Sport Psychology Tactics - Overcome Softball Throwing 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: Hiding From The Yips Will Only Make It Worse
I have lived in the southeast for my entire life, so one thing I can say for sure is that I have first hand experience seeing how intense softball competition is. For instance, people often associate the SEC (Southeastern Conference) as one of the most competitive American football conferences in the country. But what many people do not know is that the SEC is also one of the most brutal softball conferences as well. But regardless if an athlete competes in softball at the collegiate or high school level, the sport requires full mental and physical focus from the athlete to have success. However the pursuit of this success can oftentimes have a negative impact on an athlete’s mental focus.
The combination of pressure to perform, sports-related injuries and intensive physical training leaves softball athletes at an increased risk for developing what is known as the Yips. The Yips is a psychological phenomenon when a softball athlete inexplicably can no longer perform simple movements in their sport. Because this is such a prevalent issue in the sport of softball, I wanted to take the time to further discuss this issue. In part I. I will review what sport psychologists typically encounter when working with the Yips. In part II. I will review the brain science that helps us understand the Yips. Finally in part III. I will review an intervention called Brainspotting that has been shown to help athletes overcome the Yips.
Part I. Sport Psychologists Explore Four Letter Word Of Sports…The Yips
While the softball Yips can affect many aspects of one’s sport, one of the most common issues that both my colleagues and I run into are issues surrounding throwing. Oftentimes when I have worked with softball players they will describe the following experiences of the Yips in their throwing: noticing a hitch in their throwing mechanics, having a freeze response when throwing, experiencing temperature in specific regions of the body (e.g. heat change in forehead, cold sensation in neck), noticing muscle tension in certain areas of the body (e.g. muscle tension in neck, muscle tension in back, gripping the ball too tight) or experiencing pain in areas of the body where there were previous injuries which has negative affected throwing mechanics. So what causes these issues?
I have written about the cause of this extensively, but the issue that appears to cause the vast majority of throwing Yips in softball is a combination of pressure from sports and unprocessed trauma. Oftentimes when people think of the word trauma, they do not associate traumatic experiences with sports. But consider some of the things that softball players go through: experiencing significant injuries that require either surgery, injuries that demand long periods of downtime that require one to be away from their peers, injuries that force exit from sport, abusive coaching, abusive fan behavior, pressure to perform that becomes crippling, and the culmination effect of having high athlete identity. But what exactly is happening in the brain that causes throwing Yips in softball?
Part II. How Brain Science Helps Us Understand Throwing Yips
In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author goes into great detail to explain how the Yips is created and its’ connection 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.’
In the book The Body Keeps The Score, Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk goes even deeper explaining how the mechanisms of the brain respond to stress, which in turn create the symptoms of the Yips: 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.
In summary, the brain has built in mechanisms that create involuntary responses which are defensive in nature. Much of what Dr. Grand and Dr. Van Der Kolk discussed in their respective books, is how the human brain is sensitive to the environmental changes around us, and how even in an ‘untraumatized’ brain, we are always on the look out to protect our personal boundaries. When these boundaries are violated through traumatic experiences, we adapt and create new defense mechanisms. These neuroscience-based explanations give us a much clearer understanding of how the Yips is in fact a survival response, designed to protect the athlete by generating such an intense sensation of discomfort, that will compel the athlete to want to retreat from performance. Now that we have reviewed what psychological stress is, let’s review an interventions that can help with the Yips: Brainspotting.
Part III. Overcoming Throwing Yips With 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 Brain Spot) 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 Twisties, 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 softball athletes deal with that are connected to the throwing yips (sport humiliations, sports-injuries, out of sport trauma such as car accidents, interpersonal relationship issues), it can be easy to see why this intervention pair perfectly with this athlete population.
The goal of all psychotherapy interventions are to help clients move from dysregulation to regulation. For instance if you are a softball player and you have been experiencing the Yips coming in the form of freezing before a throw, this can be considered a state of dysregulation. Because almost half of the brain is dedicated to vision, we use the client’s field of vision combined with focused mindfulness to help engage the regions of the brain that are responsible for regulation and bypass the regions that are not! This physiological approach can help clients achieve their desired psychological outcomes. When athletes work with a sport psychologist who uses Brainspotting, they will first identify what the issue is that they would like to resolve. These issues can range from experiencing pre-performance nerves in sports, to having anxiety about speaking in front of a team. Clients discuss the issue in-depth and then the sport psychologist invites clients to have their eyes follow a pointer that the clinician will move in certain directions to identify the eye position that is relevant to the topic that the client is looking to resolve. 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. Whether softball players like it or not, the Yips is usually an inevitable part of softball for many athletes. In the same way athletes need to condition themselves to deal with predictable features of sport performance (e.g. working with a strength coach to increase power), Brainspotting is a form of mental training that will help you either avoid or work through the throwing Yips!
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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