Sport Psychology Tactics - Race Car Athletes, Whiplash Syndrome & Aggression Mindset Training
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: The Psychology Of Racing
Race car drivers competing in motorsports series such as Rally, IndyCar and the NASCAR Cup Series need to utilize the most advanced training methodologies available. I have had the privilege of working with athletes from all of these series, helping them achieve peak psychological performance. Through my work with race car drivers and other experts within the field of human performance, I have found that while each athlete has unique approaches towards achieving success, there are some common sport psychology training approaches that are needed to be successful at auto racing.
One of these approaches includes training aggression mindsets. Most people (including many sport psychologists) are under the impression that being mentally aggressive is about having the correct insight to achieve this mindset. However, the fact of the matter is that training to be mentally aggressive is about understanding predictable mechanisms of the brain and leveraging those mechanisms to the driver’s advantage in auto racing. For this issue of the Training Report I am going to review the science behind training and aggressive mindset. Let’s first begin by defining what these terms actually mean.
Part I. Mental Strength, Emotional Management & Aggression
I have discussed how athletes can mentally train to be aggressive in previous Training Reports. While there is definitely overlap in terms of how all athlete populations can mentally train to be more aggressive, there are unique considerations for professional racecar drivers. First, we need to dispel some serious misunderstandings that sport psychologists have about aggression and how athletes can train this part of their mind. Most sport psychologists and performance coaches view aggression as an emotional state that can only be developed through insight. While there is no doubt that there are athletes who can develop this frame of mind through reframed ideas (e.g. creating perceptions that other athletes disrespect you in order to generate an anger response) achieving peak aggression mindsets has more to do with understanding the internal alarm system and somatic processing system of the brain.
Part of what inhibits sport psychology from advancing and helping more athletes achieve this is because there is so much emphasis on training athletes to start thinking ‘positively’ and that only positive thinking can help develop mental strength and emotional management proficiency. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this is an approach of suppression which more often than not can be a toxic form of psychotherapy. The fact of the matter is that we should be training athletes to become comfortable with discomfort, incorporate somatic-based interventions and focus on using desensitization protocols that remove obstacles preventing athletes from achieving truly helpful aggressive mental states. In order to do that we need to develop insight into what is known as trauma-informed psycho-physiotherapy, how this explains what is happening in the brain during auto racing, and what strategies athletes can use to harness helpful aggressive mental states.
Part II. The Science Of Aggression, Perceptual-Cognitive Expertise & Whiplash Syndrome
Perceptual cognition is defined as the ability to process information from the environment, integrate it with existing knowledge, and use that information to select and perform actions. Racecar drivers need to be able to do this at levels that exceed that of most sports populations, but they also need to do this at incredibly fast speeds. Based on my experience, when drivers can harness psychophysiological states that mirror aggression, they are more likely to both sharpen their focus and speed up their reaction time. This is because they are operating in a state that harnesses the benefits of a healthy sympathetic nervous system state. But the only way this works at a high level, is if the athlete is unencumbered with what physiotherapists and trauma-informed sport psychologists refer to as neuro-tags, which are essentially stored pockets of unprocessed trauma in the body. And when one considers the injury-profile of racecar driver history, it seems unlikely that they would be free of this issue. Why is this the case and why is this important?
First, it is important to understand that there are two specific types of aggression that frequently occur in sports: aggression responses based on fear and aggression responses based on confidence. Fear-based aggression is the body’s way of communicating to the racecar driver’s conscious mind that there is an unresolved issue that the brain must give attention to, and therefore cannot give full focus to the current performance. In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author goes into great detail to explain the neuroscience behind these Neurotag-based responses that are a result of sports-related injuries: 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 I explain these concepts to drivers, there is initial disappointment because they believe these ‘alarm-based’ responses cannot be overcome. However, once we are able to set these systems back to their baseline state, we are then able to train their brains to operate in healthy low-road processing and confidence-based aggression. But how do we do this? Let’s explore a common issue that I work on with drivers and one of the main techniques I use to help train their mind to the ideal psychological driving state.
Part III. How Brainspotting Creates Neurobehavioural Signatures Of Peak Performance
In my experience, almost all of the race car drivers I have worked with succesfully achieve high levels of aggression mindsets by removing a predictable mental block called Whiplash Syndrome. In the book The Body Bears The Burden by Robert Scaer, the author provides in great detail how we understand what Whiplash Syndrome is and how it affects individuals. The author states the following: Patients suffering from even a minor to moderate velocity rear-end MVA often suffer from a confusing variety of symptoms. Not only do they ‘have the typical complaints of headache and neck pain and stiffness, they also often complain of emotional symptoms, depression, and anxiety. Neurological complaints are common, ranging from dizziness and vertigo, ringing in the ears, blurred vision, fainting spells and balance difficulties to remarkable problems with thinking, concentration, and memory. Rather than making a steady recovery like a comparable sports-related accident, whiplash patients often pursue a slow, unpredictable course. They often take several years to improve, with episodic periods of worsening that don’t make sense when related to other types of soft tissue injuries. Long-term studies in whiplash patients in general show that a majority (70 to 80 percent) returned to normal activities in six months. On the other hand, in other studies, persistent chronic pain has been noted in 18 percent of victims at three years and up to 40 percent to ten years.
The most effective form of mental training that I use to help race car drivers overcome whiplash syndrome is Brainspotting. 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 Brainspot or what physiotherapists call the Neurotag) that has created conflict allowing individuals to move from needing to constantly cope, to not needing to cope at all. Brainspotting can be used to help anyone who is dealing with mental blocks, the yips, psychologically traumatic events, chronic pain issues from injuries, as well as individuals who are trying to access deeper levels of creativity or cultivating mental flow states. When we think about the potential issues that racecar drivers deal with such as concussions, TBIs, car crashes, witnessing colleagues crash, whiplash syndrome, sport humiliations, sports-injuries, out of sport trauma (e.g. car accidents, interpersonal relationship issues), it can be easy to see why this intervention pairs perfectly with this athlete population. Once the eye position is identified, the client will hold that eye position for either several minutes up to two hours potentially until the issue is resolved. By removing the side-effects of stored trauma, this will clear the way for the brain to move from fear-based aggression to confidence-based aggression. If you are interested in learning more about this approach, use this link to learn more!
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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