Sport Psychology Books - Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker PhD
There are many different books that influenced my sport psychology book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns. One of those books is Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, PhD. For this issue of the Notes, I want to review what Why We Sleep is about and how athletes can benefit from reading this book!
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: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker PhD
“Sleep before learning refreshes our ability to initially make new memories. It does so each and every night. While we are awake, the brain is constantly acquiring and absorbing novel information, intentionally or otherwise...”
In my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I needed to do research on the science of sleep and how it impacts athlete mental performance outcomes. There are many excellent research papers and resources that were available to use. But perhaps one of my favorite pieces of literature on this subject was the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Matthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, the Director of its’ Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab, and a former professor of psychiatry at Harvard University.
Because this book had such a tremendous influence on both my writing and my work with athletes, I wanted to take some time to review this book. In part I. I will explore why Matthew Walker’s book is so relevant for athletes. I will highlight the both the plot and science of the book. In part II. I will review how Walker’s book connects to athlete performance outcomes. Finally, I will explore applied strategies athletes and coaches can take away from Why We Sleep. With that being said, let’s dive into what this book is actually about.
Part I. Why Matthew Walker’s Book Matters For Athletes
Per the book bio: Sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life, wellness, and longevity. Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why we suffer such devastating health consequences when we don't sleep. Compared to the other basic drives in life—eating, drinking, and reproducing—the purpose of sleep remained elusive. An explosion of scientific discoveries in the last twenty years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now, preeminent neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming. Within the brain, sleep enriches our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions. It recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite. Dreaming mollifies painful memories and creates a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge to inspire creativity. Walker answers important questions about sleep: how do caffeine and alcohol affect sleep? What really happens during REM sleep? Why do our sleep patterns change across a lifetime? How do common sleep aids affect us and can they do long-term damage?
Charting cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, and synthesizing decades of research and clinical practice, Walker explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood, and energy levels; regulate hormones; prevent cancer, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes; slow the effects of aging; increase longevity; enhance the education and lifespan of our children, and boost the efficiency, success, and productivity of our businesses. Clear-eyed, fascinating, and accessible, Why We Sleep is a crucial and illuminating book. Just after reading this excerpt, athletes, coaches, and exercise science professionals should be able to clearly recognize the need to read this book immediately. In my opinion, Why We Sleep offers the general public invaluable insight on sleep in the same way The Body Keeps the Score did on trauma. If this short excerpt isn’t enough to intrigue athletes into reading this book, then let’s consider another area where this book can help athletes excel in mental performance: learning. An athlete’s ability to learn pre, intra and post competition is critical towards their success. Why We Sleep offers us simple, yet incredible insight into how sleep helps with this. Let’s dive more into how the book reviews this.
Part II. Important Takeaways From Why We Sleep
The following excerpt explains the connection between sleep and learning: Sleep before learning refreshes our ability to initially make new memories. It does so each and every night. While we are awake, the brain is constantly acquiring and absorbing novel information (intentionally or otherwise). Passing memory opportunities are captured by specific parts of the brain. For fact-based information - or what most of us think of as textbook-type learning, such as memorizing someone’s name, a new phone number, or where you parked your car - a region of the brain called the hippocampus helps apprehend these passing experiences and binds their details together. A long, finger-shaped structure tucked deep on either side of your brain, the hippocampus offers a short-term reservoir, or temporary information store, for accumulating new memories. Unfortunately, the hippocampus has a limited storage capacity, almost like a camera roll or, to use a more modern-day analogy, a USB membory stick. Exceed its capacity and you run the risk of not being able to add more information or, equally bad, overwriting one memory with another: a mishap called interference forgetting.
How then, does the brain deal with this memory capacity challenge? Some years ago, my research team wondered if sleep helped solve this storage problem by way of a file-transfer mechanism. We examined whether sleep shifted recently acquired memories to a more permanent, long-term storage location in the brain, thereby freeing up our short-term memory stores so that we awake with a refreshed ability for new learning. We began testing this theory using daytime naps. We recruited a group of healthy young adults and randomly divided them into a nap group and a no-nap group. At noon, all the participants underwent a rigorous session of learning (one hundred face-name pairs) intended to tax the hippocamps, their short-term memory storage site. As expected, both groups performed at comparable levels. Soon after, the nap group took a ninety-minute siesta in the sleep laboratory with electrodes placed on their heads to measure sleep. The no-nap group stayed awake in the laboratory and performed menial activities, such as browsing the internet or playing board games. Later that day, at 6 PM, all participants performed another round of intensive learning where they tried to cram yet another set of new factors into their short-term storage reservoirs (another hundred face-name pairs). Our question was simple: does the learning capacity of the human brain decline with continued time awake across the day and, if so, can sleep reverse this saturation effect and thus restore learning ability?
Those who were awake throughout the day became progressively worse at learning, even though their ability to concentrate remained stable (determined by separate attention and response time tests). In contrast, those who napped did markedly better, and actually improved in their capacity to memorize facts. The difference between the two groups at 6 PM was not small: a 20% learning advantage for those who slept. Having observed that sleep restores the brain’s capacity for learning, making room for new memories, we went in search of exactly what it was about sleep that transacted the restoration benefit. Analyzing the electrical brainwaves of those in the nap group brought our answer. The memory refreshment was related to lighter, stage 2 NREM sleep, and specifically the short, powerful bursts of electrical activity called sleep spindles, noted in chapter 3. The more sleep spindles an individual obtained during the nap, the greater the restoration of their learning when they woke up. Importantly, sleep spindles did not predict someone’s innate learning aptitude. That would be a less interesting result, as it would imply that inherent learning ability and spindles simply go hand in hand. Instead, it was specifically the change in learning from before relative to after sleep, which is to say the replenishment of learning ability, that spindles predicted. So what are some applied strategies that athletes can take from reading Matthew Walker’s book to enhance their sleep performance in order to maximize their recovery and athletic outcomes?
Part III. The Connection Between Sleep & Athlete Peak Mental Performance
Dr. Walker not only provides us with scientific insight into sleep, he also gives readers specific applied strategies athletes (and non-athlete readers) can use to improve their sleep performance. The author states some of the following examples: Stick to a sleep schedule. got to bed and wake up at the same time each day. As creatures of habit, people have a hard time adjusting to changes in sleep patterns. Sleeping later on weekends won’t fully make up for a lack of sleep during the week and will make it harder to wake up early on Monday morning. Set an alarm for bedtime. Often we set an alarm for when it’s time to wake up but fail to do so for when it’s time to go to sleep. If there is only one piece of advice you remember and take from these twelve tips, this should be it.
There are many other incredible points of information that Matthew Walker reviews in his book, and I strongly encourage folks reading this edition of the Notes to buy his book. For my work with athletes, this book helped me not only better understand the brain, but also how to think about recovery and sleep performance differently. For instance, many of the professional racecar drivers I work with frequently have to travel to different time zones, multiple times for different races. Understanding the information in Why We Sleep has helped me provide better advice for how my athletes can maximize on their sleep, which in turn will maximize on their performance. I also review these strategies in my new book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, which I highly encourage people to go check out!
Why Elite Athletes Keep Aggressive Mindset Training Secret
At some point in an athlete’s career, they have probably had a coach or sport psychologist tell them to “be more aggressive”. However, these same athletes will tell you they were never taught HOW to be more aggressive. I discuss this issue in my new book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, and for this issue of the Notes I want to explore what aggressive mindset training is and HOW to do it…
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: Why Athletes Need To Do Mental Training For Aggression
Talk to any athlete, at some point in their career they have either had a coach or a sport psychologist tell them to be ‘more aggressive’. Virtually all of those same athletes will also report that they received no follow-up advice on HOW to be more aggressive. Even more frustrating for athletes is the fact that there are mixed societal signals in regards to athletes that exhibit aggressive behaviors. If you listen to any sports media commentary or macro-level discussion on this issue, people will either level criticism towards athletes about ‘excessive’ behavior or will preach about the importance of being a ‘humble’ athlete during competition. To be blunt, these ideas are antiquated and dishonest.
Athletes that want to be successful in sports absolutely need to be able to tap into aggressive mindsets if they are going to beat their opponents and achieve their goals. So in order to do this, they need the proper guidance on how to access this part of their mind on demand. In my new book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I review what aggressive mindsets are in sports and how I helped an athlete train their mind to accomplish this. For this issue of the Notes, I am first going to define what being mentally aggressive means, the science and analysis of mental aggression training, and provide several tips to enhance this psychological disposition. With that said, let’s define what aggressive mindsets are.
Part I. How Sport Psychology Defines Being Mentally Aggressive
A quick search will show that aggression has been defined as ‘hostile or violent behavior or attitudes toward another; readiness to attack or confront’. Already, we see that there are negative connotations associated with this term, and interestingly enough, when one looks through the sport psychology literature, the results show that aggression is viewed as an unwanted trait. Research articles about anger, violence, unsportsmanlike conduct encompasses the majority of research on this issue. But clearly coaches, athletes and mental performance consultants recognize that aggression is a desirable behavior in sports because almost every athlete at some point in their career has been told to be more aggressive. So what is it exactly that the sports performance community admires about aggressive mindsets? Most likely, it is a combination of factors that have to do with the perception of how an athlete moves in accordance with facial features, physical expressions of emotions and comparing these individuals to those who do not show these same behaviors. Let’s dive deeper into this.
When athletes ‘appear’ to be aggressive, they are usually executing movements at their top speed capabilities. Instinctively we all recognize that in order for people to move fast, they have to be uninhibited in terms of the effort or energy expenditure. When athletes do this, coaches recognize that they can attend to other issues and do not need to employ psychological interventions to motivate athletes to ‘boost’ their efforts. We also see that when athletes are naturally aggressive they will organically exhibit certain facial features of vocal noises. Consider anytime you have been in the gym and seen someone lifting a one rep max. There is usually quite a bit of noise that that individual makes along with facial expressions that are commonly associated with aggression. Finally, we tend to identify aggression in others easier when we compare them to athletes that are NOT demonstrating those behaviors (e.g. lack of confidence, athletes freezing before movements or making simple mistakes). But what is actually happening on a neurological level that makes us think we are seeing an athlete’s aggressive mindset?
Part II. The Science & Analysis Of Mental Aggression Training
The first step towards understanding what is happening in an athlete’s brain during an aggressive mindset is through Polyvagal theory. This theory was developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, the world’s leading expert on relating the autonomic nervous system, a neural system that oversees largely unconscious functions such as heart rate and respiration, to social behavior. In the article The Connection Between Athletic Identity & The Yips, the article describes Polyvagal theory as follows: Polyvagal Theory provides us with an understanding of how we deal with stress that exceeds our ability to cope. Porges argues that a key component of how we deal with this type of stress is through the mind-body connection, which is regulated by the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve extends from the brainstem to the colon and acts as a type of ‘control center’ for our brain that allows us to monitor internal body functions and produce behaviors that are necessary to deal with external environmental factors. Within the framework of Polyvagal theory, Porges cites the term Neuroception to explain how we see aggression in others on neuropsychological level: by processing information from the environment through the senses, the nervous system continually evaluates risk. I have coined the term neuroception to describe how neural circuits distinguish whether situations or people are safe, dangerous, or life-threatening. Because of our heritage as a species, neuroception takes place in primitive parts of our brain, without our conscious awareness. The detection of a person as safe or dangerous triggers neurobiologically determined prosocial or defensive behaviors. Even though we may not be aware of danger on a cognitive level, on a neurophysiological level, our body has already started a sequence of neural processes that would facilitate adaptive defense behaviors such as fight, flight or freeze. So, if we consider the sports environment and what we just learned about how our mind and body respond to social perceptions, it can be easy to see how aggressive mindsets are activated (usually unconsciously or involuntarily).
