Psychology Books - Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns
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: Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns Psychology Book
There are many excellent psychology books that are available for athletes that are looking to either enhance their mental performance, or find solutions to mental health concerns. However, through my work as a licensed psychotherapist and Certified Mental Performance Consultant, there were almost no books that described in detail the science of one of the most common issues that athletes face: the Yips. The Yips is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when an athletes can no longer perform even simple movement in their sports despite no presence of injury.
The Yips gained notoriety as golfers, baseball players and other athletes and coaches diagnosed the issue when the general public started to notice these behaviors. But despite the ‘label’ there was no explanation about what the Yips actually is and what causes it. That is why I decided to write my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns. For this issue of the Notes I want to preview what readers can expect when the book is released. I will provide highlight summaries of important parts of the upcoming narrative non-fiction, as well as introductory explanations for what the Yips is and how to fix it.
Part I. What is Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns about?
Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns is a narrative non-fiction about my journey towards discovering what causes the Yips and how to fix the problem. However, unlike other sport psychology books, Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns goes a step further by trying to explain the neuroscience behind the Yips, but through engaging story-telling. Many athletes are familiar with what the Yips are, but most people who are not active in sports are unfamiliar with this term. For those that are just learning about what the Yips is, quite simply it is a psychological phenomenon when an athlete can no longer perform even simple sports movements despite no presence of a sports injury. So how does one know if they have the Yips versus if they are just making simple mistakes?
In my work with athletes, most performers describe the Yips as an ‘unnatural’ and ‘unexpected’ sensation in the body. Athletes have reported that symptoms include but are not limited to the following: muscle tension in certain areas of the body, rapid breathwork, hype-focusing on unimportant areas in one’s visual field, temperature change in different areas of the body, anxiety-like symptoms, feeling ‘out of place’ or ‘off balance’, experiencing random spasms in different areas of the body, having an out of body experience where one dissociates from the present moment, feeling frozen, chronically making small mistakes, etc. But even with a list of symptoms, this still doesn’t explain to us what the root cause of the Yips is. Let’s explore this further.
Part II. Why Should Athletes Care About This Book?
One of the main reasons athletes should care about this book is because it finally explains the underlying cause of what the Yips actually is. One of the books that greatly influenced my journey towards understanding this issue was written by Dr. Van Der Kolk. In his book The Body Keeps The Score, Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk explains how the Yips is caused by unprocessed trauma. Let’s explore how the neurological process of unprocessed trauma causes 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.
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 what is one of the ‘secret’ techniques I discuss in the book to help athletes overcome this issue? Let’s talk about Brainspotting.
Part III. What is Brainspotting in the Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns book?
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 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 athletes like it or not, the Yips is an inevitable part of sports 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!
