Brainspotting A Yip Problem For Athletes
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 & A Yip Problem For Athletes
When sport psychology was first introduced as a tool for athletes to use, many people focused on how to enhance performance through different types of focus techniques. Some of these approaches ranged from using motor behavior and skill acquisition techniques to cognitive behavioral therapy. While there are many athletes that have most certainly benefited from these approaches, there was a still a large segment of the sport population that was not being served properly. For instance, many of these individuals were silently suffering with a mental block that has remained a mystery to most coaches and sport psychologists.
This mental block became infamously known as the Yips. The vast majority of sport psychologists would use ineffective techniques such as trying to ‘overload’ the athlete’s ‘yips-based- negative thinking’ with positive thoughts. Coaches frequently become frustrated with athletes and would make statements such as ‘stop over-thinking’. All of these approaches were ineffective and continue to remain unhelpful. This is due to the fact that both sport psychologists and coaches have misunderstood what the Yips actually are. For this issue of the Notes I am going to review what the Yips actually is and how it can be ‘cured’ through new approaches in sport psychology.
Part I. Yips Symptoms & Causes
The Yips is a psychological phenomenon when an athlete can no longer perform even a simple movement despite no current presence of an injury or range of motion issue. Most people have probably heard of the Yips affecting athletes in the sports of baseball, golf and even gymnastics (gymnastics refers to the Yips by a different name called the Twisties). Examples of the Yips affecting athletes include individuals no longer being able to throw a baseball several feet, golfers being unable to make simple putts and dramatically altering their putting grip, to gymnasts who once could perform movements such as the Tuck, but are no longer able to do so.
As previously mentioned, traditionally when athletes would go to work with a sport psychologist, there would be an emphasis on conditioning the athlete to ‘think more positively’ in order to counter the Yips. But this approach is based on the idea that the athlete just needs better insight into their dilemma. The reality is that most neuroscience research in the field of mental health strongly suggests that the vast majority of these issues are in fact not due to lack of insight, but rather are symptoms created from activity stored deep within the subcortical brain. In other words, issues such as the Yips are more related to unprocessed trauma, not lack of insightful thinking. Let’s dive deeper into the science that explains this.
Part II. The Yips Brain Science
In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author goes into great detail to explain the science behind the Yips and how this is connected to unprocessed, sports-related trauma. 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.’ When we understand what the brain goes through during a traumatic event such as a sports-related injury, it becomes easier to understand why this is a traumatic event for athletes and how this creates behaviors such as the Yips. Let’s now explore a specific intervention that athletes can use to deal with muscle guarding: Brainspotting.
Part III. Yips Analysis & Brainspotting Treatment Intervention
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, athletes have the ability to access the parts of their brain that traditional psychotherapy and coaching 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 many athletes deal with such as concussions, TBIs, car accidents, witnessing teammates get injured, sport humiliations, sports-injuries, out of sport trauma (e.g. interpersonal relationship issues), it can be easy to see why this intervention pairs perfectly with athletes.
The goal of all sport-psychotherapy interventions are to help athletes move from dysregulation to regulation. For instance if you are 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 athlete’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 athletes 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 decreased response times during performances. Athletes discuss the issue in-depth and then the sport psychologist invites the athlete to have their eyes follow a pointer that the sport psychologist will move in certain directions to identify the eye position that is relevant to the topic that the athlete is looking to resolve. Once the eye position is identified, the athlete will hold that eye position for either several minutes, or up to two hours until the issue is resolved. Sports can be inherently dangerous, which means on some level it is inevitable that athletes will experience stress outcomes induced on their mind and body. Athletes need to mentally train to stay ahead of these issues, and Brainspotting is the perfect mental training approach for this!