Opposing teams or fans saying obscene things to competitors, other athletes trying to inflict physical damage on their opponents, coaches yelling at their players, or worst of all, athletes feeling the pressure of letting their team down…all of these scenarios understandably can trigger defense mechanisms such as aggressive mindsets. But what is the critical difference between an aggressive mindset versus a trauma response of fight-flight? The answer lies into how stimulating the competition environment is to the athlete. In the book The Body Bears The Burden by Robert Scaer, the author gives us a description about the neurophysiological process when the brain detects threats and creates involuntary aggressive mindsets (AKA fight-flight responses): the brain’s pathways for the acute response to a threat are primarily located in the right half of the brain. They receive messages primarily from the sensory organs located in the head related to sight, smell, taste, hearing and vestibular sense (balance). This process of sensory scanning of the environment is called the orienting response, a physical act of side-to-side head movement that brings all of the sensory organs of the head and neck into play. These messages are then sent to the thalamus, a relay center in the middle of the brain. This sensory information is then routed by the thalamus to appropriate areas of the cerebral cortex that involve perceiving sensation and initiating movement. It is also sent by the thalamus to the limbic system (the emotional brain), particularly the amygdala, the nucleus, or center for arousal. The amygdala is the brain’s alarm system and storehouse of emotion-linked memory. It basically evaluates the emotional content of the sensory messages, particularly whether they represent danger. Essentially, if the environment is too stimulating, the response from our ‘emotion-brain’ quite literally overrides the structures of our mind that are primarily responsible for higher order brain processes like executive functioning skills…an involuntary process. But their are movement-based advantages that happen in this process relevant for sports.
This process recruits from many different systems, one of which is the sympathetic nervous system (one of three branches within the autonomic nervous system). The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the generation of physical behaviors in response to a stressful or dangerous situation. Part of the way this process happens is through increased heart rate and the recruitment of Type II muscle fibers. Why is this important? Increased heart rate will help deliver blood to the working muscle tissue providing it with enriched oxygenated blood-cells prolonging the ability for the organism to maintain endurance, while also stimulating Type II muscle fibers to allow the individual to create more powerful and explosive physical reactions. In summary, the perfect collection of endurance, strength and speed become available all at once. So when we put all this information together, what can we use strategies to voluntarily access aggressive mindsets and avoid involuntary fight-flight responses? In my professional experience there are three phases to this process: first, prep the competition space before you arrive. This means that you need your social support system to be perfectly synchronized with what your needs are (e.g. having a supportive coach rather than a verbally abusive, boomer coach). Second, identify if there are any unprocessed trauma events that could be inadvertently triggered by the environment (e.g. previous injuries that required surgery, history of early childhood abuse, etc.) and resolve those issues via somatic-informed mental training or trauma-informed mental health. Finally, create pre-performance routines which include a combination of insight-based perception conditioning and physical preloading procedures that tap into the sympathetic nervous system. In my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I provide mental training protocols that help psychologically condition athletes to accomplish this. Let’s briefly introduce these concepts starting off with one of my favorite approaches: static gazing.
Part III. Tips For Athletes To Enhance This Psychological State
One of my favorite pre-performance routines that I teach athletes and discuss in my book, is a mental preload method called static gazing. Different sport psychology and mental health professionals use different names for this technique (e.g. gazespotting, quiet eye), but ultimately this process achieves the same outcomes. In the article Quiet Eye Training: Effects on Learning and Performance Under Pressure by Vine & Wilson, the authors explain the science behind this process in the following excerpt: The Quiet Eye (QE) has been defined as the duration of the final fixation towards a relevant target prior to the execution of the critical phase of movement and has been accepted within the literature as a measure of optimal visual attentional control. Vickers (1996) suggests that the QE allows for a period of cognitive pre-programming of movement parameters while minimizing distraction from other environmental or internal cues. Vickers (1996) used Posner and Raichle's (1994) conceptualization of three neural networks (posterior orienting, anterior executive, and vigilance networks) to provide support for her postulations of how the QE may provide this “quiet focus.” The posterior orienting network, responsible for the location of gaze in space, may be used by performers to hold a stable and steady gaze on the target as well as preventing disengagement of this location to other locations. The anterior executive then acts to understand what is being seen and may account for adjustments in the timing of fixations in relation to the movement (longer QE periods), improving accuracy. The vigilance network is responsible for coordinating both of these networks and ensures there is no interference during sustained focus, something that is particularly relevant during periods of high pressure. The QE has not only been shown to be indicative of superior performance, but has also been demonstrated to be trainable.
The authors continue: Harle and Vickers (2001) utilized a QE training protocol in an attempt to improve the free throw accuracy of near-elite basketball players. The QE of each member of the team was recorded and viewed relative to an elite prototype in a feedback session using vision-in-action data. Participants were then taught a 3-step QE training regime aimed at improving their visuomotor control. Results showed that not only did the team significantly increase their QE durations and free-throw percentages in a laboratory setting, but after two seasons in competitive play they had improved their free-throw percentage by 23%. This finding is particularly noteworthy as a recent examination of free-throw statistics suggests that the average free-throw percentages at the highest levels of the game have not significantly improved since the conception of the free-throw in the 1960s. In summary, athletes pick a specific point in their visual field, stare at that point, and exert all psychological energy possible towards not allowing any movement of their eyes. While it is a simple process, it is virtually impossible to prevent movement. But that’s the point…it takes so much focus to accomplish this that regardless if athletes can keep their eyes static or not, they will be incredibly focused, which is a key feature of having an aggressive mindset. But there is another form of mental training that athletes competing at the highest level need to regularly engage in in order to create cognitive bandwidth for aggressive mindsets: trauma-informed and/or somatic interventions. Because sports takes an incredible toll on an athlete’s mind and body, overtime this stress accumulation will increase the risk that an athlete’s stress threshold tolerance is reduced, leaving them more prone to a fight-flight response rather than an aggression-based reaction.
One of the best tools to enhance aggressive mindset trainings that elite athletes want to keep secret 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. Some athletes and coaches reading this may initially be confused by these statements because they are under the false impression that mental health is a separate issue from mental performance. The fact of the matter is that these are not separate issues, but rather inseparable concepts. If your body is not healthy, how can you perform as an athlete? The same goes for your mind, and if any athlete is serious about achieving their goals, and acquiring consistent mental aggression states, then they need to make psychological training like Brainspotting standard operating procedure.
Psychology Sports Quotes
Going through an entire year of sports training can be a grueling process for many athletes. During this time period, athletes look for motivation to help solve problems and better understand the complexity of sports. One area that athletes will use are sport psychology resources. Learn more about the psychology sports quotes that influenced Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns which have positively impacted many athlete…
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: Important Quotes From The Sport Psychology Field
Athletes, coaches and even sport psychologists regularly turn to one resource to help them reframe negative perceptions of the sport environment, enhance their confidence and learn new ways to enhance their training: psychology sports quotes. Through the process of writing Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I used many quotes that influenced my thinking and writing on the subject matter of mental blocks in sports and how to overcome them. Because I found these quotes to be so helpful in both my writing and my work with athletes, I wanted to use the Notes to share those excerpts.
For this issue of the Notes, I am going to review three excerpts that were game changers for my work with athletes. The first psychology sports quote came from The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk. This quote gives us an introductory explanation for why traditional sport psychology is not the answer for mental blocks. The second quote comes from the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand which introduces us to Brainspotting. Finally, the last quote is an excerpt from my new book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, which gives us insight as to how we can better understand the sports environment.
Part I. Insight For Athletes In The Body Keeps The Score
In The Body Keeps The Score, author Bessel Van Der Kolk takes us on a journey into the modern science that explains how trauma impacts us. The description of the book is as follows: Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.
There are many incredible quotes and excerpts that have greatly influenced my work in the field of sport psychology, but one of my favorite quotes is in Chapter 4. Bessel Van Der Kolk makes the following statement: psychologists usually try to help people use insight and understanding to manage their behavior. However, 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. When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it. I am reminded of the comedy in which a seven-time recidivist in an anger-management program extols the virtue of the techniques he’s learned ‘they are great and work terrific-as long as you are not really angry’. This quote really hits home for me because most athletes have had the experience of sport psychologists telling them to use ‘positive-thinking’ but have had little to no success with this when trying to overcome mental blocks. This is because these are the wrong tools for this issue which is critical for athletes to know.
Part II. The Secret Mental Training Weapon In This Is Your Brain On Sports
In David Grand’s book This Is Your Brain On Sports, the author provides us insight into a new sport psychology tool that can finally help athletes overcome mental blocks. The book is described as follows: This book introduces the breakthrough concept of STSD (Sport Traumatic Stress Disorder). Grand and Goldberg have discovered that STSDs are the cause of most significant performance problems. Performance blocks and anxiety, including the yips, stem from accumulated sports traumas including sports injuries, failures and humiliations. The authors also introduce the Brainspotting Sports Performance System (BSPS) which quickly finds, releases and resolves the sports traumas held in your brain and body. An easy read, THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON SPORTS is filled with engaging, informative, inspiring stories. These case examples illustrate how professional, elite, collegiate and junior athletes have been freed for good from this silent "epidemic" of performance blocks and anxiety including: the yips, "Steve Blass disease," "Mackey Sasser syndrome," protracted slumps, balking, choking and freezing. THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON SPORTS provides the answers and the cure for athletes, their coaches and parents about "Beating Blocks, Slumps and Performance Anxiety for Good!" Grand and Goldberg also show how their BSPS can take all athletes to levels they could only heretofore dream of!
One of my favorite quotes in Dr. Grand’s book illustrates why Brainspotting works and how it helps athletes in the following excerpt: Brainspotting Sports Work has very little to do with traditional talk therapy. The belief in talk therapy is that talking about and reliving earlier upsets ultimately helps the client to heal. Talk therapy may uncover upsetting early childhood experiences that contribute to one’s problems in the present, but the treatment is often lengthy and inefficient. Treatment that relies on conscious verbal reporting is problematic because the client often either is unable to articulate the problem or is unaware of it. Athletes struggling with RSPPs (Repetitive Sports Performance Problems) are unable to understand them because the freeze reactions have nothing to do with conscious processes but are instead products of trauma, often long forgotten, that are still unconsciously held in their bodies. Brainspotting Sports Work explores past physical and emotional traumas without consciously rehashing them. As a consequence, we don’t encourage athletes to talk or think through past events. Instead, our model directly targets the places in the athlete’s brain and body where these physical and emotional traumas are frozen. By holding the eye position in place, with the athlete gazing at a pointer, the brain is able to process and release the trauma’s present-day effects.
Part III. Tips On Beating The Yips In Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns
In my new book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I introduce readers to new concepts that help explain what the Yips is and how athletes should actually approach mental skills training. The following is a summary that provides more details on what Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns is all about: Discover the silent threat plaguing athletes worldwide in BREAKTHROUGHS NEED BREAKDOWNS, a compelling narrative non-fiction shedding light on the pervasive impact of the Yips, or Mental Blocks, which silently derail careers, drain organizations, and sow panic throughout the athletic world. Unveiling the deep-rooted trauma behind these psychological barriers, this book offers vital mental health interventions to empower athletes to shatter limitations and reach their peak performance. Through riveting tales from athletes and sport psychologists, embark on an enlightening journey through the neuroscience of the Yips, unlocking pathways to resilience and triumph, while also describing strategies used to enhance mental performance.
In my book, there is one excerpt that took a considerable amount of time to craft but ultimately helps readers really understand important information about the sports environment, and how to leverage this information to their advantage: At their core, sports are stress tests. It does not matter what level of sport competition an athlete participates in, nor what type of sport. In order to pass through the stress test successfully, athletes need to be able to give full mental focus and full physical focus. But like any stress test, if there is an unresolved issue or weakness within the system, the stress test will reveal this. In the case of athletes, the revelation comes in the form of an error signal which can vary from athlete to athlete, but usually is unexpected and to many athletes ‘inexplicable’. This excerpt from the book explains mental blocks such as the Yips & Twisties in more detail, followed by strategies athletes can use to actually permanently get rid of these psychological obstacles and maintain peak mental performance outcomes.
