Sport Psychology Tactics - Mental Toughness In Athletes: What It Is & How To Train It
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 Science Of Developing Mental Toughness
When athletes go to work with sport psychologists and AASP CMPCs, they are oftentimes seeking help improving their mental performance. This can be either through trying to alleviate the symptoms of the Yips, Twisties or mental blocks. However, sometimes athletes and coaches will seek help from sport psychologists to improve their mental toughness. Interestingly, there is considerable debate about how to define and train mental toughness in athletes. Because this is such an important issue that athletes need resources for, I wanted to use this issue of the Training Report to discuss mental toughness in more depth.
In part I. of the Training Report I am going to spend time defining mental toughness and providing examples of what this looks like through athlete case studies specific to American Football. In part II. I am going to review how sport psychologists understand mental toughness by reviewing the brain science research. Finally in part III. I will review several strategies that athletes can use to train mental toughness, specifically through a new intervention called Brainspotting. Let’s first begin by exploring an effective definition of mental toughness and how research supports this definition.
Part I. Mental Toughness And Athletes
According to some experts, mental toughness is defined as the personal capacity to produce high levels of subjective or objective performance despite challenges, stressors, or adversities. Obviously, many coaches and sport psychologists are often trying to develop strategies that can help athletes tap into ‘mental toughness’ so that way when their performers encounter the inevitable obstacles in sport that can throw off focus, athletes will have ‘mental toughness’ in place. While it is important to have a working definition in place, in my opinion sport psychology has largely failed to develop a meaningful ‘mental toughness’ model because the interventions have largely been ineffective and sometimes even harmful for athletes.
Athletes are often inundated with messages of ‘just tough it out’ or are encouraged to ‘never show emotion’. Many of these so called ‘lessons’ continue to further perpetuate negative behaviors that are not conducive to forming health social relationships. On the flip side however, we also have a movement where trauma and PTSD is over diagnosed, and an army of mental health therapists will categorize all emotional outbursts as a ‘fight, flight’ response. In either case the pendulum has swung too far to either side and is leaving athletes without the necessary tools to deal with adversity in healthy ways. So what is it that most sport psychologists and coaches don’t understand about mental toughness? The answer is both simple and complex: the brain.
Part II. How Sport Psychologists Explain Mental Toughness With Brain Science
Since mental toughness is defined by how well athletes produce elite performances in spite of high stress environments, we need to understand how the brain responds voluntarily and involuntarily to stress. In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author in the following excerpt describes the systems in our brain that determine how well (or not well) we respond to stress events: ‘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.’ So what does all of this have to do with mental toughness? If we know that when athletes compete in high stress environments that their brains will predictably produce ‘emergency-type’ responses, then we can implement the correct mental training techniques that correctly prepare the brain for this type of stimulation, and focus less on unscientific ‘insight-based’ approaches such as CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) or positive self talk. So what types of interventions can we use to create mental toughness?
Part III. How Athletes Can Train Mental Toughness
Based on my experience working with professional, Olympic and high-level collegiate athletes, one of the best ways to help athletes train mental toughness is by helping them become comfortable with discomfort. For example, if football players have been told by coaches to ignore pain or tough out negative feelings, in many ways this is teaching athletes to ‘run away’ from the discomfort, rather than exploring it, which in my opinion is the opposite of mental toughness. So how can we mentally train athletes to become comfortable with discomfort? I believe one of the best interventions to help athletes with their mental training is Brainspotting. 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 help athletes train their minds to become more comfortable with discomfort. Developed in the late 1990s by Dr. David Grand, he discovered the technique while helping an Olympic ice skater overcome the Yips. Using what was known as EMDR, he noticed that during this protocol there were specific eye movement patterns that appeared to be associated with certain stress responses. So why is this important when we are talking about using interventions like Brainspotting?
The goal of all psychotherapy interventions are to help athletes move from dysregulation to regulation. For instance if a football player has been experiencing mental blocks such as increased pre-performance anxiety or fear responses, this can be considered a state of dysregulation (incorrectly, coaches and sport psychologists think this is a lack of mental toughness). 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 the area of their sport that causes dysregulation. These issues can range from experiencing pre-performance nerves in sports, to having anxiety about performing in front of large crowds. Athletes 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 athlete is looking to resolve. Once the eye position is identified, the athlete will hold that eye position for either several minutes up to two hours potentially until the issue is resolved.
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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