Mental Health Performance - Athlete Mental Blocks & The Yips: A Review Of How These Issues Affect Sport Performance
About the 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!
Athletes, Mental Blocks (AKA The Yips) & The Connection To Sport Performance
I have talked extensively about trauma and how prevalent of an issue this is within the world of sports performance. Many athletes, coaches and even fans are under the impression that the word ‘trauma’ has no place in discussions around the stress that athletes experience (I have talked about psychological sports trauma in previous Training Reports). Even the overwhelming majority of sport psychologists view sports performance and clinical mental health concerns that arise from traumatic events as a ‘separate’ issue. Many people are also under the impression that trauma & sports mental blocks are different topics all together.
The truth is that the overwhelming majority of the time, sport mental blocks are the symptoms of deep rooted trauma. This trauma can come from experiences within sport, or non-sport related events (e.g. car accidents, family abuse, etc.). Regardless of the origin, athletes should start to view trauma-informed mental health interventions as a critical component towards achieving peak performance in sports. And peak performance cannot be reached until the mental blocks are cleared. For this Training Report I want to re-examine the topic of mental blocks & trauma in sports. Let’s begin by exploring the psychological components of sports performance and how this brings about mental blocks.
The Psychological Toll Of Competing At Championship Levels
When athletes are competing at a high level, every fiber of who they are both physically and mentally is required in order for them achieve the highest level of focus and peak performance. This is because regardless of the sport, all sporting experiences are problem solving events that are specifically designed to induce psychological and physical stress. This repetitive experience alone can have a negative impact on an individual athlete’s psychology, and if not consistently monitored can lead to stress overload on the brain which can also lead to mental blocks. Factor in sports-related injuries, the pressure of not reaching higher levels of competition, securing sponsorships, social rejection by teammates & coaches, all of which can continue to add to the athlete’s psychological burden.
However, even non-sport experiences can indirectly impact sports performance in a negative way. For instance, if an athlete has an insecure parent-child relationship, this negative relationship could have potentially adversely affected the athlete’s ability to develop health psychological defenses and overall poor mental insecurity. Another example could be if the athlete suffered a car accident or non-sport related injury that required invasive surgery. In these types of experiences, RARELY do doctors and other healthcare professionals see these issues as psychologically traumatic. In either case, if these previous experiences are not effectively dealt with in mental health therapy, they will manifest in the form of mental blocks in sports because the brain has not fully resolved these issues. But how do we know this is happening on a scientific & measurable level?
The Neuroscience Of Athlete Mental Blocks AKA The Yips
When we experience a stressful or disturbing experience that overwhelms our capacity to cope with the situation (also known as trauma), different parts of our brain are responsible for the process of generating survival responses that drive us to seek safety. These experiences can include abuse by coaches, insecure parent-child relationships, car accidents, sports-related injuries, sports humiliations and even pre-verbal trauma events (e.g. being born with an umbilical cord around your neck during birth). When a trauma event occurs, sensory information about the environment such as sight, smell, sound, and touch converge in an area of the brain called the thalamus. The information is processed in the thalamus and then passed on to the amygdala where the emotional significance of the event is determined. The excessive stress that occurs during a trauma event triggers the amygdala to send a lightening speed message down to the hypothalamus and the brain stem, recruiting the stress hormone system and autonomic nervous system to orchestrate a whole body response (e.g. fight, flight, freeze, etc.). This overrides our prefrontal cortex rendering it unable to filter out unimportant information.
But even once we have survived the trauma event, our brain has still not fully processed the experience. A special type of trauma memory capsule is created and keeps the internal alarm systems activated keeping individuals in a hypervigilant state, which is a form of dysregulation. This dysregulation then takes the form of a sports mental block when athletes are competing and/or training. Athletes will try to directly address the mental block through traditional sport psychology interventions such as self-talk or positive affirmations. Unfortunately these approaches will not be effective because the areas of the brain that are responsible for the creation of these mental blocks are not directly responsible for higher order brain functions such as executive functioning skills. Hopefully this explanation has demonstrated that when we comprehend the neuroscience behind trauma, it becomes easier to understand how trauma affects athletes. So what can athletes do to clear mental blocks and achieve their true athletic potential?
Brainspotting: How To Get Rid Of Athlete Mental Blocks
Brainspotting is by far the most effective method to help athletes clear mental blocks. In Brainspotting we say where you look affects how you feel, and when working with clients we try to find a relevant eye position in the athletes visual field that connects to a body sensation around the specific issue (e.g. a trauma event such as a sports humiliation) that the athlete is working on. Brainspotting works for several reasons: first, this combination of processing allows us to access the layers of the brain that are involved in regulation/dysregulation (the agranular isocortex and allocortex) and bypassing the areas that are not (the neocortex, granular isocortex). Second, Brainspotting accesses the 1st and 3rd layers of the superior colliculi, which is responsible for directing behaviors towards specific points within the body space. Finally, the dual attunement between the sports-therapist and athlete provides a healing environment for the athlete through the shared biofield of the relation and interpersonal neurobiology. Ultimately, athletes need to start taking their mental health seriously and understand that addressing these issues through approaches such as Brainspotting are not ‘separate’ issues, but are directly connected to sport performance outcomes.
Note To Reader:
If you are an athlete reading this segment of the TRAINING REPORT, hopefully this content was helpful! I put the Training Report together because I felt like many of the discussions on issues such as the Yips/mental blocks, strength training & other subject matter on athlete performance concepts were really missing the mark on these ideas (e.g. how trauma is the direct cause of the Yips). If you are interested in learning more, make sure to subscribe below for when I put out new content on issues related to sport psychology & athlete performance! Also, if you are looking to work with a mental performance specialist, you are in the right place! USE THIS LINK to reach out to me to see if my services are the right fit for your goals!
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