mental Block (Yips) Genesis
In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author goes into great detail to explain the neuroscience behind the Yips and how these defense mechanisms that the body creates is connected 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.’ When we understand what the brain goes through during a stress event, it becomes easier to understand how experiences motorsports can create the yips. Let’s now explore a specific intervention that NASCAR athletes and professional racecar drivers can use to deal with mental blocks: Brainspotting.
Part III. How Professional Racecar Drivers & NASCAR Athletes In Motorsports Can Beat Mental Blocks (AKA The Yips)
I have previously discussed different methods that motorsport athletes have used to overcome the Yips. One of my favorite interventions is called Brainspotting, which is a modified version of EMDR. The sport psychology community is becoming more curious about this intervention because of both the success that Brainspotting is having in working with athlete populations and also because it is specifically tailored to deal with athlete mental blocks. Developed in the late 1990s by Dr. David Grand, he discovered the technique while helping an Olympic ice skater overcome the Yips. Using EMDR, he noticed that during this protocol there were specific eye movement patterns that appeared to be associated with certain traumatic memories. Following this experience, he developed Brainspotting which is a modified version of EMDR. So why is this important when we are talking about using this as a possible intervention?
In Brainspotting we say ‘where you look affects how you feel’ and through this process drivers 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 still very new and needs more research, which is a valid criticism of the intervention. But it is rooted in EMDR principles and its’ founder is an EMDR trainer, which makes this tool a plausible intervention to help drivers overcome these obstacles. This is important because EMDR has a plethora of research that strongly supports its’ efficacy. Through my work with professional racecar drivers, I have had tremendous success helping athletes clear their symptoms of the Yips using Brainspotting! 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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