NASCAR Drivers, Sport Psychology & Trauma
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: NASCAR Drivers, Sport Psychology & Trauma
Motorsport athletes such as racecar drivers compete in some of the most physically and mentally demanding competitions on the planet. Racecar drivers are expected to be able to psychologically process high volumes of information within milliseconds, all while withstanding the grueling conditions of operating the car cockpit. This can include being able to handle the physical toll of multiple g-forces on the body, constantly apply several hundred pounds of force to the brakes or even being able to stay focused in a cockpit that can reach up to 140 degrees throughout the race while driving at 200 mph.
This is a population of athletes that I have spent a considerable part of my career working with in terms of the mental performance of their training. My work with racecar drivers which include NASCAR, IndyCar, Rally, IMSA, Dirt Racing and other racing series influenced my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns. For this issue of the Notes, I want to take the time to explain how a common traumatic experience in racing helped shape both my work with these athletes as well as my writing: whiplash syndrome. I will review the science behind this phenomenon and how it affects driver performance.
Part I. How NASCAR Drivers Experience Trauma
As previously mentioned, the stress demands that drivers experience during motorsports requires intense mental and physical training. The vast majority of this training is meant to help the driver’s body withstand the physical demands of the cockpit, so that their brain can psychologically process the data that is coming in during the race, while not having to allocate any resources towards dealing with unresolved issues in the body (e.g. if your body is not conditioned to deal with the heat of the cockpit, your brain will be preoccupied with the temperature rather than what is happening during the race). But WHEN a crash happens in a race this can be an unsettling experience for the athlete, and no amount of physical training will prepare an athlete for this.
Usually when crashes occur, they are violent, unexpected and happen very fast. Despite the safety precautions that are put in place to reduce the risk of injury or death (e.g. fire suit, halo, roll cage, etc.), these resources can only help to a certain extent. Many drivers will experience the following during these experiences: at least 2 or more concussions, multiple TBIs, broken bones, torn muscles, etc. But even in the highly unlikely event that a driver sustains none of these types of injuries, they will experience whiplash syndrome. Whiplash syndrome is when the driver experiences dysregulation behaviors such as erratic emotional outbursts, inability to regulate energy levels (e.g. excessive tiredness), sleep dysregulation, increased pre-race nervousness, noticeable digestion issues, or significant declines in reaction time. Let’s dive deeper into the neuroscience that explains this phenomenon.
Part II. The Neuroscience Of Whiplash Syndrome & Racecar Drivers
As previously mentioned, when you look at unique characteristics involved with racecar driving, crashing the car is a matter of WHEN, not if. The reason this is important to understand is because our brains are not able to process specific types of information beyond excessive dimensions of speed, and traveling at racecar speeds during a crash is an example of a common experience in motorsports that impacts the athlete’s mind. In the book The Body Bears The Burden by Robert Scaer, the author provides in great detail how we understand what Whiplash Syndrome is and how it affects individuals such as racecar drivers. The author states the following: Patients suffering from even a minor to moderate velocity rear-end MVA often suffer from a confusing variety of symptoms. Not only do they ‘have the typical complaints of headache and neck pain and stiffness, they also often complain of emotional symptoms, depression, and anxiety. Neurological complaints are common, ranging from dizziness and vertigo, ringing in the ears, blurred vision, fainting spells and balance difficulties to remarkable problems with thinking, concentration, and memory. Rather than making a steady recovery like a comparable sports-related accident, whiplash patients often pursue a slow, unpredictable course. They often take several years to improve, with episodic periods of worsening that don’t make sense when related to other types of soft tissue injuries. Long-term studies in whiplash patients in general show that a majority (70 to 80 percent) returned to normal activities in six months. On the other hand, in other studies, persistent chronic pain has been noted in 18 percent of victims at three years and up to 40 percent to ten years.
Through my experience with these athletes, I have found that approximately 20% of all drivers I have worked with are most likely dealing with the after-effects of whiplash syndrome. But a common question that these drivers will ask me, is how is it that these past experiences could be affecting them in the present? I go into great detail on this explanation in my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, but one of the resources that greatly influenced my thinking on this was David Grand. In Dr. Grand’s book This Is Your Brain On Sports, the author goes into great detail to explain the neuroscience behind the effects that sports-related trauma such as whiplash syndrome can have on an athlete’s reflex responses. 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.’ In summary, whiplash syndrome keeps the brain in a pre-occupied state where the driver’s subcortical systems remain highly activated which act as a type of defense mechanism. Because the brain is in a defensive state, it is unable to fully give itself to the moment which in turn slows down the driver’s response time. With that being said, let’s explore a form of mental training that drivers can regularly partake in, in order to offset the predictable consequences if this issue: Brainspotting.
Part III. How Brainspotting Helps Mentally Train Racecar Drivers
Brainspotting is a brain-based psychotherapy technique that utilizes the athlete’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 athletes 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 racecar drivers deal with such as concussions, TBIs, car crashes, witnessing colleagues crash, sport humiliations, sports-injuries, out of sport trauma (e.g. car accidents, interpersonal relationship issues), it can be easy to see why this intervention pair perfectly with this athlete population.
The goal of all 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 (misreading if the car is too tight or loose), 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. Athletes discuss the issue in-depth and then the sport psychologist invites the athlete 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 athlete will hold that eye position for either several minutes up to two hours potentially until the issue is resolved. This form of mental training is discussed in great detail in Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns and provides a case study about when Brainspotting is used as a continuous form of mental skills training, regardless of the sport, athletes will be able to increase the chances of sustaining a long and healthy career in their field of competition.
