Sport Psychology Tips For Volleyball Players & Mental Blocks
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: Mental Training Tips For Elite Volleyball Athletes
When athletes and coaches look for sport psychology resources to enhance their mental training, they will usually find predictable tips. For instance, many athletes and coaches are interested in mental toughness, and there is no shortage of sport psychologists and mental performance consultants who discuss what their ‘system’ is for training this psychological trait. Other suggestions usually include positive self-talk or some form of mental skills training that is rooted in what is commonly referred to as cognitive behavioral therapy or motivational interviewing. These tips can work well for some athletes, but are largely ineffective for the modern-day athlete.
That is because a vast majority of the sport psychology-based interventions are outdated and have missed an important detail about the sports environment: sports by their very nature are stressful and, in most instances, the environment contributes to the formation of trauma. It is inevitable that athletes experience physical and mental breakdowns due to this stress induction. However, modern day sport psychology can help offset many of these trauma-based problems which is what I discuss in my new book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns. For this issue of the Notes I want to introduce a case study I discuss in my book about a Volleyball player and mental training tools I used with this athlete.
Part I. Why Elite Volleyball Players Work With Sport Psychologists
The athletic requirements to be an elite volleyball player are staggering. Many of the volleyball players I have worked with explain that to compete at the highest level, these athletes need to possess an abnormal combination of fast twitch muscle fibers, exhibit extraordinary hand-eye coordination, and have elite reflexes. Additionally, because volleyball players compete on a team, they also need to have high quality communication skills that help create authentic team-cohesion. This requires that athletes possess a well-balanced blend of humility (e.g. team first mindset) and borderline cockiness. Obviously, the first two areas of development that these athletes focus on are the technical skill developments and physical conditioning. This includes high quantities of high-quality volleyball drills followed by a combination of explosive training exercises (e.g. Olympic-weightlifting, plyometrics, etc.) and prehab-style training regimens. But for the elite volleyball athletes that master these tasks, they will go on to enhance their mental performance using sport psychology.
However, many elite volleyball players are learning that not all sport psychologists use the same methods. Most of the time when these athletes go to work with sport psychologists it is so they can enhance their focus, increase mental toughness, or overcome mental blocks. As a result of the increase in demand for sport psychology training, college athletic departments and professional sports teams by and large have at least one if not several sport psychologists working on staff. Most of these professionals will exclusively utilize what is called “evidence-based” interventions to help volleyball players achieve these mental performance goals. These interventions include but are not limited to cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, or rational emotive behavioral therapy. While there is no question that some athletes have benefited from these approaches, most volleyball players that use these tools will not greatly benefit from them due to how outdated and out of place these interventions are in the sports environment. Let’s dive deeper into why this is the case.
Part II. Advanced Sport Psychology Strategies Volleyball Players Need To Succeed
Many years ago, I was fortunate to work with an elite collegiate volleyball player. The timing of my encounter with her was perfect, as I had just begun to understand how to help athletes both overcome mental blocks and achieve peak mental performance (I write about this specific athlete case study in my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns). One of the things that I had to come understand about sports environments like volleyball, is that these athletes are under so much stress that in many cases this will have a negative impact on both the athlete’s mental health and mental performance (I believe they are both the same). One of the ways to understand this is through a trauma-informed perspective, which emphasizes how stress can leave the mind-body connection in a state of turmoil. This mental state is created in significant part by boundary violations, which is part of the trauma experience. In the book The Body Bears the Burden by Robert Scaer, the author explains in beautiful detail how human boundary processing works in the following excerpt: All of our senses-smell, vision, hearing, vestibular input, taste, touch, nociception (sense of pain) and proprioception (sense of joint motion) - contribute to the formation of these boundaries that eventually tell us where we end as a perceptual entity, and where the rest of the world begins. Our unconscious awareness of these boundaries allows us to move about in the world without literally impacting obstacles that are not part of our own self. We receive positive or negative information as a developing infant and child from sensory experiences that contribute to our unconscious perception of our safe boundaries. Painful or unpleasant feedback leads us to avoid moving beyond the boundary created by that experience, where as positive feedback stimulates us to explore the area within that expanded boundary more.
So, when athletes experience boundary violations, what exactly happens to them that causes mental blocks and loss of confidence? In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author provides us an explanation of the ‘sports perspective’ of psychological trauma in the following excerpt: ‘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 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.
The author continues: 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.’ A common question I get from athletes involves confusion about the connection between boundary violations and experiences in sports. In Volleyball, one example of a boundary violation can be getting hit in the head with the ball. How is this the case? As previously stated, because your brain is always creating maps of where you are in reference to the space around you, if at any point something ‘challenges’ that space, your brain becomes confused and does not have security about understanding where you are on this map. If the ball hits you in the head with extreme force, this is a penetration of your physical space…your brain no longer knows where the body ends, and the world begins. There are other examples of this too that are not necessarily physical in nature. For instance, the social pressure associated with not performing for your team, experiencing sports humiliations where failure happens in front of large audiences, forms of physical, emotional or psychological abuse, etc. Unfortunately, when athletes have tried to address this through traditional sport psychology, they most likely have not received the specific tools needed to address these specific issues. Fortunately, sport psychologists are finally catching on to what is really needed to specifically address these issues.
Part III. Trauma-Informed Sport Psychology Is Mental Training
Many athletes (and even well-known sport psychologists) often see mental health interventions as a separate issue from mental performance training. We need to end this way of thinking and come to terms with the fact that mental health outcomes go hand in hand with mental performance outcomes and vis versa. You will not be able to perform at your most optimal level if your mind is preoccupied with issues that are affecting your ability to live a healthy and fulfilling life. But to take this concept a step further, sports environments are not designed to help athletes optimize their mental health…in fact quite the opposite. Sports environments at their core are stress tests and are designed to inflict a type of psychological stress on an athlete’s mind that can be so extreme, that athletes are at risk for developing high levels of anxiety, depression and trauma-related behaviors. As previously mentioned, many athletes experience sports-related injuries, sports humiliations, fan/coach abuse, etc. Because these are the inevitable experiences that most athletes will undergo, they need to have the correct resources to stay ahead of the negative side-effects of sports, just in the same way athletes work with athletic trainers or strength coaches to offset the negative side-effects of sports.
One specific tool that I have had incredible success with is Brainspotting. Elite athletes that use this tool have figured out that if they can maintain the mental edge over their competition by training their mind to be comfortable with discomfort and clear trauma, they are more likely to regularly possess the desired aggression response. Brainspotting is a powerful, focused mental training intervention that works by identifying, processing and releasing core neurophysiological sources of emotional/body pain, trauma, dissociation and a variety of other challenging symptoms. Brainspotting utilizes the athlete’s field of vision to identify unresolved psychological issues such as the Yips or mental blocks. Through this process athletes have the ability to access the parts of their brain that traditional mental skills approaches can’t. Because almost half of the brain is dedicated to vision, the combined use of eye movement with focused mindfulness helps engage the regions of the brain that are responsible for regulation and bypasses the regions that are not! This results in athletes being able to directly address the true ‘underlying’ issue, which we refer to as a brain spot. In my book, I discuss how I used Brainspotting in the volleyball player case study and how these intervention helped this athlete overcome her mental block.
While Brainspotting is my preferred method when trying to help athletes overcome trauma, there are many athletes who have had successful outcomes using alternative interventions. For instance, EMDR is another fantastic tool that has incredible research supporting its’ efficacy (the research is not as strong in Brainspotting, but this is largely due to the fact that it is a relatively new intervention, and securing grants for research in mental health is quite challenging). Neurofeedback and biofeedback are also trauma-informed tools that can help athletes mentally train through trauma in order to achieve peak mental performance. Whichever tool athletes choose to use, what is most important is that they start to see mental health treatment (specifically trauma-informed interventions) as a different but equally important approach towards achieving optimal psychological performance outcomes. Fortunately, we also have plenty of athletes who serve as inspirational case studies to show that in order to win at a high level, athletes need to deal with the inevitable side effects of competing in sports, one of those side effects being PTSD. If you are interested in learning more about trauma-informed training interventions, please use this link here to learn more about this approach or simply use the contact form link here to inquire more about services that I offer to help with these issues!
