Sport Psychology Books - This Is Your Brain On Sports By David Grand PhD
About the Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns 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: Brainspotting & Athlete Mental Training
There are many people and moments that influenced the creation of Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns. But without a doubt one of the biggest influences on the book is the psychotherapy intervention called Brainspotting. More specifically, the founder of Brainspotting David Grand wrote a book that had a profound influence on me called This Is Your Brain On Sports, Beating Blocks, Slumps And Performance Anxiety For Good! This book not only taught me about how Brainspotting can work with athletes, but it finally explained to me what the Yips actually is.
For this issue of Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns Notes I want to discuss why this book is important for athletes and sports psychologists alike. For part I. I am going to review what Brainspotting is and the history of Brainspotting. For part II. I am going to review how the book discusses the Yips and how it connects to Brainspotting. Finally I am going to explore how this book illustrates why Brainspotting is perfect for athlete mental training. I will also explore some pros and cons of the book and where it needs updating. With that being said let’s dive into what Brainspotting is.
Part I. What is Brainspotting?
Brainspotting can trace its’ roots back to Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), which is a psychotherapy technique that was developed in the 1970s by Dr. Francine Shapiro. EMDR was and still is a very effective technique that has extensive research supporting the efficacy of the approach. Prior to the discovery of Brainspotting, Dr. Grand was an EMDR trainer (A trainer is one of the highest levels of recognition one can have as a subject matter expert in psychotherapy). EMDR focused on helping clients alleviate or significantly reduce their symptoms of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), and over the years gained a reputation at being able to help clients move through these symptoms at lightening fast speed. However when Dr. Grand was in private practice, through a combination of observation and applied experience he noticed that there were certain aspects of the technique that were not effective for the populations he was working with. One particular case that Dr. Grand cites was his work with an Olympic ice skater. In his work with the ice skater he found that there were actually specific eye reflexes that were associated with mental blocks, and once those eye reflexes were identified, clients could process through these issues using 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 athletes deal with that are connected to the sports mental blocks (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 athletes. But let’s dive deeper into understanding HOW Brainspotting helps athletes with these issues.
Part II. How Does Brainspotting Work To ‘Cure’ The Yips?
Part of how Brainspotting helps ‘cure’ the yips is due to its’ theoretical orientation. In David Grand’s book This Is Your Brain On Sports the author goes into detail explaining what happens in the brain that causes the Yips (AKA mental blocks). 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.’ The book goes on in further detail providing additional scientific insight. With that being said, I want to provide my own opinions on how I think this book helps connect athletes to Brainspotting, and what content needs to be added to this book.
Part III. Why Is Brainspotting Perfect For Athletes?
The goal of all psychotherapy interventions are to help clients move from dysregulation to regulation. When athletes experience mental blocks that come in the form of freezing or ‘locking up’, this can be considered a state of dysregulation. Because almost half of the brain is dedicated to vision, Brainspotting uses 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.
Where I feel like This Is Your Brain On Sports needed to add more content was further emphasizing the connection between athlete mental health and performance. Oftentimes what we see in sport psychology is that the sport psychologist will only focus on mental health issues, or they will never focus on mental health issues…there is no in between. Athlete mental health is directly connected to overall performance, and Brainspotting in my opinion is a form of mental training that can help accomplish all of these things. This is something that I plan to address in my upcoming book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns. If you are interested in learning more about the book, sign up for the newsletter below to stay up to date on the upcoming release!
