Hypnotherapy for Athletes and Sports Performance

Author: Andreas Balasis, LCSW-QS, CHP

Reviewer:  Dr. Mary Perleoni, LMHC ✓

I think the underlying mechanisms are going to be the same. It's just the point of focus.

A lot of times we uncover that the difficulties in athletic related avenues might be more strongly associated with other domains.

What Do Athletes Come to Hypnotherapy For?

All the above, and part of the problem is that they're used interchangeably. I feel pressure, I feel nervous, I feel anxious. We can use those as synonyms, but it's going to make both of our jobs that much harder. I like to ask, what separates nervousness from excitement?

Other than one having more of an automatic negative connotation? Both have to do with future anticipation, both have to do with physiological changes and presentations. Does one speak more towards happiness or belief, where the other speaks more towards doubt or uncertainty? The language we use matters.

So I want to know how they relate to and visualize pressure and how it manifests.

How Should Athletes Think About Confidence?

I also want to know how they define confidence. Is confidence an interval? Like there's degrees of confidence, and that's how research is done. Or is confidence more like a light switch? We either have it or we don't. If we believe we need to have confidence in order to perform well, but we don't think we're confident right now, then by association, we don't believe we can perform, and now we have a negative feedback loop.

What if we can recognize confidence as less of a variable altogether? That no matter what we might be noticing in the moment, we're able to acknowledge it and to recenter attention back to the task at hand. So the way that we use these words, especially with athletes, is crucial.

If someone says they don't feel confident, I'll ask them, what does confident feel like? Usually it takes a pause, or they're not sure, and that's when I say, well, let's construct it. Maybe we're not even going to use the word confidence because it has already too much emotional association. Can we use present? Can we use engaged? Can we use ready? Can we use prepared?

The goal is being in a place where we know we can execute what we need to execute. Or even if we don't know we can execute it, we could still do it anyway, where we're not held back, or where our attention isn't pulled towards discomfort, but rather it's being pulled towards what we value most, be it competition, be it success in how we define it, be it personal improvement, be it friendship, camaraderie amongst the team.

Can Hypnotherapy Help With the Yips?

There's the analytical component too, because I'll use a golf analogy. You give a golfer a three foot putt, they don't need to analyze the weight of the club or the length of the stroke or the force going into impact. If you do that, it can contribute to what we know as the yips. Not every case of the yips is mental, though. Some are a form of focal dystonia, a neurological movement disorder, so it's worth getting checked by a physician if the problem persists.

We want to let the feel and the awareness that we've built countless repetitions of this already, and it doesn't require conscious control. We want the feel to take control. We don't want to be in a position where we're trying to use our thoughts to manufacture something, especially when that thing has been trained and ingrained time and time again.

We want to regain automaticity in certain areas, the ability to react automatically to something. In sports, we want to regain it. And in other areas, we want to dial it back because we don't want our automatic responses to dominate what we do. We want to have a greater sense of control over what we do.

Is an Athlete's Session Different From Anyone Else's?

I might actually feel incredibly confident in, say, my pitching, but socially I don't think I'm doing all that well. It could be my academics don't exactly lend themselves to a lot of self-belief, and that bleeds into other areas. It could be how we perceive time commitment. It could be how we perceive overall skill and how far out we extrapolate our current behavior.

There are a lot of different angles to look at it from, and we want to make sure that the athlete has as clear of an understanding of what they're doing and why they're doing it as they possibly can.

I think sports are one of the best analogies to life and mental health. In sports, the rules are a little bit more clearly defined, but part of the work with hypnosis is rewriting the rules. We're making sure that we understand the rules we've been operating under. Maybe we've been operating under a rule set that isn't the actual rule set, or we didn't create ourselves. Or maybe we fundamentally disagree with it. We could change it.

What About the Fear of Re-Injury?

Injuries happen when things come out of alignment or when there's too much force being pulled in different directions. You plant super hard, you put too much force without the stability that needs to be there in order to change direction, you blow your knee. The mind is very similar.

I think this way, but I behave this way. I behave this way, but I think this way. If there's an incongruence, it increases the chance of injury. It increases pain. And tie it back to pain, the brain, the subconscious, unconscious, whatever terminology we want to use, is not very good at differentiating emotional pain from physical pain. So there's an interconnectedness.

And then we can quiet the noise that comes from the discomfort physically. We could change the relationship to the physical discomfort. What previously signified a lack of preparedness or a lack of confidence or a lack of ability can just as easily be perceived as preparedness, excitement. It can be energy that is channeled as opposed to energy that is actively fought off.

We can ride that wave as opposed to trying to swim against it. We can use the current to accelerate, or we could try to swim against it and burn our arms out. But that ends up becoming a choice, whereas in the past it wasn't as much of a choice.

Meet Andreas Balasis

My name is Andreas Balasis. I'm a licensed clinical social worker in the state of Florida, and a certified hypnosis practitioner through the International Hypnosis Association. As a previously certified personal trainer, mental performance coaching is another area that I'm really interested in.

If your mental game is holding you back more than your physical training is, reach out to IBWHC to set up a conversation with Andreas.