Sport Psychology Tactics - Beat Baseball 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: How Do You Know You Have The Yips?
Baseball is one of the most psychologically demanding sports that an athlete can participate in. People oftentimes refer to baseball as a ‘failure’ sport and will often make statements such as ‘fail forward’. This is because the margin for error is so small that the difference between being great and terrible is very minimal. While many athletes have positive experiences in this sport, there are just as many that have negative careers in baseball too. This is due to many issues such as injuries, sports humiliations, abusive coaching, and the mentally draining task of not losing confidence during continuous negative performances. One common problem that comes up for these issues is a psychological phenomenon called the Yips.
Even though I have previously written on this issue, I want to take the time to further explore how Baseball Yips can significantly impact an athlete’s performance. For part I. I want to review some of the worst cases and symptoms that have been explored on this issue. For part II. I am going to review in depth the neuroscience of the Baseball Yips and what is happening in an athlete’s brain when this occurs. Finally in part III. I am going to review an intervention called Brainspotting, and how this can be used to beat baseball yips and throw freely again. With that being said, let’s dive into part I. and review some of the worst case studies of the Yips and the experiences of baseball yips that athletes describe.
Part I. Worst Cases Of The Yips In Baseball
There are many famous examples of baseball players who have suffered from the negative symptoms of the Yips. Rick Ankiel, Mackey Sasser, Dale Murphy and others are examples of elite level athletes in the sport of baseball that publicly discussed their experiences with the Yips. While these are not clients of mine, many of the baseball players that I have worked with have described a spectrum of common symptoms that they have experienced associated with the Yips. Some examples include but are not limited to temperature change throughout different regions of the body (e.g. heat in forehead, cold in back, etc.), tightness throughout certain regions of the body, muscle tension, anxiety, rapid breathing, out of body sensations, or phantom pain in specific regions of the body despite no presence of an injury.
So what causes the Yips in Baseball? The answer is quite simple: unprocessed trauma. The Yips are symptoms of unprocessed trauma, and when we consider all of the stressors that are associated with baseball, it is easy to see how baseball players are subject to experiencing unprocessed trauma. Some of the stressful events that baseball players experience but are not limited to the following: moderate to severe injuries throughout different regions of the body, psychological abuse from coaches and/or fans, high levels of athlete identity that were never properly addressed, medical issues unrelated to sport such as car accidents, interpersonal relationship issues, or loss of a loved one. Most people initially do not understand how unprocessed trauma causes the Yips. In order to clarify any confusion on this issue, we need to develop a baseline understanding of how the brain works.
Part II. How Does Your Brain Create The Baseball Yips?
Sometimes baseball players and athletes in other sports will hear coaches and even some sport psychologists say ‘it’s all in your head’. The underlying implication is that what you are thinking and feeling from a Yips perspective is not ‘reality-based’ and this is just a part of your imagination. These coaches are actually right about the Yips being ‘in your head’, but they are right for the wrong reasons…which is vitally important to understand. So what exactly is happening in a baseball player’s head that generates the Yips? 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 (AKA symptoms of unprocessed trauma): 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.
While Dr. Van Der Kolk’s book provides an excellent description of the neuroscience behind the Yips, we need a deeper understanding of what this looks like in a sport context. In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author goes into detail explaining what happens in the brain that causes baseball yips. Per the author ‘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 now that we have a better grasp about what is happening in our brain when we are dealing with the Yips, let’s explore one of my favorite interventions that can be used to overcome this: Brainspotting.
Part III. Beat Baseball Yips & Throw Freely Again
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, the twisties, 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 baseball athletes deal with that are connected to the 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 pairs 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 baseball player and you have been experiencing the Yips coming in the form of freezing before a pitch, 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 baseball players like it or not, the Yips is an inevitable part of baseball 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 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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