5 Tips for the ‘yips’
The ‘yips’ is an anxious state that impacts an athlete’s performance. It’s when a muscle memory task completed hundreds if not thousands of times begins failing the athlete. Examples are the golfer that starts missing the fairway, the 3rd baseman missing routine throws to first base, a swimmer that has lost ‘feel’ of the water, a cross country runner that cramps only in meets, and the 99% free throw shooter in practice is only 45% in games.
Yips are not limited to athletes. Yips can stricken any high performer (HP). It might be a professional musician that begins struggling with chords or a CEO that cannot give a public speech without losing train of thought. When routine actions in key moments are no longer routine, then you have the yips.
High performing athletes and professionals that develop the yips don’t have an issue with ‘not working hard enough’ - they’re elites. It’s what they do. What makes it so frustrating for the HP is they can’t just ‘do more’ to make the yips go away. Doing more and working harder can often make it worse. Continued setbacks can defeat morale and overworking the body promotes injury. This leads to greater anxiety and depression and the cycle continues.
The real problem lies deep within. Literally. The problem lies within the brain’s memory banks. Yips are an issue that ‘coping skills’ will struggle to resolve. In computer terms, it doesn’t help adding code to the brain to compensate for bad code. Fix the bad code.
The good news is that after 30+ years of high quality science based research into the brain’s inner workings, proven treatment methods can re-wire aka reprocess the brain back to it’s high performing ability. In most instances the yips has a single moment of creation, but rarely can the HP recall it without some guided assistance. This starting memory has become buried so deep in the neural network, the HP either can’t find it or dismisses it as insignificant. In time, the memory surfaces as anxiety and that ultimately lodges itself in the HP’s physiology. That is to say, for the elite performer, any amount of anxiety can impact muscle movement leading to fractional shifts in the body’s motion or function and those fractions can be the difference between winning and losing.
When confronted with the yips, I recommend a trauma based approach. A good one is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). After all, the brain structures responsible for PTSD and the yips are the same.
Steps to improving performance at this juncture:
1) Accept this may be a ‘think smarter,’ not ‘try harder’ situation
2) Accept that the yip problem may exist in your life outside of your chosen HP area and is carrying over
3) Find a therapist trained at troubleshooting the genesis of the problem
4) Is that therapist trained at altering the neurophysiology of the problem - although very important to the HP, you may need to go beyond mindful meditation and envisioning successful outcomes when overcoming the yips
5) Follow through in scheduling with the therapist