Sport Psychology Tactics - The Power Of Brainspotting For Athletes: A New Technique For The Yips (AKA Mental Blocks) & Peak Performance
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: Athletes, Mental Blocks (A.K.A the Yips) & The Power Of Brainspotting
When athletes compete in sports, they are constantly being tested physically and mentally. These tests can range from intense practice sessions, transitioning from sport-related injuries, going through constant weight training, balancing sports with interpersonal relationship issues or the pressure to deliver results in sport performance situations. Over time, these experiences can have a negative cumulative effect and can lead to issues such as mental blocks, anxiety and depression.
Even though sports can be immensely beneficial to both individuals and communities the constant grind of sports stress-tests will inevitably increase the likelihood that athletes experience one or several of the previously mentioned psychological set backs. Fortunately there is a new cutting-edge psychotherapy technique that holds immense promise for helping athletes with these issues. This technique is called Brainspotting and for this Training Report we are going to review what it is and how it works. To further explore this tool, for part I. I will first review the connection between athletes, sports and trauma. For part II. I will review the neuroscience behind sports trauma. Finally for part III. I will discuss the technique of Brainspotting in more detail.
Part I. Athletes, Trauma & The Connection To Sport Performance
Most people do not understand how sports can be a traumatic experience. But talk to any athlete, and they will be quick to tell you about the immense stress that they are under and how these experiences can continue to stay with them throughout their lives. It also does not matter what level of competition, or what sport you compete in. Whether you are a NASCAR or Formula 1 driver, or a high school cross-country athlete, the repeated experiences of stress-tests can have a lasting impact on one’s psyche. Sports-related injuries such as ACL tears, concussions, sports humiliations, over-training syndrome, are just a few of the examples that can cause sport psychological trauma.
Sports psychological trauma will generate symptoms that most sport psychologists refer to as mental blocks (a.k.a. the yips). But traumatic experiences that athletes experience outside of sport can also be a direct cause of the yips (e.g. car accidents, past surgeries, abusive relationships). Regardless of the situation when athletes experience the yips, this can be a debilitating experience rendering athletes with feelings of helplessness. The reason the yips occur during sport performance is because the stress-test characteristics of sport-performances expose what is still ‘unresolved’ in the athlete’s mind. Let’s dive deeper into the neuroscience of sports trauma & mental blocks to better understand how this occurs.
Part II. The Neuroscience Behind Sports Trauma, Athletes & Mental Blocks
When we experience a traumatic event (such as a sport-related injury) that surpasses our individual stress threshold, our reptilian brain becomes highly responsive to the stress event, and it’s easy to see how athletes are susceptible to these types of experiences. In the book The Body Keeps The Score, author Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk beautifully illustrates how the brain functions during a trauma event, ‘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 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.’
David Grand explains this connection from a sports perspective in his book This Is Your Brain On Sports. 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.’ Many athletes will try to understand their trauma through logic based thinking, but what they fail to consider is that neuroscience research shows that very few psychological problems are the result of defects in understanding; most originate in pressures from deeper regions in the brain that drive our perception and attention. So how can Brainspotting help athletes move through this type of issue?
Part III. Brainspotting, Athletes & Sport Performance
As previously mentioned, certain structures in our brain are responsible for certain behaviors that we produce. Brainspotting offers us a way to specifically interact with the areas of the brain that are in distress. Essentially, this brain-based intervention allows us to bypass the areas of our brain that are not directly responsible for trauma-based responses, and allows us to access the areas that are. Try to think of your brain as if there are two roommates that live inside your mind: one of these roommates is like a college guidance counselor, and the other one is a blind-folded alligator. Would you be able to have a logic based conversation with a blind-folded alligator? Probably not. But Brainspotting offers us the opportunity to be able to have that dialogue.
So what can athletes expect when they go through a Brainspotting session? When an athlete goes to work with a Brainspotting sports therapist the client and clinician will select a specific issue that is causing the client distress. Examples of issues could be emotionally traumatic experiences like sports-related injuries, sports humiliations, or anxiety that comes up when an athlete visualizes an upcoming performance. From there the clinician will have the athlete hold their visual focus on a pointer and will work with the clinician to identify a reflex (e.g. usually a significant increase in the feelings of distress) and process from there. If you have more questions about Brainspotting, keep reading other Training Reports or feel free to use this link to reach out! Brainspotting is the perfect tool for athletes and worth learning more about!
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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