Sport Psychology Tactics - Yips: Do They Exist Or Are They An Athlete Myth?
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: Are The Yips Real?
When athletes are competing in their respective sport environment, they are exposed to many different types of stressful experiences. Some of these experiences include but are not limited to sustaining sport-related injuries such as concussions or ACL tears, surgeries required as a result of those injuries, seeing teammates get injured, experiencing various types of abuse from members of the sports team or staff, continuing to deal with chronic pain from injuries or training, social pressure from family or friends in order to perform, pressure to perform in order to keep sponsorships or scholarships, increased autonomic nervous system responses as a result of general performance pressure, dealing with high athlete identity, etc. Athletes usually experience one if not several of the previously mentioned issues, and given enough time will develop an infamous type of mental block called 'the Yips’.
The Yips gained notoriety originally in the sports environments of golf and baseball. It’s not exactly clear when the term ‘the Yips’ was created, but essentially coaches were seeing that some players would experience symptoms such as being unable to perform even simple sport movements despite no presence of a sport-relate injury or range of motion issues. Predictably coaches would share these experiences with other coaches and labeled this issue ‘the Yips’ because it was becoming such a commonly identified phenomenon. Because this is an issue that I primarily specialize in, I am often asked for a more technical explanation of what the Yips are and if the Yips are even real. For this issue of the Training Report I want to take the time to explain what the Yips actually are, the symptoms of the Yips, what causes the Yips, and what athletes can do to ‘cure’ themselves of the Yips. Let’s dive into part I. discussing the Yips actually are!
Part I. What Are The Yips & What Are The Symptoms Of The Yips?
As I previously mentioned in the introduction section, one of the most common questions I get from clients is asking whether the Yips are real or not? The answer to this question is yes, but clients will quickly follow up by asking what are the Yips? The yips is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when athletes can no longer perform sports movements randomly and unexpectedly despite no presence of range of motion issues or an injury. When an athlete has the Yips, from an outside perspective this can look different depending on the sport the athlete is involved in. Some athletes such as baseball players (e.g. most commonly pitchers, catchers and players at bat) will no longer be able to throw the ball even several feet, will constantly overthrow the target they are throwing too, can no longer locate the ball, can no longer throw strikes, or some athletes will complain of hitting slumps. Golf athletes will no longer be able to make certain shots (e.g. wedge shots, simple putts, iron shots), gymnasts will ‘freeze’ before they tumble, softball players will ‘freeze’ taking ground balls, racecar drivers will ‘freeze’ or experience tension when trying to make entry, etc. But what are these athletes feeling during these experiences?
Regardless if you are working with a MLB or youth baseball player, golfer or NASCAR driver, athletes will describe a variety of sensations or experiences that accompanies the Yips presentation. Felt sensations of the Yips can include but are not limited to the following: change of pressure or temperature throughout the head, excessive muscle tension in certain areas of the body or throughout the body, temperature change in certain areas of the body, random muscle spasms, increased heart rate, increased breath rate, depersonalization, dissociation, hyper focusing on unimportant areas in an athlete’s visual field, numbness in certain areas of the body, ‘electric’ like feeling in certain areas of the body, unable to focus anywhere in the field of play, etc. All of these descriptions are some of the most common symptoms that athletes describe to me when they are experiencing the Yips. But here is the most important thing to take away from this information: the symptoms of the Yips ARE the Yips, and any sport psychologist or athlete mental health counselor worth their salt should know that your first order of business should not be to treat the symptoms but to address the underlying issue causing the Yips. In this case, the underlying issue of the Yips is trauma.
Part II. What Causes The Yips?
As previously mentioned, the Yips is a psychological defense caused by unprocessed trauma. But what happens in the brain during a trauma event that leads to the Yips? One of the leading experts in the world on this issue provides an excellent description of this mechanism. In the book The Body Keeps The Score, Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk explains the process of how the brain respond to stress (or trauma), which in turn can lead athletes towards regressing mentally in sports performances, thereby creating 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.
One area of research that is connected to the Yips mechanisms that Dr. Van Der Kolk described is in the field of HRV research, and the larger impact that the autonomic nervous system has on athlete’s mental performance. Dr. Stephen Porges, one of the more well-known experts within the field has made groundbreaking discoveries and provided excellent descriptions about how this system works. Per his website, the following quote illustrates important characteristics of this system, “The mind and body are connected through the Vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the autonomic nervous system, stretching from the brainstem to the colon. It is our internal control center, allowing the brain to monitor and receive information about many of our bodily functions”. We know from research that athletes and other individuals with low HRV have issues associated with mortality, myocardial infarction, coronary heart disease, and congestive heart failure. But the Vagus nerve also influences our brain’s fight, flight, freeze responses as well. Overtime if left unchecked, as the athlete’s brain adapts to the stress experienced in sports (and outside of competition) the athlete’s brain will predictably and reflexively adapt in ways that are not ideal for peak performance outcomes. One of these ways is through the creation of Yips responses.
In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author goes into great detail to explain the neuroscience behind the sports-related stress and how the brain generates the Yips reflex responses. 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.’ Some people might question if this is an isolated opinion about sports yips. In some ways it is because as I have mentioned previously, the majority of sport psychologists have limited training on the mechanisms of trauma on the brain. But leading experts such as Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, Dr. Stephen Porges & Dr. David Grand add weight to the validity of this argument. So now that we have established an understanding of what the Yips actually is, let’s review a possible ‘cure’ that sport psychologists and athlete mental counselors can employ to help athletes treat the yips: Brainspotting.
Part III. How To Treat The Yips
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 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 athletes deal with such as concussions, TBIs, sport humiliations, sports-injuries, out of sport trauma (e.g. car accidents, interpersonal relationship issues), it can be easy to see why this intervention pair perfectly with athletes.
The goal of all psychotherapy interventions are to help clients move from dysregulation to regulation. For instance if you are an athlete such as a racecar driver and you have been experiencing mental blocks such as increased pre-performance anxiety or fear responses, 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 large groups. 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. If you would like to learn more, please 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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