About the author:

Alex Bolowich is a Certified Mental Performance Consultant, founder of Elite Mental Performance, a private practice in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he specializes in helping competitive athletes mentally train for consistent high performance. He is also co-founder of Ibex Tactics, a performance psychology organization that increases team and organizational performance through enhanced human-human connection. If you are interested in any of his signature programs, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!

Note: Ai was used solely for editing and grammar purposes. The creation of this article was handwritten by the author.

Breaking Through Mental Blocks: How Brainspotting is Revolutionizing Sports Performance

Picture this: You're a world-class gymnast who has performed the same routine thousands of times. Your body knows every twist, every landing, every breath. Then suddenly, mid-air, your brain disconnects. You lose spatial awareness—what gymnasts call "the twisties"—and what was once muscle memory becomes terrifyingly foreign. This is exactly what happened to Simone Biles at the Tokyo Olympics, forcing her to withdraw from competition to protect herself from serious injury.

Or imagine being a baseball pitcher who can't throw to first base, despite making that same throw countless times in practice. A golfer whose putting stroke abandons them on the final hole. These aren't just "performance slumps"—they're neurophysiological phenomena that leave elite athletes feeling confused, frustrated, and questioning everything they thought they knew about their sport.

The skills they've spent thousands of hours and years building suddenly feel foreign. Athletes fight desperately to get them back, cycling through traditional mental performance strategies: positive self-talk, visualization, training harder, practicing more intensely. But none of it works. The confusion turns into frustration, and the "when or if" question looms large. In sports, time is of the essence—you don't have the luxury of slowly "figuring it out."

Then there's performance anxiety, sometimes so intense that swimmers and track athletes I've worked with will vomit before a meet. Sometimes so overwhelming that they dissociate completely, going numb and unable to access the energy they need to compete at a high level. Their brain and nervous system have decided it's not safe enough to feel, triggering a complete shutdown mode.

Traditional mental training approaches fall short with these deep-rooted issues. But what if there was one method that could address both mental blocks and performance anxiety? What if it could happen much faster than the typical "just take deep breaths and try to relax" approach? Would you be willing to try it?

The Accidental Discovery That Changed Everything

In 2003, Dr. David Grand, a psychotherapist, was working with a figure skater who couldn't perform a triple loop. He was using EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) when he noticed something unusual. As she tracked his fingers with her eyes across her visual field, there was a specific point where her eyes began to wobble.

Instead of continuing with the standard EMDR protocol, Dr. Grand made a split-second decision that would revolutionize sports psychology. He held his hand in that exact position. "It was almost as if an invisible force grabbed my hand and held it in place," he later described (Grand, D. 2013).

What happened next was extraordinary. Her brain and nervous system began clearing the mental block on their own, processing through old memories that—unknown to her conscious mind—were what her nervous system was reacting to, causing her body to shut down and freeze when it came time to perform the triple loop.

That moment sparked the discovery of Brainspotting, launching a new era of cutting-edge sports psychology practices.

Why Traditional Mental Training Falls Short

To understand why Brainspotting works when other modalities don't, you need to understand the three brain regions responsible for your performance:

The Front Brain (Neocortex): Your "thinking brain"—responsible for logic, rationality, and conscious thought.

The Midbrain (Limbic System): Your "feeling brain"—the emotional processing center.

The Hindbrain (Brain Stem): Your "survival brain"—focused entirely on keeping you alive.

Visualization, self-talk, and reframing are all cognitive-based mental training techniques that operate in the neocortex—your thinking brain. This explains why when a baseball player struggles to throw to first base, or when a swimmer tells themselves "it's just another meet," the logical words don't create change.

Here's what's happening "under the hood": It's like you're driving a Tesla, and you are the neocortex—the conscious driver. The Tesla's computer system represents your midbrain and hindbrain. For some reason, your Tesla's safety system has scanned the environment and determined there's something dangerous, causing a "malfunction."

I use that word loosely because these brain regions aren't actually malfunctioning—they're doing exactly what they're designed to do: keep you alive. Your brain's primary directive in any context isn't just about physical safety; it includes emotional safety too. If it has any reason to believe, based on your past experiences, that what you're about to do could put you in a vulnerable position emotionally or physically, it can override your conscious mind and shut things down.

So your Tesla brain automatically stops because it detected what it perceives as danger, while you're using your neocortex to press the gas pedal. But your system is still registering threat—it cannot move forward.

The Hidden Trigger System

You might be wondering: "I'm always in vulnerable positions in sports—why does my brain override me now but not other times?"

The answer lies in how your brain continuously scans your environment through your senses. When you have "unprocessed traumas," and trauma here means any physical or emotional distress, whether small chronic stresses built over time or one acute event like a significant injury, it can get trapped in those parts of the brain and nervous system. Your nervous system responds by scanning for cues of safety and danger every second without your conscious awareness (Porges, S. W., 2011)

Any physical distress (like an injury) or emotional distress (like a coach's humiliation, parental pressure, or even non-sport-related incidents like a car accident) can create these unprocessed memories. When something in your current environment triggers these old experiences, your brain's safety systems override your conscious control (Grand & Goldberg, 2016).

Here's the crucial point: these deeper brain centers cannot tell time. They respond as if that original trauma is happening right now. Your logical neocortex knows you're not currently experiencing that trauma, but your midbrain and hindbrain are far more powerful when it comes to safety—and they get first priority on your automatic responses.