2 Critical Horseback Riding Psychology Tips
In my new book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I discuss multiple athlete case studies about the Yips. One of the case studies involves an elite equestrian athlete. For this issue of the Notes, I review not only how I helped this athlete overcome the mental block, but I also discuss horse psychology and why it is important to understand these neuroscience concepts…
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: Why Many Equestrian Athletes Don’t Understand Horse Psychology
Equestrian athletics is one of the most mentally and physically challenging sport environments an athlete can compete in. It is absolutely critical that an athlete be in top physical condition in order to meet the demands of the equestrian event that they are competing in. Many equestrian athletes also understand that it is vital to be in top mental condition to perform at a high level too. Horseback riders probably have heard instructors say things like ‘ride with confidence’ or have heard terms surrounding mental toughness or focus. But from my experience what has been absolutely shocking is how very few experts within the equestrian community understand horse psychology.
But well before an equestrian athlete can reach their potential, they need to have a solid understanding of how horses think (and if possible how horses feel). Through my work with equestrian athletes, I have found that in nearly 100% of athlete case studies, all riders need some basic introduction into the neuroscience behind both horse psychology and the connection to the human nervous system. I discuss these issues in-depth in my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns. For this issue of the notes, I will first introduce the concept of horseback riding psychology, then I will explore horse neuroscience, and finally I will provide sport psychology tips that I used with my athlete in my book.
Part I. Introduction To Horseback Riding Psychology
Let’s start with the obvious. Horses are prey animals that live in herds. These two facts tell us some very important things about horse psychology. The first is that horses always ‘have their heads on a swivel’. They are constantly on the lookout for potential predators or threats within their immediate environment which is how they have adapted to survive over the millions of years that they have inhabited the planet. Obviously, this behavior is representative of the psychology of a prey animal. Second, horses are incredibly curious and social creatures. They form intimate bonds with those in the herd AND are always trying to assess who is the alpha. Equestrian athletes can do one of two things with this information: they can either leverage this to their advantage or they can ignore it at their own peril and not develop any form of meaningful communication with their teammate. Interestingly in my experience, many equestrian athletes are mostly unaware of these psychological characteristics and underestimate the impact these behaviors will have on the performance (which is why in most cases, they end up working with me). When equestrian athletes seek the services of a sport psychologist, it’s because they mistake these experiences as a mental block. But what I have found is that on average is that it isn’t a mental block, but rather the rider is missing the necessary language to communicate with their teammate.
To be blunt, the fact that horses are gracious enough to let a predator ride its’ back, should be enough to motivate humans that want to work with these animals to increase their ability to communicate with them more efficiently. Consider the following scenario: your boss tells you that you are going to need to start learn a new skill (e.g. playing an instrument, learning about car engines, etc.). Maybe you are excited by this, but maybe you aren’t. For the moment, let’s assume that you are not thrilled with this new task you’ve been given. What is your motivation at this point? Next, your boss says that you have to learn this skill from an instructor who speaks a completely foreign language to you…what is your mood and motivation now? Consider the world that horses inhabit when it comes to the equestrian relationship. This type of scenario is probably fairly representative of a horse’s experience with most humans, and to make matters worse, humans oftentimes become frustrated with horses at the worst moments of this rollercoaster ride of emotions. This is in large part because many humans do not understand the power of the fight, flight, freeze systems that become activated by these events. Equestrian athletes don’t need to be experts in horse neuroscience, but it certainly would help if they retained basic information about how the hardware and software in a horse’s brain works in these scenarios. Let’s explore in more detail what this looks like.
Part II. Research & Analysis Of Horse Neuroscience
Let’s begin by understanding specific areas of the horse’s brain that will help us better understand these fascinating creatures. In the article Prefrontal Cortex in Horses and Humans by Janet L. Jones Ph.D., the author provides us valuable insight into similarities and differences between a horse’s brain and our own. The author states the following: Many horse owners think the existence of the prefrontal cortex is a major controversy in equine science. It’s not. It’s just an area that’s riddled with misinformation. Curiously, most people—horsey or not—want the prefrontal cortex to be part of the horse’s brain. How does their reasoning go? “If I have one and I’m smart, he must have one because he’s smart.” That’s an oversimplified generalization, but at base, I think it’s true. The prefrontal cortex is a small portion of brain tissue located at the front of the frontal lobe in human brains, just behind and above our eyes. It’s responsible for what we call the executive function—planning, organizing, deciding, evaluating, and strategizing. It’s also responsible for judging, worrying, and manipulating. Humans rely strongly on the prefrontal cortex. Horses do not. Thirty-three percent of the average human cortex—the outer layers of the human brain—is prefrontal. That’s a lot! It matches our sense that we spend a lot of time carrying out the activities of executive function. By comparison, about 15 percent of the monkey cortex is prefrontal, and only 5 percent of the cat and dog cortex is prefrontal. These canine and feline predator brains are capable of limited executive function and spend very little time carrying out executive tasks. But they probably can when they need to. Prey brains are different in many important ways from predators' brains. Horses have no prefrontal cortex. They do not even have a frontal lobe. The accuracy of these facts is verified easily by consulting recent MRI images of the equine brain. So if horses have no prefrontal cortex, how do they solve problems?
The author continues: They use their excellent memories and senses. What worked in the past? What action led to positive consequences? Try that! The last thing a prey animal needs to survive is a prefrontal cortex. All that time spent pondering, deciding, and planning is time taken away from fleeing danger. Over 56 million years of evolution, the equine brain has evolved to prevent wasting time. A horse who considers the meaning of a movement in the grasses is a horse who becomes a predator’s dinner. The lack of the prefrontal cortex in horses is a gift to them and us. It keeps them alive and helps to sharpen their memories. But it allows us to work with animals who live in the moment, who do not—indeed, can not—judge, criticize, worry, or manipulate. What a refreshing experience! So, now that we understand some of the evolutionary reasons that drive horse behavior, let’s continue to dive deeper into the specific hardware that affects these fight, flight responses: The amygdala. In the article Nociceptive pain and anxiety in equines: Physiological and behavioral alterations by the authors state the following when describing this structure: The amygdala forms part of the limbic system. It is located in the medial temporal lobe, which is known for its role in the emotional states of sensory stimuli, related to behavioral adaptations in response to changes in an organism’s internal and external environment. Current lines of research, both anatomical and physiological, suggest that nociceptive projections that originate in the lamina I of the dorsal horn of the spinal cord, or the spinal nucleus of the trigeminal nerve, leading to the parabrachial nucleus and then to the central nucleus of the cerebral amygdala, which functions as the main exit for projections from the amygdala, performs functions related to pain, and participates significantly in the emotional-nociceptive component by modulating part of the behavioral component, including, to a large degree, facial expressions generated by pain.
The authors continue: Schmidt et al. evaluated the morphology of the warm blood horse through magnetic – resonance - imaging; they found functional connections located mainly in the limbic system between cortex somatosensory and amygdala, areas that have been proven to be responsible for threat detection. The CNS has neuronal groups called central pattern generators (CPG), located in the mesencephala, bridge, and spinal cord, in both humans and animals. These groups form part of the neuronal circuits that organisms possess to modulate their adaptation to the demands of the environment, and allow individuals to express motor responses that include recognition of emotions. CPG are activated principally by stimulation of the peripheral sensory receptors and signals generated by other nuclei of the CNS. As a result, the limbic system regulates the expression of emotional responses, while the CPG associated with this system initiate and controls the activity of the facial muscles to generate a conservative, stereotypical response to a specific stimulus. During the sensations of fear and terror, the peripheral stimuli will lead to the activation of the limbic system that will produce physiological responses such as increased heart rate and respiratory rate, dry mouth, muscular tension, and sweating. In the same way, there is an emotional reaction that communicates the internal state of an individual that can be reflected through gestures or facial expressions. Previously, it was mentioned that emotions were uniquely human characteristics; however, Charles Darwin described them as emotional states such as fear, aggression, and pain in animals expressed by postural reactions and facial expressions. Understanding an emotion such as fear requires, first, knowing the relationship between the cognitive sentiment represented in the cerebral cortex and the associated physiological signs regulated by subcortical areas.
The authors conclude: This process occurs in the following order. First, an emotional stimulus of significant intensity activates sensory systems that send information to the hypothalamus. This area generates a response that is capable of modulating heart rate, blood pressure, and respiratory rate. At the same time, the information from this stimulus is carried to the cerebral cortex; hence, it is taken indirectly from the peripheral organs (which lose their homeostatic state due to the stimulus) and directly from the hypothalamus, amygdala, and related structures. Hence, from a neurobiological point of view, anxiety, and pain share the communication pathways in the limbic system that makes it difficult to establish a difference for their recognition since they will lead to similar physiological reactions. Therefore, the limbic system fulfills the role of interconnection, processing, and response, both physiological and emotional, which will be reflected with the activation of the sympathetic nervous system or postural reactions that communicate the internal state of the individual. While there are undoubtedly key differences in the fight, flight responses between humans and horses, there are many striking similarities as well. Why is this important? There is a term in the study of consciousness called Qualia which has been defined as ‘the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena’. There is the subjective experience of fear and pain, but we also have a shared experience of this as well. Because we as humans know what it is like in some form or fashion to suffer under the mental conditions of fight-flight, then we should try to work with these animals with empathy and leverage their strengths rather than weaponize these instincts against them (e.g. breaking in horses, viewing them exclusively as property, short-tempers when they don’t obey us). So how exactly can we engage with these animals in a more positive light to yield better performances and relationships?
Part III. Sport Psychology Tips To Enhance Horseback Riding Connection
Now that we have introduced important concepts in animal and horse psychology that are critical for equestrian athletes to know in order to form a strong connection with their teammate, we need to explore the truth behind the concepts of fake confidence, trauma and how these issues prevent riders from truly bonding with their animal comrades. Let’s first begin by exploring what equestrian athletes are commonly taught about confidence versus the reality. Horseback riders are often taught that they need to ‘ride with confidence’ but in my experience they are rarely told what this means or even how to do this. Based on my experience working with elite athletes, confidence is not a place that you arrive or stay at, but rather a place that you temporarily visit and then promptly exit. Furthermore, there are too many variations of unexpected stress markers that can happen during sport events. To imply that confident athletes remain confident in all situations all the time goes against everything we understand about neuroplasticity and how the brain truly functions. Instead, equestrian athletes should focus on these two concepts to achieve peak mental performance: be cognitively flexible rather than confident, and become comfortable with discomfort. Let me explain more on this. On any given day, your horse may be feeling motivated to work with you or not motivated to work with you. But regardless of where they are on this spectrum, equestrian athletes need to adapt to where their horses are in terms of mood, temperament and motivation. Consider the following scenario: you are an elite equestrian athlete preparing for one of your biggest competitions of the year. However, the night before you contract the flu and wake up feeling mentally and physically debilitated. You know that you have to go through with the performance, but you know you will not be able to put on your best work. What do you do?
