Sport Psychology Tactics - Brainspotting & Mental Toughness Training For Athletes
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: Brain-based Sport Psychology & Mental Toughness Training
A significant majority of the most elite athletes work with a sport psychologist to help give them an edge over their competition. Most sport psychologists and mental performance consultants use traditional approaches such as motivational interviewing (MI), cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT) when trying to help athletes accomplish their goals. However, as time has gone on new research in neuroscience and technological advancements in exercise science have shown us that these approaches largely are ineffective for the modern day athlete, especially when it comes to mental toughness training.
There are varying opinions on how to define mental toughness and how athletes should train this psychological feature. Because this is such a critical issue for athletes, I want to take the time to review what mental toughness is and how it can be trained using modern sport psychology approaches. Before we can do that, we first need to understand how sports affect mental toughness through the lens of trauma. We will then review why using a trauma-informed intervention such as Brainspotting is a perfect fit for mental toughness training. Finally, I will provide a sample mental skills training program that integrates Brainspotting with mental toughness development.
Part I. The Science Of Trauma & Athlete Performance
I will define what mental toughness is and explain what trauma has to do with it, but first we need to explore the importance of how interwoven trauma is with sports experiences. Trauma in its’ simplest definition is considered to be a deeply distressing and/or disturbing experience. When we think about common experiences that athletes go through, it can be easy to see why this word is so relevant. Many athletes have experiences such as sports humiliations, moderate to severe injuries (e.g. torn muscles, broken bones), concussions, multiple invasive surgeries, and varying forms of abuse by coaches or athletic administrative staff. This combination of stress places athletes in prime position to experience many of the symptoms that we have come to learn are associated with psychological trauma. To be clear, just because someone has experienced trauma does not mean that they have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But even if individuals do not meet the ‘DSM criteria’ for PTSD, that does not mean that this issue should go ‘under the rug’. Unprocessed trauma is uniquely stored in the body and can have disastrous effects on an athlete’s ability to mentally perform at a high level.
In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author provides us valuable insight into what happens to the athlete’s brain after an individual experiences a traumatic event: 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.’ An athlete can utilize standard sport psychology skills such as CBT, MI or REBT all they want to, but until these involuntary trauma responses are dealt with, athletes will not be able to achieve the levels of psychological performance they want. So what can athletes do to overcome these issues?
Part II. Brainspotting & Athlete Mental Skills Training
Before we explore what can be done to overcome these involuntary mental blocks, we need to first begin by defining mental toughness and how this issue is connected to trauma. Mental toughness is defined as the personal capacity to produce high levels of subjective or objective performance despite challenges, stressors, or adversities. So how does an athlete possess or develop mental toughness? The keyword in this definition is capacity. Capacity is defined as ‘the maximum amount that something can contain’. From a psychological perspective, the personal capacity someone has to deal with anything is completely subjective. But one thing we know for sure is that when we dive into trauma research, we see that when individuals are dealing with these issues, their brain will remain preoccupied with trying to ‘make sense’ of the unprocessed trauma. By extension this means that there is quite literally ‘less capacity’ to handle additional problems. For example, if you are a baseball player and you injured your arm pitching, part of your brain may actually not be aware that the pitching injury is over. Therefore, if you are in a game pitching, but part of your brain is trying to decide if you are about to reinjure yourself, you will not be able to focus on other important details happening in the game.
In order to give athletes the best chance of developing mental toughness, we need to give them the capacity to do so. This is where Brainspotting comes into play. Brainspotting is a powerful, focused mental training intervention that works by identifying, processing and releasing core neurophysiological sources of emotional/body pain, trauma, dissociation and a variety of other challenging symptoms. Brainspotting utilizes the athlete’s field of vision to identify unresolved psychological issues such as the Yips or mental blocks. Through this process athletes have the ability to access the parts of their brain that traditional mental skills training can’t. CBT, MI, REBT and other sport psychology interventions are focused on trying to provide insight and logic to athletes, but as we have discussed most psychological issues are not due to lack of insight. Because almost half of the brain is dedicated to vision, the combined use of eye movement with focused mindfulness helps engage the regions of the brain that are responsible for regulation and bypasses the regions that are not! This results in athletes being able to directly address the true ‘underlying’ issue, which we refer to as a Brainspot. Interestingly, there is another added benefit to using Brainspotting as a mental skills training tool to enhance mental toughness in athletes. This added benefit comes through the somatic exploration of emotions.
Negative emotional experiences associated with trauma such as anxiety cause a very predictable reaction: individuals who experience anxiety do not want to continue to experience anxiety. Understandably, this causes individuals to do anything they can to avoid feeling these emotions. For example, if you are an athlete experiencing anxiety (or any stress reaction for that manner) you have probably had the experience of wanting to be anywhere but playing in your sport. Traditional sport psychologists give athletes tools to distract them from these negative emotions or to reduce the intensity of them…essentially these tools never truly help athletes directly deal with and explore these emotions. Think of anxiety like a pitch black room you’ve never been in. You can use the traditional sport psychology method of ‘visualizing that you are in a bright room’ when in reality you are not, or you can ‘feel your way’ around the room and create a mental map of all the dimensions of that room. Which approach sounds more closely connected to mental toughness? If athletes can understand their emotions to the maximum capacity that they can be felt and understood, they will be more prepared to deal with those emotions when they happen. Processing negative emotions on a somatic level BUILDS capacity to deal with them, rather than pretend that they do not exist. With that being said, let’s explore what a Brainspotting mental toughness training program would potentially look like!
Part III. The Connection Between Trauma Processing & Mental Toughness
Phase 1 Mental Training Block
DISCLAIMER - THIS IS A SAMPLE MENTAL TRAINING PROGRAM AND SHOULD NOT BE REPLICATED. READERS SHOULD CONSULT THEIR SPORT PSYCHOLOGIST, DOCTOR OR MENTAL HEALTH PRACTITIONER ON THESE ISSUES
Week 1 - Identify sports-related trauma events and set goals for what reduction of mental block symptoms would look like
Week 2 - First Brainspotting intensive session 2 x per week
Week 3 - Second Brainspotting intensive session 2 x per week
Week 4 - Standard Brainspotting session 2 x per week
Week 5 - Standard Brainspotting session 1 x per week
Week 6-7 - OFF Week (take 2 weeks to physically and mentally recover from mental training)
Phase 2 Mental Training Block
Week 1 - Identify sports-related performance goals (e.g. the athlete wants faster reaction times, more aggression, etc.)
Week 2 - Brainspotting intensive with expansion focus 2 x per week
Week 3 - Brainspotting intensive with expansion focus 2 x per week
Week 4 - Brainspotting with expansion focus, standard session 2 x per week
Week 5 - Brainspotting with expansion focus, standard session 2 x per week
Week 6-7 - Mental training d-load week (take 2 weeks to physically and mentally recover from mental training)
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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