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. I cover this content in more thorough detail in my guide for how to cure advanced mental blocks such as the yips. 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. I also cover neurofeedback and biofeedback techniques in more detail in my advanced guide here.
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! I also cover advanced techniques for how to use brainspotting on many complicated athlete mental blocks in my advanced guide here.