Traditional sport psychologists would cite ‘mental toughness’ strategies and encourage you to ‘gut it out’. Based on my applied experience working with Olympic-level and elite equestrian athletes, it is better to adapt to your situation rather than perform outside of your capabilities. What does this look like? On a scale of 1-10 (10 being you feel great, 1 you feel terrible) let’s assume that you are a 1 and you are obligated (and still somewhat capable) to perform. As a 10 athlete, you are able to do more advanced maneuvers than a 1. But because you are a 1, making those maneuvers is not an option. But, you are still capable of doing certain things, even if they seem small or meaningless. If you can focus on doing what you are capable of on that day rather than what you are not capable of, you are still in the competition. Furthermore, there is no assurance one way or another that your competition is a 10 out of 10, when in fact they may be a 1 as well. However, it is also critical to make sure you identify what your horse’s capabilities are and ensure that you only ask of them what you know they will give you. But there is one more mental training technique that can help enhance your ability to communicate with your horse. The new technique that has athletes talking is called Brainspotting. Brainspotting is a brain-based mental training intervention that utilizes the athlete’s field of vision combined with focused mindfulness to help athlete’s overcome mental blocks while also becoming ‘comfortable with discomfort’. Trauma expert Robert Scaer described Brainspotting as follows: Brainspotting is based on the profound attunement of the therapist with the patient, finding a somatic cue and extinguishing it by down-regulating the amygdala. It isn’t just PNS (Parasympathetic Nervous System) activation that is facilitated, it is homeostasis”
In the research article Brainspotting: Sustained attention, spinothalamic tracts, thalamocortical processing, and the healing of adaptive orientation truncated by traumatic experience, the authors explain the science behind how Brainspotting works: Full orientation to the aversive memory of a traumatic experience fails to occur when a high level of physiological arousal that is threatening to become overwhelming promotes a neurochemical de-escalation of the activation: there is then no resolution. In Brainspotting, and other trauma psychotherapies, healing can occur when full orientation to the memory is made possible by the superior colliculi-pulvinar, superior colliculi-mediodorsal nucleus, and superior colliculi-intralaminar nuclei pathways being bound together electrophysiologically for coherent thalamocortical processing. The brain’s response to the memory is ‘‘reset’’ so that the emotional response experienced in the body, and conveyed through the paleospinothalamic tract to the midbrain and thalamus and on to the basal ganglia and cortex, is no longer disturbing. Completion of the orientation ‘‘reset’’ ensures that the memory is econsolidated without distress and recollection of the event subsequently is no longer dysphorically activating at a physiological level. When athletes experience unwanted feelings during competition such as anxiety, traditional sport psychologists will give them tools to distract them from these feelings. But Brainspotting helps athletes train their minds to allow the discomfort to exist, which in turn helps extinguish the negative symptoms outright. One reason Brainspotting is so effective specifically with equestrian athletes is because Brainspotting forces athletes to become more aware of negative somatic sensations that are occurring in their bodies, and if they can be more alert to these sensations, they will be able to communicate more effectively with their teammate! If you are interested to learn more about Brainspotting, use this link here!
What Athletes Need To Know - Equestrian Mental Blocks
Athletes competing in equestrian sports face many physical and mental obstacles. The accumulation of stress associated in dealing with these obstacles can lead to the creation of mental blocks. I write about this extensively in my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns. Learn more about how sport psychologists help equestrian athletes use mental skills training to overcome the Yips...
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!
Sport Psychology & How The Athlete’s Brain Works
The field of sport psychology is undergoing a massive change due to new developments in our understanding of neuroscience. For this issue of the Notes, I want to review how modern sport psychology rooted in new neuroscience research helps us better understand the athlete’s brain…
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: Sport Psychology & How The Athlete’s Brain Works
The field of sport psychology is currently in the early stages of a massive transition. Even since its’ inception, sport psychologists have been focused on helping athletes achieve peak mental performance. Professionals in the field have primarily utilized interventions that have a ‘top-down’ emphasis, meaning that the sport psychologist attempts to provide the athlete with either better ‘insight’ into the psychological obstacles that they are dealing with, or increase their confidence through logic-based thinking processes. Many of these approaches are widely used in the field of psychotherapy, but are quickly becoming outdated due to better options that have been developed.
This is because new advancements in technology have allowed us to better understand what is actually happening in the brain, which in turn has helped clinicians develop new techniques that are ‘bottom up’ focused. Because I saw that there needed to be a massive overhaul in the field of sport psychology I wrote a book called Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, which explores these issues. I want to use this issue of the Notes to introduce some of the concepts I explore in the book to better understand how the athlete’s brain works. In part I, I will provide an athlete case study that we can use to guide our understanding of these concepts which will then lead into a discussion about athlete learning, consciousness & trauma.
Part I. Sport Psychology Athlete Case Study
People that are unfamiliar with the sport of NASCAR usually have a very poor understanding about the psychological and physical demands that drivers are under. These drivers experience immense pressure from their sponsors, fans and teammates to drive their car to perfection. Psychological demands include but are not limited to analyzing car data in real-time while driving at speeds of 200 MPH, making efficient decisions about when to make tactical pit stops which can result in lost position, avoiding high speed wrecks, maneuvering around rival drivers, maintaining composure when driving tight or loose, avoiding being intentionally wrecked by rival drivers, securing consistent top five finishes, and successful qualifying. These are just a fraction of the psychological obstacles these athletes face while competing in front of hundreds of thousands if not millions of spectators.
While there are psychological challenges unique to NASCAR, what is not unique is how one deals with the discomfort of pressure that comes during these performances. As I have stated in previous Training Report issues, at the end of the day all sports are problem solving experiences that are meant to induce maximum psychological and physical stress upon its’ participants. The athlete who endures these inductions of stress is usually the most successful. So how does one achieve peak performance in these situations? By seeking comfort in discomfort. What this means is rather than developing coping skills to avoid or manage the discomfort, athletes should seek to both understand and fully experience whatever their subjective discomfort is to the maximum possibility.
Part II. The Neuroscience Of Athlete Learning
One area that is of particular interest in sport psychology which helps athletes develop comfort in discomfort is athlete learning. In the book The Biology Of Desire, Why Addiction Is Not A Disease by Marc Lewis, PhD., while the author’s book focuses on addiction, the following excerpt is a great description about the science behind learning: Whether we construe addiction as a disease, a choice, a complex sociocultural process, self-medication, or a string of bad-hair days, we only have one brain, and it’s central to everything we do, everything we are. So a very important question is simply this: what does the brain do in addiction? But before trying to answer that question, we need to understand how brains change normally. In fact, brains are supposed to change. Brain change-or neuroplasticity-is the fundamental mechanisms by which infants grow into toddlers, who grow into children, who grow into adults, who continue to grow. Brain change underlies the transformations in thinking and feeling that characterize early adolescence. In fact, developmental neuroscientists estimate that ‘as many as 30,000 synapses may be lost per second over the entire cortex during the pubertal/adolescent period. Brain change is necessary for language acquisition and impulse control in early childhood, and for learning to drive a car, play a musical instrument, or appreciate opera later in life. Brain change underlies religious conversion, becoming a parent, and, not surprisingly, falling in love. Brains have to change for learning to take place. Without physical changes in brain matter, learning is impossible. Synapses appear and self-perpetuate or weaken and disappear in everyday learning. Learning alters the communication patterns between brain regions and builds unique configurations of synapses (synaptic networks) that house knowledge, skill, and memory itself. The connection between learning and brain change has been studied for more than a hundred years: it was reasonably well understood by the 1940’s, and the search for specific cellular mechanisms continues today.
The author continues: Whether repairing the damage caused by a minor stroke or altering emotional processes in the wake of trauma, neuroplasticity is at the top of the brain’s resume’. To repeat: proponents of the disease model argue that addiction changes the brain. And they’re right. It does. But the brain changes anyway, at every level: gene expression, cell density, the concentration and location of synapses and their fibers, even the size and shape of the cortex itself. Of course, neuroscientists who subscribe to the disease model must know that brains change with learning and development. So they must view the brain change that accompanies addiction as extreme or pathological. In fact, they would have to show exactly that in order to be convincing. They would have to show that the kind (or extent or location) of brain change characteristic of addiction is nothing like what we see in normal learning and development, or even in the more extreme transitions people go through when they fall in love or have children. But that’s where they step onto thin ice. The kind of brain changes seen in addiction also show up when people become absorbed in a sport, join a political movement, or become obsessed with their sweetheart or their kids. The brain contains only a few major traffic routes for goal seeking. Like the mina streets of a busy city, the same routes get dug up and paved over time and time again, no matter who’s in charge. Brain disease may be a useful metaphor for how addiction seems, but it’s not a sensible explanation for how addiction works. What I love about this excerpt is both the heavy emphasis on discussing neuroscience mechanisms of learning and how this complicates traditional ideas of how we understand human psychology. While this can make executing psychotherapy approaches more difficult, it also frees athletes and sport psychologists to utilize new approaches to help individuals overcome these issues.
Part III. Understanding Athlete Consciousness & Trauma
Another area of interest within the world of sport psychology is athlete consciousness. In the book The Feeling Of What Happens, by Antonio Damasio, The author states the following: core consciousness occurs when the brain’s representation devices generate an imaged, nonverbal account of how the organism’s own state is affected by the organism’s processing of an object, and when this process enhances the image of the causative object, thus placing it saliently in a spatial and temporal context. This hypothesis outlines two component mechanisms: the generation of the imaged nonverbal account of the object-organism relationship-which is the source of the sense of self in the act of knowing - and the enhancement of the images of an object. The author continues: As far as the sense of self component is concerned, the hypothesis is grounded on the following premises: consciousness depends on the internal construction and exhibition of new knowledge concerning an interaction between that organism and an object. The organism, as a unit, is mapped within the brain, in the sensory and motor structures activated by the interaction of the organism with the object, both organism and object are mapped as neural patterns, in the first-order maps; all of these neural patterns can become images. The sensorimotor maps pertaining to the object cause changes in the maps pertaining to the organism. The changes described previously can be re-represented in yet other maps (second-order maps) which thus represent the relationship of object and organism. The neural patterns transiently formed in second-order maps can become mental images, no less so than the neural patterns in first-order maps. Finally, because of the body-related nature of both organism maps and second-order maps, the mental images that describe the relationship are feelings.
Antonio Damasio’s book would be one of several resources that influenced how psychotherapists understood the brain’s mechanisms of trauma. For instance, in the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author goes into great detail to explain the neuroscience behind the sports-related trauma and how the brain responds to stress events: 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.’ Ultimately, the educational resources listed in this issue of the Notes are just a fraction of the concepts and ideas about athlete brain science. These resources also had significant influence on my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns. Make sure to stay up to date with the Notes as I continue to write about additional research that is influencing the field of sport psychology!
NASCAR Drivers, Sport Psychology & Trauma
When I began writing my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I needed to provide a case study about an athlete population that consistently deals with the Yips. For this issue of the Notes, I want to talk about how NASCAR drivers influenced this book and how they deal with a version of the Yips called Whiplash Syndrome…
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.
Psychology Books - The Feeling Of What Happens By Antonio Damasio
During the writing process for my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I needed to thoroughly research all of the literature that would help me better understand the Yips. While not a sport psychology book, Antonio Damasio’s book The Feeling Of What Happens significantly guided my thinking on this issue and how to help athletes overcome the Yips in sports…
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: The Feeling Of What Happens By Antonio Damasio
I have spent a considerable portion of my career trying to help athletes overcome mental blocks such as the Yips. What I have found in my work with different performers is that this is an issue that affects far more athletes than people realize. For instance, while the term the Yips is mostly used in the sports of baseball and golf, athletes in all sports such as gymnastics, cross-country, equestrian athletics and other sports experience the Yips just as intensely and in some cases with higher frequencies. Gymnastics athletes are an example of this, but instead of calling this mental block the Yips, they call it the Twisties.
Because I recognized that this is a very prevalent problem for athletes, I wrote a book about this topic called Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns. My experiences with athletes no doubt served as the primary influence for my understanding on how to effectively help athletes overcome the Yips, but there were also many important secondary sources that guided my thinking on this. One of those sources was a book written by Antonio Damasio, The Feeling Of What Happens. For this issue of the Notes I want to provide introductory details about what the Yips are and how Antonio Damasio’s book influenced my work.
Part I. What Are The Yips?
The Yips is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when an athlete is no longer able to perform even simple movements in their sport despite no current presence of a physical injury or range of motion issues. The vast majority of sport psychologists that attempt to help athletes overcome this issue focus on using ‘insight’ building approaches such as positive self-talk or cognitive behavioral therapy. The idea behind using these approaches is that the sport psychologist will try to overload the athlete’s Yips or ‘negative’ thinking patterns with more positive and logic-based thinking strategies. However, when we really dive into the basic functions of the brain during this experience, what we find is that these approaches are misplaced and not appropriate for dealing with this issue.