Your autonomic nervous system triggers one of three main responses to environmental stimuli (Porges, S. W., 2011):

1. Ventral Vagal: Connection and safety

2. Sympathetic: Fight-or-flight mobilization (where we want to be during performance, combined with ventral vagal)

3. Dorsal Vagal: Freeze or shutdown

Performance anxiety represents an overactive fight-or-flight response that, when too intense, can lead to freeze. Mental blocks and phenomena like the yips are freeze responses. These involuntary, powerful automatic responses shape your mental and physical state before and during performance (Grand, 2013). If you have unprocessed sports-related traumas, your nervous system can pull you out of the controlled activation state you need for peak performance—and you become a passenger while it takes you for a ride you don't want (Grand & Goldberg, 2016).

How Brainspotting Solves the Puzzle

I won't get too detailed here because the essence of Brainspotting is for the client to "allow" and "observe" rather than "control" or "think" about what's happening. But here's what you need to understand about the process:

Your brain and nervous system are constantly trying to return to homeostasis, your natural equilibrium. Athletes inevitably experience emotionally or physically distressing events, often multiple times. If your brain registers these as traumatic and something to monitor for safety purposes, and they haven't been fully processed, they remain active in your system.

Brainspotting simply opens the door for your brain and nervous system to complete the processing of these experiences naturally.

Here's the remarkable part: with Brainspotting, you don't need to consciously identify where the distress originates. Your Brainspotting specialist will likely ask about your trauma history, and it's crucial to be honest about everything you can recall, especially non-sport-related experiences. This helps the specialist determine which therapeutic frames will work best for you.

During a session, your brainspotting specialist will have you discuss what you're experiencing and the emotions present during those difficult moments, whether it's intense anxiety before competition, a complete mental block of a skill, or frustration about repeated mistakes. They'll guide you to tune into where you feel these emotions in your body. Yes, emotions are stored physically in your muscles, cells, and tissues (van der Kolk, B. A., 2014).

Then the specialist will guide you to focus your gaze in specific positions while mindfully observing what emerges. As Dr. Grand (2013) explains: "Where you look affects how you feel." These activated points in your visual field are called "brainspots"—they're like coordinates to the memories that need processing and release. This prevents your internal "Tesla" from getting its wires crossed when it encounters triggers, allowing you to genuinely feel "it's just another meet" instead of having to convince yourself of that.

Neither you nor the brainspotting specialist are responsible for the processing itself. Your nervous system and brain do the work automatically once the brainspot is accessed. You might experience increased physical sensations—anxiety, muscle tension, temperature changes—or mental experiences like flashbacks, internal voices, or future imagery. Whatever occurs during this time represents your brain and body doing what they need to complete the resolution process.

The Timeline Question

"How long does this take?" It's the question every athlete asks, and it's vital to understand if you want the process to work effectively.

Having time pressure on Brainspotting will actually slow your progress. As high-performance athletes, you're naturally focused on efficiency and speed. It's normal to think, "How fast can we do this?" But rushing the process creates delays because you shift into a controlling mindset instead of allowing your brain to process naturally (Grand & Goldberg, 2016). You engage more conscious thought and logic in your neocortex rather than letting your deeper brain regions do the work they know how to do.

I've worked with athletes who resolved their issues in 1-3 sessions, and others who needed 10-20 sessions. Our measuring stick is always what you honestly feel and experience regarding the original issue that brought you in.

Will This Work for You?

Brainspotting works for everyone. In fact, Dr. Grand discovered it's not just for "curing" mental blocks and performance anxiety, it can also expand performance from where you currently are (Grand & Goldberg, 2016). You don't need to use Brainspotting only to "fix" something; you can build on what you already have.

As a former NCAA Division I goalkeeper, I remember experiencing minor mental blocks consistently. Routine saves I could make in my sleep would suddenly see the ball slip through my hands, or I'd get stuck mid-movement before sprinting to close down an attacker. These micro-freezes were more than just mistakes or phases. They made me question whether I belonged at that level, even though I knew I'd performed successfully there before.

What I didn't realize was that my nine broken bones, three surgeries, and two shoulder dislocations had created more than enough unprocessed trauma to alter my depth perception, accuracy, and timing. My body was protecting me in ways my conscious mind couldn't understand.

Where Do You Go From Here?

Look, I'm not going to blow smoke up your *** about this being some magic bullet. Brainspotting works, but it requires transparency, patience, and trust.

The athletes I work with who see the biggest changes are the ones who come in without trying to control every aspect of the process. They trust that their brain knows what it's doing, even when it doesn't feel like it in the moment.

Your athletic career isn't going to last forever. The window is smaller than you think. The mental blocks, the anxiety, the freeze-ups, they're stealing time you can't get back. And honestly? You're probably tougher than whatever's holding you back. Your brain just needs permission to let go of the old stuff so you can get back to doing what you do best.

If you want to see if this approach makes sense for you, sign up for a consultation. We'll talk through what's going on and figure out if we're a good fit. If we're not, I'll point you toward someone who is. My job is to help you make the most of whatever time you have left in your sport.

Let's get after it.

References

Grand, D. (2013). Brainspotting: The revolutionary new therapy for rapid and effective change. Sounds True.

Grand, D., & Goldberg, A. (2016). This is your brain on sports: The science of underdogs, the value of rivalry, and what we can learn from the t-shirt cannon. Simon & Schuster

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking