What Athletes Need To Know - Equestrian 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: Equestrian Athlete Sport Psychology Case Study
In my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I review the neuroscience and sport psychology interventions that both explain what the Yips (aka mental blocks) are in sports and how to overcome them. The first case study that is reviewed in the book is a professional racecar driver who is experiencing how the Yips is adversely affecting his career. While this was what I consider to be a textbook Yips case study, I wanted to also provide different examples of athlete case studies that other individuals could related to.
One of those alternative case studies that I discuss in the book is an equestrian athlete. For this issue of the Notes I want to review the unique challenges that equestrian athletes face, how the Yips affects equestrian athlete performances and what these elite performers can do to both overcome this mental block and achieve peak performance outcomes. I will also review how my work with equestrian athletes impacted my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns. Let’s begin by exploring the unique performance demands associated with equestrian athletics.
Part I. Mental Performance Demands For Equestrian Athletes
Unlike most sports, in equestrian athletics there are always two athletes working together. One of those athletes is the rider, and the other athlete is obviously the horse. There are certainly other ‘team sports’ competitions and even partner-based sport competitions such as tennis, racecar driving (Rally, FIA WEC, etc.), pickleball and other sports. But equestrian athletics is one of the few sports competitions where two different species need to be synchronized with one another, both physically and mentally. Even more challenging is the fact that one of these teammates is a prey animal, and the other is a predator animal…an odd team combination to say the least. So whether you are competing in Hunter Jumper, Dressage or another equestrian competition, there are many unique challenges that you will face as a competitor.
Depending on the sport within equestrian athletics, there will be unique rules and guidelines for how the athlete must work with the horse. This means that the motor behavior and skill acquisition principles will vary greatly. For instance, in hunter jumper the athlete will be more focused on external narrow targets whereas dressage athletes will need a combination of broad external and broad internal focus cues to stay synchronized with both the horse’s movements and the horses concerns about the environment. Equestrian athletes also need to be highly in-tuned with their own central nervous system functioning (e.g. how anxious are you, how tight are your muscles) to help facilitate how patient one will be with their horse. All of these stressors can lead to the creation of equestrian mental blocks. Let’s explore this more.
Part II. The Common Cause For Equestrian Athlete Mental Blocks
I have mentioned some of the performance demands associated with equestrian athletics. But the unique nature of stress associated with this sport can expose unprocessed traumatic events that athletes have previously gone through. This is because in order to get through the stresssful nature of sports, athletes need to be able to give full focus. But if any part of their body and or mind has an unprocessed traumatic event (such as a sport-related injury like falling off of a horse) combined with a stressful sport performance event that surpasses the athlete’s individual stress threshold, their reptilian brain becomes highly responsive to the stress event, thus creating a mental block. For those unfamiliar with the neuroscience of trauma, in the book The Body Keeps The Score, author Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk beautifully illustrates how the brain functions during a trauma event: 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 Bessel Van Der Kolk’s explanation is presented in a non-sport context, we have additional expert insight that helps us better understand the connection between unprocessed trauma and sports performance mental blocks. David Grand explains this connection from a sports perspective in his book This Is Your Brain On Sports. 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 re-experience 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. Many athletes will try to understand their mental blocks and trauma through logic-based thinking, but what they fail to consider is that neuroscience research shows that very few psychological problems are the result of defects in understanding; most originate in pressures from deeper regions in the brain that drive our perception and attention. So, based on this information, how can equestrian athletes overcome these issues? Let’s explore my two favorite approaches that I discuss in my book that help equestrian athletes deal with mental blocks: pre performance routines and Brainspotting.
Part III. Mental Training Skills For Equestrian Athletes
In regards to pre performance routines, there are two immediate changes that I often recommend for equestrian athletes to use to overcome mental blocks. First, before every ride I instruct horseback riders to do a body-scan to identify any mental or physical stress that they are carrying in their body. Oftentimes equestrian athletes underestimate the amount of tension that they are holding, which in turn the horse will naturally pick up on. The result of this tension usually leads to a lack of patience and poor communication between the horse and the rider. The second pre-performance routine that I instruct riders to do AFTER they have done their own self-check in is to assess what the horse’s tension/tolerance level is. The key point that I make to riders is that even if you are feeling great, you cannot outperform your horse’s stress levels. ALL riders need to adjust their expectations according to what their body and their horse’s body is capable of that day, regardless of how optimistic they may be. But this is all just the starting point for an equestrian athlete’s mental training during their sport performance. There is an even more important tool that equestrian athletes should utilize to overcome mental blocks. Brainspotting.
The sport psychology community is becoming more curious about this intervention because of both the success that Brainspotting is having in working with athlete populations and also because it is specifically tailored to help athletes train their minds to become more comfortable with discomfort. Developed in the late 1990s by Dr. David Grand, he discovered the technique while helping an Olympic ice skater overcome the Yips (AKA a mental block). Using what was known as EMDR, he noticed that during this protocol there were specific eye movement patterns that appeared to be associated with certain stress responses. So why is this important when we are talking about using interventions like Brainspotting? The goal of all psychotherapy interventions are to help athletes move from dysregulation to regulation. For instance if a football player has been experiencing mental blocks such as increased pre-performance anxiety or fear responses, this can be considered a state of dysregulation (incorrectly, coaches and sport psychologists think this is a lack of mental toughness). 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. If you would like to learn more about Brainspotting, use this link here for more information!