I have spent a considerable amount of time in previous Training Report issues discussing how trauma is connected to the Yips. To summarize, when we have experiences that exceed our ability to cope with those moments our brain is left in a state of alarm. Because a trauma event can be so overwhelming to an athlete’s brain, the experience oftentimes is not fully processed the entire way through, thereby leaving an athlete’s mind in a frozen state of confusion trying to make sense of the experience. While this is certainly foundational towards understanding the Yips, we need to go even ‘deeper in the weeds’ to really grasp the nuance of this neurological process. Antonio Damasio’s book The Feeling Of What Happens: Body and Emotion In the Making of Consciousness provides important context for understanding this issue.
Part II. How The Feeling Of What Happens Explains The Yips
‘In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Antonio Damasio — a renowned and revered scientist and clinician who spent decades following amnesiacs down hospital corridors, waiting for comatose patients to awaken, and devising ingenious research using PET scans to piece together the great puzzle of consciousness — explores the biological roots of sentient awareness and its role in survival. Consciousness is the feeling of what happens-our mind noticing the body's reaction to the world and responding to that experience. Without our bodies there can be no consciousness, which is at heart a mechanism for survival that engages body, emotion, and mind in the glorious spiral of human life’. Linking body and emotion in an arresting and original study of what it is to be human, The Feeling of What Happens had an incredible impact on my understanding about the complexity of the Yips and how athletes deal with this issue. Specifically, there is an excerpt in the book that touches on the connection between consciousness and the brain’s ongoing process of ‘identifying where the body ends, and where the world begins’. The author states the following: core consciousness occurs when the brain’s representation devices generate an imaged, nonverbal account of how the organism’s own state is affected by the organism’s processing of an object, and when this process enhances the image of the causative object, thus placing it saliently in a spatial and temporal context. This hypothesis outlines two component mechanisms: the generation of the imaged nonverbal account of the object-organism relationship-which is the source of the sense of self in the act of knowing - and the enhancement of the images of an object.
The author continues: As far as the sense of self component is concerned, the hypothesis is grounded on the following premises: consciousness depends on the internal construction and exhibition of new knowledge concerning an interaction between that organism and an object. The organism, as a unit, is mapped within the brain, in the sensory and motor structures activated by the interaction of the organism with the object, both organism and object are mapped as neural patterns, in the first-order maps; all of these neural patterns can become images. The sensorimotor maps pertaining to the object cause changes in the maps pertaining to the organism. The changes described previously can be re-represented in yet other maps (second-order maps) which thus represent the relationship of object and organism. The neural patterns transiently formed in second-order maps can become mental images, no less so than the neural patterns in first-order maps. Finally, because of the body-related nature of both organism maps and second-order maps, the mental images that describe the relationship are feelings. Because the book offers incredible insight into consciousness such as the previous excerpt, these explanations helped me create a deeper understanding as to how these maps become ‘dysregulated’ by unnatural events that happen to us (e.g. athletes becoming injured and developing the Yips). Furthermore, the book emphasized the importance of what people commonly refer to as the mind-body connection, and that professionals in sport psychology and psychotherapy need to be focusing on ‘bottom-up’ approaches (what we feel) as much if not more than ‘top down’ approaches (logic-based thinking).
Part III. Brainspotting & Mental Skills Training
One of the best ‘bottom-up’ forms of mental training that follow the core principles of The Feeling Of What Happens, is an intervention called Brainspotting. 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 athletes 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 Brainspot or what physiotherapists call the Neurotag) 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.
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 or 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 how when Brainspotting is used as a continuous form of mental 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. The way I discuss Brainspotting in my book was significnatly influenced by Antonio Damasio’s book, and I strongly recommend people check out his work to learn more about this issue!
Racecar Drivers, Energy Management & Mental Performance
When writing Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I wanted to make sure that readers would not only learn how to overcome mental blocks, but also discover new strategies to achieve peak mental performance. In the book, I discuss how elite energy management skills can accomplish this. Learn more in this section of the Notes about the connection between energy management and sport psychology…
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: Racecar Drivers, Energy Management & Mental Performance
The field of sport psychology has a strong presence in many sports. For instance, every NFL team, power 5 athletic department and MLB team has at least several sport psychologists and mental performance consultants. But one area where sport psychology is just beginning to make in-roads is in motorsports. While we are now starting to see many of the most elite teams in all of the racecar series consult with sport psychologists, we still need significant growth in adding these professionals to race teams. I have been fortunate to be amongst those professionals in the sport psychology industry that works with elite motorsport athletes, and I have learned a great deal from the drivers, all the way to the pit crew about what sport psychologists should focus on to truly help these performers reach their peak potential.
In my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I discuss many of these lessons I learned through a case study of a driver I worked with many years ago. While a significant portion of the book focuses on sports-related trauma and how it affects the brain, I also spend some time towards the end of the book discussing different strategies drivers can use to enhance their race performances (athletes from all sports populations can use these skills). Specifically, I focus on the importance of energy management and how one can become a master over this area of their training. For this issue of the Notes I will review the unique features of racecar driving, how energy management affects performances, and the science that both explains and informs best sport psychology practices in motorsports using energy management strategies.
Part I. Mental Energy Demands Of Racecar Drivers
I have discussed motorsport performance demands in great length in previous Training Reports, but the physical and psychological demands of racecar drivers are as intense as any sport. Depending on the series, racecar drivers can reach speeds between 200 to 360 miles per hour, pull anywhere from 3 to 4 Gs’ on the track, experience cockpit temperatures that reach up to 140 degrees, may need to apply up 350 lbs. of force on the brakes multiple times throughout the race, and will also need to monitor the changing conditions of the car throughout the race in order to make the necessary adjustments when getting back on pit road. As one can imagine, having to deal with all of this simultaneously can be incredibly energy demanding. In fact, these performances can be so intense, that many drivers on average will burn anywhere from 3000 up to 6500 calories in one race. All of this makes it easy to understand WHY drivers need to be masters of energy management.
Traditionally, sport psychologists would never focus on discussing energy management with athletes, let alone racecar drivers. But as previously mentioned, the field is rapidly evolving and many of the up and coming mental performance consultants and sport psychologists are enhancing their understanding of the connection between mental performance and energy management. Traditional sport psychology utilizes what are referred to as ‘top-down’ approaches, meaning that they try to help athletes develop better insight into issues around focus and mental blocks. But this approach does not effectively work when we are trying to help drivers enhance their energy management skills. That is why modern day sport psychology has begun to utilize interventions that are more ‘bottom-up’ focused, while simultaneously making sure that their approaches are grounded in exercise-psychology. Let’s discuss this further in part II.
Part II. The Science Of Energy Management & Sport Psychology
Sports are designed to be stressful environments. Overtime, the longer the athlete competes in the stress environment of sports, the more energy this will extract from them. And the more energy this extracts from athletes, the worse their decision making becomes. Ultimately, these negative consequences are the result of poor psychological functioning, but there are markers that we can identify before this decline ever happens. For instance, if you are a NASCAR driver and your HRV is not in a good state, your mental focus will be compromised and you will have a lot of disappointing performances. This is because research shows us that biomarkers such as HRV (Heart Rate Variability) are associated with different physical and mental states. When discussing HRV from a sport psychology perspective, we tend to focus on the larger impact that the autonomic nervous system has on an athlete’s mental performance (as well as their physical health). When we look at the premier research on the importance of HRV and the autonomic nervous system, Dr. Stephen Porges, one of the more well-known experts within the field has made groundbreaking discoveries and provided excellent descriptions about how this system works in relation to psychological reactions.
Per his website, the following quote illustrates important characteristics of this system, “The mind and body are connected through the Vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the autonomic nervous system, stretching from the brainstem to the colon. It is our internal control center, allowing the brain to monitor and receive information about many of our bodily functions”. We know from research that if left unchecked, athletes and other individuals with low HRV have issues associated with mortality, myocardial infarction, coronary heart disease, and congestive heart failure. When sport psychologists help enhance HRV, HRV in this case is associated with improved autonomic nervous system balance. Research on athlete populations shows that when these benefits are gained, athlete sport performance outcomes improve while also reducing the risk of complex motor skills from being compromised. So, what are the best approaches to help athletes improve psychologically using exercise & sport psychology? I have found that using a combination of smart prehab-focused exercises, along with a regimented self-monitoring system that tracks HRV trends gives racecar drivers the best chance to achieve their goals. Let’s dive deeper into this in part III!
Part III. Using Exercise Psychology To Train Mental Energy
From an HRV tracking perspective, I have found that both regularly collecting HRV data from the driver’s monitoring devices (Polar, WHOOP, Garmin, COROS) while also having them fill out customized surveys exploring subjective data about their stress levels is an effective way to help them monitor their recovery patterns. Most exercise physiologists just collect HRV data and store it, but rarely dive deeper into what the data means. Part of the reason for this is because there is such a high turnover in exercise science staff in different sports teams that they never get enough time to both analyze data and set goals for what they want to analyze. Also, many members of the exercise science staff only have training in exercise physiology, but none in clinical psychology or psycho-physiology. Essentially, this data sits on a computer server and will most likely never be thoroughly studied. But in my experience, when regularly tracking the data in synchronization with subjective driver self-reporting on stress levels, on average I have been able to help drivers accurately stay recovered and maintain high energy levels before races. In terms of prehab, there are many different definitions and interpretations of what ‘prehab’ is. In the book The 4-Hour Body by Timothy Ferris the author quite simply defines prehab as ‘injury-proofing- the body. You could make the argument that all strength & conditioning is ‘injury-proofing’ the body, but when speaking with different exercise science professionals and biomechanists, most of these individuals consider prehab to be a combination of strength training with physical-therapy style focused exercises.
In Mr. Ferris’s book, he provides an example of how prehab specialists think about this issue: According to Gray the most likely cause of injury is neither weakness nor tightness, but imbalance. Think doing crunches or isolated ab work is enough to work your core muscles? Think again. ‘The core, as just one example, often works fine as long as one’s hips aren’t moving. It’s when the hips are moving-a more realistic scenario-that the core starts to compensate for left-right differences.’ That’s when you get injured. Other experts in the field provide similar content to support the need to focus on these types of interventions. In the book Becoming A Supple Leopard by Dr. Kelly Starrett, the following excerpt provides additional rational for this type of thinking: Prioritizing spinal mechanics is the first and most important step in rebuilding and ingraining functional motor patterns, optimizing movement efficiency, maximizing force production, and avoiding injury. In order to safely and effectively transmit force through your core and into your extremities, you need to organize your spine in a neutral position and then increase stability throughout that organized system by engaging the musculature of your trunk, which is knowns as bracing. This is the basis of midline stabilization and organization. To oversimplify this, if you are a professional racecar driver and your body is in pain or aching, your mental focus will be compromised and you will have a lot of disappointing performances. Selecting physical training approaches that are both ‘mental specific’ and ‘sport specific’ will enhance psychological performance outcomes in the car (you will not be distracted by your body’s limitations). All of these topics are issues that I have written about in my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, where I describe actual case studies that will help provide readers with a point of reference for how they can use these strategies themselves to achieve their goals!
Brainspotting A Yip Problem For Athletes
The Yips is a psychological phenomenon when athletes can no longer perform even simple movements in sports despite no current presence of an injury. In my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I review the science of the Yips in great detail. Learn more about this in the Notes...
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!
Sport Psychology & How To Teach Aggression
Athletes understand that there are certain mindsets that they need to tap into in order to perform at a high level. In my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns I explore how athletes can mentally train to be aggressive in sports. Learn more about this in the Notes...
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: How Mental Performance Coaches Teach Aggression In Sports
At some point in an athletes career they have probably been told by a coach to be more aggressive in certain moments of their training or performance. But when you ask athletes about this interaction, most of them will tell you that their coach never told them HOW to be more aggressive or even what it means to be more aggressive. This experience can be very frustrating for both athletes and coaches, which can both strain their relationship while also reducing the athlete’s confidence in their sport performance abilities. What makes this even more of a double edged sword is how athletes are also receiving social messages that aggression is a ‘toxic behavior’.
While many sport psychologists and mental coaches have tried to help athletes with this issue they have largely failed. The reason for this is because many of these professionals neither have the knowledge needed to properly teach this nor the applied experience. Because this is such an important topic that frequently comes up in my work, I decided to cover this in my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns. For this issue of the Notes, I wanted to take the time to explain how training aggression in athletes shaped both by book and my work with athletes. I will explain the science of aggression and how athletes can actually train themselves to enter this mental state.
Part I. Defining How To Teach Aggression In Sports
Part of the controversy around teaching aggression to athletes in sports is that there is not a standardized method to teach how to be aggressive nor is there a definition sport psychologists and coaches agree upon. Aggression has been defined as ‘hostile or violent behavior or attitudes toward another; readiness to attack or confront’. This definition makes sport psychologists and coaches uncomfortable because there is a general resistance around teaching athletes how to be violent while also preaching the importance of ‘controlling emotions’. The fact of the matter is that most sport psychologists who stress the importance of ‘controlling emotions’ are more focused on suppression than exploration of emotions. Furthermore many sport psychologists and coaches hold the false assumption that athletes will not be able to appropriately place boundaries on when they should or should not be aggressive, which infantilizes the athlete.
First, we need to dispel the myth that being aggressive in sports it ‘toxic’. In fact, not only is aggression in sports necessary in order to compete at a high level, it helps keep the athlete in the safest position possible. Most sports require athletes to produce abnormal amounts of explosive power and muscle tension which in turn means their competitors need to match their physiological disposition. Additionally, we should also start from the position that athletes know their own bodies better than coaches and sport psychologists do and therefore deserve the benefit of the doubt in terms of their ability to manage their emotions both inside and outside of sports. When all is said and done, we need to be more focused on helping athletes appropriately express emotions and tap into their natural ability to be aggressive in sports for both the sake of their mental health and their safety during performances. With that being said, let’s tap into the science of athlete aggression.
Part II. Understanding The Neuroscience Of Aggression In Sports
We first need to establish the difference between aggression that is performance-based versus fight, flight, freeze-based aggression. Fight, flight, freeze-based aggression is an involuntary response that is produced by the subcortical brain when an individual feels as if their safety is completely compromised. This type of aggression usually comes in one of two forms: either an individual is experiencing imminent danger and must fight to survive, or the individual has experienced trauma and is perceiving (or misperceiving) some form of their environment as threatening (the garden hose is mistakenly seen as a snake). In either case, this type of aggression is not ideal for athletes to be experiencing during sports because this type of response is purely involuntary and not strategic in nature. Essentially, the athlete is not able to control their actions in any meaningful way for performance.
Aggression that is performance-based presents with similar characteristics as flight, fight, freeze-based aggression but is largely different due to the voluntary nature of the emotional-behavioral response. Performance-based aggression is meant to have athletes create sympathetic nervous system responses that create higher levels of muscle tension, explosive power, and increased focus through a mind-body synchronization. Athletes usually try to create these sensations through some type of psychological construct or belief (e.g. the other team disrespects me and this makes me angry, this other person is trying to harm me and take away my livelihood, etc.). While this may be helpful for some individuals, I have found in my work with athletes this does not produce consistent and reliable results. Athletes need to focus on skills that directly tap into the body, rather than imaginary ideas.
Part III. Somatic Exercises & Mental Skills Training For Athlete Aggression
One area where I have spent a considerable amount of time enhancing psychological performance for the athletes I work with is through exercise psychology. Typically when we think about exercise psychology, most people think about research that is focused on keeping people motivated to lose weight. In fact, a vast majority of exercise psychology is focused more on improving negative health experiences through motivation-based strategies (e.g. self-determination theory, achievement goal theory, etc.). Because of my dual background as a Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) and a Certified Mental Performance Consultant (CMPC), I try to look at how athletes design their exercise training programs as it relates to improving their mental performance outcomes. What is an example of this?
Rather than trying to help athletes develop insight-based thoughts for aggression, I try to help them select exercises that will force them to synchronize the mind-body connection and create aggressive emotional states. For example, let’s say you are an athlete that does not know how to access the feelings of aggression when needed…a perfect exercise to solve this would be doing some variation of an Olympic-style weightlifting movement. Olympic-style weightlifting force individuals to generate more muscle tension, more power and more sympathetic nervous system activation in order to create an aggressive ‘brace’ response (think of tensing your body to absorb a punch). Another example would be to do some form of heat training in order to train your mind to be ‘comfortable with discomfort’. All of these approaches are introduced in my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, which I review extensively throughout the performance enhancement section! If you would like to learn more, sign up below to receive more information on the book!
What To Know About Brainspotting Therapy
The top sport psychologists and coaches in the field of mental skills training are using a new technique called Brainspotting. Learn more about what Brainspotting is, how it work, and the influence it had on my book 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: What To Know About Brainspotting Therapy
When athletes go to work with sport psychologists, it is usually to either overcome a mental block or achieve peak mental performance. Most sport psychologists focus on using interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy or motivational interviewing because they believe that when athletes present with negative thinking patterns, the solution is to overload these thought processes with more logic-based thinking or better insight. However, a vast majority of mental health research strongly suggests that these issues are not due to lack of insight.
Because this is the case, many athletes have been frustrated with the field of sport psychology and what it has to offer. However, there are some sport psychologists who have begun to implement trauma-informed psychotherapy approaches into their work. One of these interventions that has gained significant traction within the sports world is Brainspotting. Brainspotting is a brain-based psychotherapy intervention that utilizes the athlete’s field of vision to process and resolve issues such as trauma & even sports-related mental blocks. Let’s dive deeper into what this approach is and how it works!
Part I. Benefits Of Brainspotting Therapy
Brainspotting is effective for a wide variety of emotional and somatic issues. Brainspotting is particularly effective with trauma-based situations, helping to identify and heal underlying trauma that contributes to anxiety, depression and other behavioral conditions. It can also be used with performance and creativity enhancement. Brainspotting gives the therapist access to both brain and body processes. Its goal is to bypass the conscious, neocortical thinking to access the deeper, subcortical emotional and body-based parts of the brain. Clients often fall into two categories. The first being those who are seeking therapy for the first time. The second are people who have been in therapy before who are seeking a therapist with new techniques. With focus and precision, one can find with eye positions (Brainspots) where the trauma, anxiety, depression or behavioral problems are held in the brain. This allows the brain to process from the inside out and from the bottom up.
Because all of my clients are athletes that compete at all levels of sports such as NASCAR cup series drivers, IndyCar Drivers, WRC Rally drivers, NFL players, youth/college baseball players and collegiate endurance athletes, almost all of the individuals have sought my services to either overcome the Yips or achieve peak performance flow states. Of all the sport psychology-based interventions I have used with these populations over the years, I have found Brainspotting to be the most effective. Specific examples of mental training achievements through the use of Brainspotting include but are not limited to the following: overcoming the Yips (golf, baseball, and gymnastics Twisties), clearing trauma, stopping over-thinking, eliminating muscle guarding that was a result of sports injuries, achieving flow states and hyper focus. But as important as it is to know about the potential benefits, we also need to understand how this mental training intervention actually works.
Part II. How Brainspotting Therapy Works
Brainspotting is a powerful, focused treatment method that works by identifying, processing and releasing core neurophysiological sources of emotional/body pain, trauma, dissociation and a variety of other challenging symptoms. Brainspotting is a simultaneous form of diagnosis and treatment, enhanced with Biolateral sound, which is deep, direct, and powerful yet focused and containing. Brainspotting functions as a neurobiological tool to support the clinical healing relationship. There is no replacement for a mature, nurturing therapeutic presence and the ability to engage another suffering human in a safe and trusting relationship where they feel heard, accepted, and understood. Brainspotting gives us a tool, within this clinical relationship, to neurobiologically locate, focus, process, and release experiences and symptoms that are typically out of reach of the conscious mind and its cognitive and language capacity. Brainspotting works with the deep brain and the body through its direct access to the autonomic and limbic systems within the body’s central nervous system. Brainspotting is accordingly a physiological tool/treatment which has profound psychological, emotional, and physical consequences. In summary, the reason this intervention is so effective is because of how it is rooted in a trauma-informed perspective. To better understand this, we can refer to one of the leading experts in the world on trauma & PTSD who provides an excellent description of the trauma-informed perspective by explaining the process of how the brain stores trauma.
In the book The Body Keeps The Score, Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk provides the following explanation: 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. Because Brainspotting training is rooted in teaching clinicians the mechanisms of the brain’s defense systems, Brainspotting therapists can more efficiently guide the therapy to directly target the trauma through the proper neuropsychological mechanisms rather than trying to exclusively ‘talk client’s through’ their problems. As previously mentioned, while Brainspotting can work for many client populations, lets dive deeper into why this is a good fit for athlete mental training.
Part III. Where You Look Affects How You Feel
Because I believe so strongly in this intervention and more specifically the positive impact it can have on athlete populations, I decided to write a book about how my training in Brainspotting transformed both my perspective on psychology and the way I chose to work with athletes. In my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I focus on discussing what many consider to be one of the most mysterious mental health conditions known throughout the sports world: the Yips. The Yips is a psychological phenomenon when athletes suddenly and unexpectedly can no longer perform even simple sport movements despite no current presence of a sports injury. Most sport psychologists and neurologists assess this to be a random muscle spasm that athletes experience…but this is not the truth.
In Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I explain what the Yips is, what causes it, and why Brainspotting offers athletes the best chance to overcome this issue. I review more of the in-depth science, the history of Brainspotting, and I also provide actual athlete case studies where individuals who were suffering from the Yips were able to overcome the issue. Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns also reviews how a Brainspotting-informed perspective helped these athletes achieve peak mental performance and flow-state experiences in their sport. If you would like to learn more about the book or new developments in the field of Brainspotting sign up below for my newsletter to receive the latest updates on the book and new research on sport psychology related issues!
Top 3 Sport Psychology Skills
When athletes go to work with sport psychologists, they are looking for mental skills training approaches to gain the edge over their competition. I want to review the top 3 sport psychology approaches that I discuss in my upcoming book 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: The Top 3 Sport Psychology Skills
As athletes look to gain the edge over their competition, they will use any tools necessary to achieve their goals. One resource that athletes have been turning to more and more is sport psychology. Athletes and coaches are beginning to recognize that all athletes use exercise science strategies to improve their training outcomes, but very few use sport psychology. Predictably, many collegiate and professional sports teams have begun to employ Certified Mental Performance Consultants and sport psychologists to help their athletes gain a competitive advantage.
However just in the same way athletes look towards sport psychology to differentiate their training from their peers, many sport psychologists try to find different mental training methods that will separate them from their sport psychology colleagues. Through this process, there appear to be three distinct sport psychology skills that athletes can count on to give them the best results: Brainspotting/EMDR, Biofeedback/neurofeedback and exercise psychology. For this issue of the Notes, I want to briefly introduce each skill that influenced my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns.
Part I. Brainspotting Mental Skills Training
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 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, which then enables athletes to move from needing to constantly cope with things like negative thinking, 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 mental blocks (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 sport psychology interventions should be to help athletes move from dysregulation to regulation. For instance, if you are a golfer and you have been experiencing the Yips, 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 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. Athletes discuss the issue in-depth and then the sport psychologist invites athletes 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 athlete 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.
Part II. Athlete Biofeedback & Neurofeedback
Biofeedback is a technique by which sport psychologists monitor and display what is happening in the athlete’s body from a physiological perspective. There are several different traits that sport psychologists and mental performance consultants can focus on in order to help the athlete with this technology. In the book Biofeedback & Neurofeedback Applications In Sport Psychology edited by Benjamin Strack, PhD, Michael Linden, PhD & Vietta Wilson, PhD, the authors give examples of where Biofeedback technology is used.
Heart Rate: Elevated heart rate may increase reaction time, while stabilization of heart rate may increase endurance, and cardiovascular efficiency.
Respiration - Improper respiration may lead to performance inefficiency or ‘choking’ and hyperventilation.
Muscular Tension - Excess muscle tension can inhibit movement speed, rhythm, timing & flexibility.
Sweaty Palms - An indirect measure of emotional reactivity and anxiety
Brainwave Activity - Athletes who learn to control brainwaves can enhance their ability to pay attention, control their emotions, and minimize a busy brain.
Peripheral Body Temperature - Measures blood flow or blood-vessel constriction in the hands and feet. Stress can cause the constriction or shutting down of blood flow, which inhibits recovery from strenuous workouts or minor and major injuries.
Neurofeedback is a noninvasive, neuroscience intervention which measures & trains brainwaves. This approach provides real-time feedback about where the athlete’s brain is functioning efficiently versus where their brain needs training. Ultimately, this mind-body approach can help athletes develop neural stability which leads to an increased stress-threshold tolerance. When beginning neurofeedback training, brain mapping technology (aka QEEG) is first used to analyze how different areas of an individual’s brain are functioning & interacting with one another. Once an athlete’s brain has been analyzed, we use the information from the QEEG to start neurofeedback interventions tailored to the athlete’s individual needs. This intervention works through Operant Conditioning, which is a form of learning that uses a reward to modify behavior. For example, during a neurofeedback session as the brainwaves change in a healthier way, you may hear a bell ring or you will see a visual image changing on a computer screen . This feedback encourages the brain to more easily move into healthier functional ranges over time.
Part III. Exercise Psychology
Exercise psychology is mostly used to help individuals identify ways of staying motivated so they can improve healthcare outcomes. But I have found that there are more creative ways to use exercise psychology to help athletes improve their mental training. One form of exercise psychology that I employ with my athletes is through the use of Prehab. There are many different definitions and interpretations of what ‘prehab’ is. In the book The 4-Hour Body by Timothy Ferris, the author quite simply defines prehab as ‘injury-proofing- the body. You could make the argument that all strength & conditioning is ‘injury-proofing’ the body, but when speaking with different exercise science professionals and biomechanists, most of these individuals consider prehab to be a combination of strength training with physical-therapy style focused exercises. In Mr. Ferris’s book, he provides an example of how prehab specialists think about this issue: According to Gray the most likely cause of injury is neither weakness nor tightness, but imbalance. Think doing crunches or isolated ab work is enough to work your core muscles? Think again. ‘The core, as just one example, often works find as long as one’s hips aren’t moving. It’s when the hips are moving-a more realistic scenario-that the core starts to compensate for left-right differences.’ That’s when you get injured.
Other experts in the field provide similar content to support the need to focus on these types of interventions. In the book Becoming A Supple Leopard by Dr. Kelly Starrett, the following excerpt provides additional rational for this type of thinking: Prioritizing spinal mechanics is the first and most important step in rebuilding and ingraining functional motor patterns, optimizing movement efficiency, maximizing force production, and avoiding injury. In order to safely and effectively transmit force through your core and into your extremities, you need to organize your spine in a neutral position and then crease stability throughout that organized system by engaging the musculature of your trunk, which is knowns as bracing. This is the basis of midline stabilization and organization. To oversimplify this, if you are an athlete and your body is in pain, aching or your HRV is not in a good state, your mental focus will be compromised and you will have a lot of disappointing performances. Selecting physical training approaches that are both ‘mental specific’ and ‘sport specific’ will enhance psychological performance outcomes during sports performances.
Brainspotting Therapy: Healing Athlete Trauma
When athletes go to work with sport psychologists, they will use different mental training skills to improve their psychological performance. One technique they are using to help athletes gain the edge in competition is Brainspotting. Learn more about how this approach helps athletes clear trauma and achieve their peak potential.
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 Therapy & Healing Athlete Trauma
In the field of sport psychology, professionals that work with athletes are focused on helping them accomplish many different things such as achieving a positive mindset during sports, or sharpening an athlete’s pre-performance routine in order to beat mental blocks such as the Yips. For some athletes, this can be an appropriate training method. But for most athletes, this will not be an effective approach because sports-related mental blocks are more often than not a very complicated problem. Fortunately, there is a new mental training skill that can help athletes overcome mental blocks: Brainspotting.
Brainspotting is a brain-based psychotherapy approach that utilizes the athlete’s field of vision to overcome deep underlying issues. In my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I discuss in detail not only how Brainspotting helped my athletes overcome their mental blocks, but how it also helped me understand the neuroscience of sports-related mental blocks. For this issue of the Notes, I am going to review the science behind Brainspotting which is called trauma-informed psychotherapy. I will then explore in more detail what Brainspotting is, and finally I will explore how Brainspotting helps athletes achieve peak mental performance.
Part I. What Is Trauma-Informed Psychotherapy?
Traditional sport psychology interventions are focused on helping athletes develop better ‘insight’ into their negative thinking patterns or mental blocks. But the majority of neuroscience research shows us that most of these psychological issues are not due to lack of insight, but rather trauma stored within the body. In the book The Body Keeps The Score by Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, the author gives us a glimpse into the neuropsychological process that occur in an athlete’s brain during a sports-related trauma event which eventually can cause mental blocks: 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 author continues: 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. The reason this is important is because trauma-informed psychotherapy places a dual emphasis on helping athletes clear these mental blocks by processing underlying issues from a somatic perspective. This is because when athlete’s process mental blocks from a somatic perspective, they are utilizing the areas of the brain that are primarily involved with the creation of these issues. This is where Brainspotting comes into play. Let’s explore more detail about Brainspotting and why it is a perfect fit for athlete populations at being able to help them clear mental blocks.
Part II. What Is Brainspotting Therapy?
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 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, which then enables athletes 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 mental blocks (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 sport psychology interventions should be to help athletes move from dysregulation to regulation. For instance, if you are a golfer and you have been experiencing the Yips, 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 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. Athletes discuss the issue in-depth and then the sport psychologist invites athletes 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 athlete 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.
Part III. Why Do Athletes Improve With Brainspotting Mental Training?
The reason athletes benefit from mental training with Brainspotting is because it helps them become comfortable with discomfort. Why is this the case? The very nature of sports is both highly stressful but also trauma-inducing. Sports expose athletes to injury-risk, abuse from fans, coaches, sports humiliations, and increases the athlete’s risk for developing high levels of athlete identity. Because these are inevitable features of the sport-performance environment, athletes cannot escape this inevitability by using traditional sport psychology skills that falsely encourage athletes to ignore their feelings and distract themselves with techniques such as positive self-talk.
Brainspotting not only helps athletes clear stored trauma in the body, it also helps athletes both directly confront negative emotions and become comfortable with those emotions. As previously mentioned, during Brainspotting, sport psychologists ask athletes to focus on the somatic sensations of negative thoughts and feelings, and to immerse themselves in those experiences. Athletes develop a deeper understanding of the depth of those emotions and by extension diminish their initial fear of those experiences. In my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I go into great detail about what this looks like through athlete case studies, as well as explore the science behind why this works!
Athletes, Somatic Exercises & Energy Management
When athletes go to work with the top sport psychologists, they will use the most advanced mental training skills to help them accomplish their goals. In my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I review two of these strategies (somatic exercises & energy management skills) and how athletes can apply them in their training...
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: Somatic Exercises & Energy Management
Competing in sports is an incredibly demanding process. As an athlete, you have to spend incredible amounts of time and resources in order to develop your body and mind to the level it needs to be so you can compete in accordance with your expectations. In my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I spend a great deal of time exploring how the demands of sport preparation take an incredible toll on an athlete’s mental and physical health outcomes. I discuss what this looks like through actual athlete case studies, but also diving into the science behind how sports can cause trauma on the mind-body connection.
But just as importantly, I also cover what types of approaches I used with athletes to both overcome the trauma from sports and transition to achieving peak mental and physical performance. Two of those approaches were somatic exercises and energy management strategies. For this issue of the Notes, I want to provide insight into the science behind somatic exercises and energy management, while also explaining how athletes can use these approaches to beat mental blocks and become the best version of themselves! Let’s begin by exploring what somatic exercises are, and the connection to athlete performance outcomes.
Part I. Somatic Exercises & Athlete Mental Performance
Let’s first begin by defining the word somatic. Per the authors Strean, W. B., & Strozzi-Heckler, R. from the article The Body of Knowledge: Somatic Contributions to the Practice of Sport Psychology, they state the following: “Somatics” comes from soma— the body in its wholeness. From a somatic perspective, the self is indistinguishable from the body. The attributes that make up the self (emotions, actions, beliefs, interactions, perception, ethics, morals, and drive for dignity) all emerge from the physical form (e.g., Strozzi-Heckler, 2003; 2007). We reject the assumption that there is a disembodied, self-contained self that is separate from the life of one's body. We acknowledge this idea as a radical departure from pervasive Cartesian discourses that have dominated and also posited a determinable, objective reality disconnected from subjective experience. Without the body there would be no possibility for tasting, hearing, smelling, and feeling. There would be no thoughts, reflection, or awareness. There would be no presence that would interact with others. Without the body there would simply be no basis for experience. The experience of living, then, resides in the “embodied self,” (a term that could be seen as redundant, if one were to adopt this point of view). From our living biological experience we form relationships with others and the world. In this way our bodies become the ground from which we develop and cultivate athletic performance.
So when we combine the word somatic with exercises, what is the underlying implication? When athletes go to work with most sport psychologists, they will exclusively focus on developing deeper levels of insight using more ‘logic’ based thinking processes. This approach is rooted in a psychotherapy technique called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) which is considered to be an ‘evidence-based practice’. But this technique is rooted in western-style medicine, which means that the traditional sport psychologist only operates in a silo, viewing the body merely as a platform for one’s head. The fact of the matter is that the body is an extension of our mind, and modern mental performance experts focus on trying to enhance this mind-body connection through somatic exercises. Why is this relevant for athletes? And why did I spend so much time focusing on discussing this in my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns? It’s because I have found that oftentimes many athletes are suffering from unprocessed trauma and remain very disconnected from their bodies in order to not have to confront the pain that they are dealing with. Somatic exercises help athletes process their trauma in a more effective manner and strengthen the mind-body relationship on a healthier level. Now that we have reviewed why athletes should use somatic exercises to enhance performance, let’s dive deeper into how they use energy management.
Part II. Energy Management & Athlete Mental Health
Part of an athlete’s job is to make sure that they have trained their bodies to withstand the physical demands of their sport. One of the ways athletes can be highly successful or fail miserably in this task, is through energy management skills. Through my work with athletes, what I have found is that while many of the performers I have worked with demonstrate elite levels of strength and explosive power through their physical training, they have below average skills at effectively managing their energy throughout the week. The reason this is important is because if you are not good at managing your energy, your recovery will be much slower. And if your recovery is slower, you will be more likely to get injured, and if you are more likely to get injured than you will find yourself without a job. So what is one way that athletes can effectively track this?
In Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I review the importance of tracking Heart Rate Variability (HRV). Since heart rate variability (HRV) reflects the time between heartbeats, it directly relates to the electrical activity stimulating the heart, specifically the sinoatrial node (the heart's natural pacemaker). Low HRV is associated with mortality, myocardial infarction, coronary heart disease, and congestive heart failure. When sport psychologists help enhance HRV, HRV in this case it is associated with improved autonomic nervous system balance. Research on athlete populations shows that following improvements in HRV, their sport performance outcomes improve while also reducing the risk of complex motor skills from being compromised. Interestingly, when athletes are exhibiting decreased symptoms of recovery, research has shown that there is a significant likelihood that there will be poor HRV outcomes. So what are examples of energy management skills and somatic exercises that athletes can use to enhance performance?
