You may be asking yourself this question, especially if you had it all together and now you don’t. What’s changed? Maybe you’re the parent of an athlete asking these questions.
One of my most favorite and simple reads is a book by Dr. Dave Grand and Alan Goldberg called, This is Your Brain on Sports. It’s about beating block, slumps, and performance anxiety for good. In this book, they give several stories of professional and non-professional athletes who are in this predicament. It’s very relatable and something you have likely encountered to some degree – especially if you’re still reading this blog post.
What I love about this book as he speaks to parents and coaches alike helping them to understand the impact they have on the fight/flight response in the athlete/child’s brain when it comes to mistakes in the game. Helping you understand the physiology of how we are hardwired is a pivotal point in understanding RRPP’s – Repetitive Sports Performance Problems.
Here is a paragraph from the above mentioned book:
“The onset of these RSPP’s never makes sense to the athlete, coaches, parents or fans. The athlete hasn’t a clue what’s really wrong and is at a loss about how to “fix” it. His or her best efforts lead to more frustration and depending of the struggles. The athlete’s coaches try everything they know in a futile attempt to get the athlete back on track. When they fail, coaches feel helpless and overwhelmed and often end up deeming the athlete a “head case.” Some coaches then subject the athlete to further emotional turmoil with humiliations in front of teammates. RSPP’s can be tenacious, defying the best efforts of most professionals. The athlete, unable to perform like he or she did before, often prematurely end his or her sport in defeat.”
We know that research tells us that the action of “choking” is actually the fight/flight response malfunctioning its performance response resulting in motions and skills being out of place.
Grand and Goldberg also write about how 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 is was initially experienced.”
This becomes even more fascinating when you understand the makeup of the human body and add the knowledge that muscle has memory. Not only that, we have smooth muscle laced through every fiber of our being in the fascial system and the job of smooth muscle tissue is to contract and to hold UNCONSCIOUSLY! See this page for more information about this.
So, with this knowledge we now understand that we can have movements, even micro, out of our conscious control. What do we do about that? Brainspotting! This is a fascinating tool that gets to the limbic system in the brain where this process begins.
Brainspotting is effective and the very technique Dr. David Grand developed when working with professional athletes for the past 2 decades. It is the missing link to traditional sports psychology techniques which address self talk. Although important, language lives on the top of our brains and the reflex of muscle and unconscious thought lives much deeper. So when self talk isn’t doing the trick, the next layer is what needs to be addressed.
Cost effective and quick moving I’d love to visit with you further about your struggles as an athlete. If you need a good place to start, take this free quiz and see if some of these relate to your story.
I can be reached at ashley@groundedandgrowing.me or 320-766-4686 for more information.