Part III. Brainspotting Mental Training, HRV & Biofeedback
One of my favorite somatic exercises that I describe in my book is Brainspotting. 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 with their unprocessed trauma, 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. Brainspotting truly is a textbook somatic exercise that sport psychologists can use to help athletes strengthen the mind-body connection.
In terms of helping athletes with HRV and energy management, one tool that can be used is Biofeedback. Biofeedback is a technique by which sport psychologists monitor and display what is happening in the athlete’s mind and their body’s physiological reactions. There are several different traits that sport psychologists and mental performance consultants can focus on in order to help the athlete with this technology. In the book Biofeedback & Neurofeedback Applications In Sport Psychology edited by Benjamin Strack, PhD, Michael Linden, PhD & Vietta Wilson, PhD, the authors give examples of where Biofeedback technology is used.
Heart Rate: Elevated heart rate may increase reaction time, while stabilization of heart rate may increase endurance, and cardiovascular efficiency.
Respiration - Improper respiration may lead to performance inefficiency or ‘choking’ and hyperventilation.
Muscular Tension - Excess muscle tension can inhibit movement speed, rhythm, timing & flexibility.
Sweaty Palms - An indirect measure of emotional reactivity and anxiety
Brainwave Activity - Athletes who learn to control brainwaves can enhance their ability to pay attention, control their emotions, and minimize a busy brain.
Peripheral Body Temperature - Measures blood flow or blood-vessel constriction in the hands and feet. Stress can cause the constriction or shutting down of blood flow, which inhibits recovery from strenuous workouts or minor and major injuries.
Usually when an athlete works with a sport psychologist during an actual biofeedback session, the athlete will have various sensors attached to different areas of the body. These sensors can range from clips attached to their ears, electrodes attached to their head, or patches attached to their skin (there are no needles, there is no invasive aspect to the procedure). These sensors will relay the information that they are detecting from the body to a computer, the computer will analyze the information (e.g. heart rate, body temperature, etc.) and then display what is actually happening in the athlete’s body during this feedback, while also providing information about when optimal body changes are occurring, which can come in the form of some type of reward (e.g. bell ringing, movie playing, etc.). Athletes can alter the results of the biofeedback equipment through deep breathwork that will help them accrue the benefits they are looking for. At the conclusion of biofeedback work, athletes can see a significant improvement in HRV, which in turn will potentially help enhance their energy management capabilities!
Top 3 Sport Psychology Books
Athletes and coaches are constantly looking for resources to achieve new levels of performance. One area where athletes can excel in their development is through the field of sport psychology. Learn about what I consider to be the top 3 sport psychology books that athletes can use to improve their mental performance!
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: Top 3 Sport Psychology Books
Athletes and coaches are always looking for resources to help achieve peak performance. One area where athletes look to gain the edge over their competition is through mental skills training. Fortunately there are many excellent resources to help them accomplish these goals. For instance, there are a plethora of mental performance books written by sport psychologists that provide guidance on how athletes can achieve their goals. Based on my experience in the sport psychology field, I wanted to provide my list of the top 3 sport psychology books that athletes and coaches can use to leverage mental skills training to their advantage. Let’s dive in!
Part I. This Is Your Brain On Sports
THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON SPORTS: Beating Blocks, Slumps and Performance Anxiety for Good! is the ground-breaking book that will change the face of sports performance forever. This book introduces the breakthrough concept of STSD (Sport Traumatic Stress Disorder). Grand and Goldberg have discovered that STSDs are the cause of most significant performance problems. Performance blocks and anxiety, including the yips, stem from accumulated sports traumas including sports injuries, failures and humiliations.
The authors also introduce the Brainspotting Sports Performance System (BSPS) which quickly finds, releases and resolves the sports traumas held in your brain and body. An easy read, THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON SPORTS is filled with engaging, informative, inspiring stories. These case examples illustrate how professional, elite, collegiate and junior athletes have been freed for good from this silent "epidemic" of performance blocks and anxiety including: the yips, "Steve Blass disease," "Mackey Sasser syndrome," protracted slumps, balking, choking and freezing.
Part II. The Body Keeps The Score
Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat: one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps The Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.
He explores innovative treatments-from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga-that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. Van Der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal-and offers new hope for reclaiming lives. This book has incredible application to individuals suffering from the after-effects of trauma, and when one considers the amount of traumatic experiences that athletes experience in sports, it becomes easy to see why athletes and coaches need to get this book!
Part III. Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns
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 is, 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 current 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 breathing, hyper-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, etc. Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns provides the answers and solutions to these problems while also exploring strategies to stay ‘Yips-free’ and unlock an athlete’s peak mental performance potential!
Psychology Books - The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.
Athletes look for any sport psychology book to help them improve their mental game. But one of the least discussed sport psychology book that all athletes should read is The Body Keeps the Score. This book had significant influence over my book 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: The Body Keeps The Score & Sport Psychology
As I began the process of writing my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, one of the sources I frequently cited the most in my book was The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk. In my opinion, this is one of the greatest psychology books ever written. While there were many books that were written on trauma, Bessel Van Der Kolk was one of the first experts to present high quality information not only on the science of trauma, but on psychology itself. Just as Sigmund Freud laid the groundwork for future psychotherapists, Bessel Van Der Kolk will hold a place in history as one of the trail blazers in the field of mental health.
But what many people may not know (including Dr. Van Der Kolk), is that this book is also paving the way for how we rethink our approaches in the field of sport psychology. This is why his book was so influential on Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns. So for this issue of the Notes, I want to take time explaining to readers what The Body Keeps the Score is about, why it is important for athletes to read, and how it had a profound effect not only on me, but also on my writing and the way I approach my work with athletes. Let’s first dive into a summary about Dr. Van Der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps The Score.
Part I. What Is The Body Keeps The Score About?
Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat: one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps The Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.
He explores innovative treatments-from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga-that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. Van Der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal-and offers new hope for reclaiming lives. While this book has incredible application to individuals suffering from the after-effects of trauma, many people are surprised when I say this is a must-read for athlete populations. Let’s dive into why that is.
Part II. Why Does This Book Matter For Athletes?
Most sport psychology is rooted in an approach commonly known as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). In summary, CBT is a psychotherapy approach that has been shown to help clients reframe negative thoughts into positive thoughts through more logic-based, positive psychology type approaches. While there is no doubt that this approach has helped people, the vast majority of sport psychologists apply this approach for most athlete populations. This approach however is not appropriate for most athletes let alone individuals who are suffering from the negative outcomes of trauma. The reason for this is because most sport psychologists (and unfortunately most psychotherapists) have a poor understanding of basic brain functions. Just as importantly, many sport psychologists and sports medicine professionals do not immediately connect the word trauma to negative sports experiences.
A perfect example that demonstrates this, is an excerpt from Dr. Van Der Kolk’s book: However, 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. When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it. When our emotional and rational brains are in conflict, a tug of war ensues. This war is largely played out in the theater of visceral experience, your gut, your heart, your lungs will lead to both physical discomfort and psychological misery”. When we consider all of the stressors that athletes face such as sports injuries, coach abuse, public humiliations, using the word trauma to identify the problem becomes more acceptable.
Part III. The Connection To Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns
Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns is one of the first books to finally explain the connection to athletes, trauma and mental performance. Furthermore, this book also explains how athletes that incorporate trauma-informed psychotherapy into their mental training is a form of performance enhancement. Dr. Van Der Kolk’s writing and insight made it possible for me to be able to convey this message. Because mental blocks such as the Yips are representations of unprocessed trauma, athletes and sport psychologists need a foundational understanding of the neuropsychological mechanisms that cause this.
But Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns is not just a book about problems, it’s also a guide about HOW to overcome those problems and HOW to sustain that success. One of my favorite interventions that I discuss in my book which helps with the HOW, is Brainspotting. Brainspotting is a brain-based psychotherapy intervention that is a modified technique of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Like the Body Keeps the Score, Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns provides details about how athletes can overcome these daunting mental blocks and get back to performing at an elite level!
Psychology Books - The Curious Voyage To Authenticity By Cynthia Schwartzberg, LCSW
Discover your true self and forge deeper connections with joy and peace. "The Curious Voyage" serves as a transformative self-help guide, offering exercises to unveil your authentic identity beyond societal norms. Navigate life creatively as you redefine your personal rulebook and align with your inner truth.
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: The Curious Voyage to Authenticity by Cynthia Schwartzberg
In the field of psychotherapy, there are many different tools and approaches that are available for clients to assist them with their healing process. One of my favorite interventions is a new modality called Brainspotting. Brainspotting is a brain-based psychotherapy intervention that uses the client’s field of vision to help process trauma that is stored in the body. This approach is a modified version of Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR) that is sharper, more refined and adaptable to individual client processing styles.
While Dr. David Grand is the original founder for this approach, there have been others who have followed in his path and have made incredible contributions not only to Brainspotting but also to the field of psychotherapy. One of those thought leaders is Cynthia Schwartzberg. Recently, Cynthia released her book A Curious Voyage To Authenticity. Cynthia, and her work were significant inspirations for Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, and so for this issue of the Notes, I wanted to take some time to review why this book is a must read!
Part I. What Is The Curious Voyage To Authenticity About?
The journey to authenticity breaks all the rules. Cynthia’s new book, The Curious Voyage to Authenticity: A Rule-Breaking Guide for Personal Growth, is a remarkable resource for the courageous explorer. In her book, she aims to help readers discover their true selves and forge deeper connections with joy and peace. It contains stories from the author and many of her clients from their own voyage of self-discovery and awakening. Through these stories, "The Curious Voyage" serves as a transformative self-help guide, offering exercises to unveil the reader’s authentic identity beyond societal norms.
While there were many strong endorsements for the book, one of the most powerful ones came from the founder of Brainspotting, David Grand. Per Dr. Grand: Curiosity didn’t kill the cat, curiosity guided the cat on a wise, creative, dynamic journey. I strongly recommend you take this voyage of curiosity through Cynthia’s remarkable book, which gives us a powerful and practical view into the mysterious worlds within ourselves. Curiosity leads us beyond our limitations into a journey of fulfillment we might never have imagined possible.
Part II. How The Curious Voyage Influenced Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns
As one of the top thought leaders in psychotherapy and Brainspotting, Cynthia has mentored and trained hundreds of psychotherapists in the art of Brainspotting. One of those psychotherapists happened to be me. Over the years as I received my training from Cynthia, my approach to working with athletes sharpened and as such the outcomes with my clients dramatically improved. Many of the stories that you will read in Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns were directly influenced by her mentorship and teaching methods.
Her teaching methods are what eventually led to me developing my understanding of what the Yips is, and how to help clients deal with this issue. Predictably, as I began writing my book I would often use Cynthia’s teachings and her writings from her book The Curious Voyage as a type of guide to help organize my thoughts and stay true to the message of my book: while the journey of self-discovery and healing trauma can be painful, there is great power and happiness to be found at the end of that process. If you are interested in learning more about Cynthia’s book, use this link for more information!
The Connection Between Athletic Identity and the Yips
When athletes are no longer able to perform even simple sport movements, most people refer to this as a mental block. Sport psychologists will commonly call this the Yips. There are many factors that affect the Yips, one of which is athletic identity. I recently co-authored an AASP blog post with my colleague Alex Bolowich on this issue...
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!
The Connection Between Athletic Identity and the Yips
I was recently afforded the opportunity to provide information about the Yips for the Association for Applied Sport Psychology. While I have written extensively about this issue, including in my upcoming book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I wanted to collaborate with one my colleague Alex Bolowich who is also an expert in the field of sport psychology. Together, we wanted to combine our knowledge on how at least one aspect of the Yips is affected by athletic identity. Use the link below to read the full article on the Association for Applied Sport Psychology’s blog page!
Psychology Books - Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns
When athletes such as baseball players, racecar drivers and golfers have mental blocks, this can be called the Yips. Ben Foodman is releasing his upcoming book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns for athletes and sport psychologists to use to beat the Yips...
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!