My Approach to Sports Psychology: Training the Nervous System, Not Just the Mind
One of the most frustrating experiences for an athlete is knowing, “I can do this.” You’ve done it hundreds or thousands of times in practice. Your body knows the movement, your coach knows you’re capable of it, and you know you’re capable of it.
Then competition comes, and something changes. Your heart rate increases, your breathing changes, your muscles tighten, or you suddenly start thinking about mechanics that normally happen automatically. A mistake happens and instead of moving on, your mind keeps returning to it.
The harder you try to make yourself perform, the further away your natural performance can seem to get.
This is one reason my approach to sports psychology and performance work in Lubbock isn’t primarily about teaching athletes to “think more positively.” Often, the athlete already knows what to do. The problem is accessing what they know when pressure changes the state of their nervous system.
That changes the way I think about performance anxiety.
Performance Isn’t Only Mental
We often call sports psychology the “mental game,” and mindset certainly matters. But performance isn’t happening inside the mind alone; it’s happening inside an entire nervous system.
Under pressure, the brain and body are continuously evaluating what is happening. Am I safe? What if I fail? What will my coach think? What will my parents think? What if this happens again? What if I let everyone down?
Those questions aren’t always conscious. Sometimes the athlete simply experiences the result: a racing heart, tightness in the chest, shallow breathing, heavy legs, shaking, muscle tension, mental blankness, tunnel vision, overthinking, or an inability to reset after a mistake.
This is why telling an athlete to “just relax” usually isn’t very helpful. The nervous system isn’t a light switch.
Sometimes Performance Anxiety Is an Access Problem
One of the most helpful ways I’ve found to think about performance anxiety is this: you may not have lost the skill; you may have temporarily lost access to the state in which that skill is easiest to express.
An athlete can perform beautifully in practice because the movement has become automatic. Then pressure increases and attention shifts inward. Instead of simply doing what the body knows how to do, the athlete begins monitoring: Am I doing this correctly? Where are my hands? What if I miss? Don’t screw this up.
A movement that normally happens automatically suddenly becomes consciously controlled. The athlete isn’t necessarily less capable; they’re trying to perform from a different state.
So rather than simply asking, “How do we make you more confident?” I usually want to understand something first: What actually happens inside your system when the pressure goes up?
What Does Your Nervous System Do Under Pressure?
Different athletes respond to pressure differently. Some become hyperactivated—their thoughts race, their muscles tighten, they speed up, become impulsive, try too hard, or can’t settle between plays or events.
Other athletes move toward something more like a freeze or shutdown response. Their mind goes blank, their body feels heavy, they become hesitant or disconnected, or they suddenly can’t initiate something they’ve done countless times before. Some athletes bounce between both patterns.
Understanding your particular response is much more useful than assuming every performance problem requires the same mental-performance technique. The athlete who becomes overly activated may need something very different from the athlete whose system begins shutting down.
The Goal Isn’t to Eliminate Activation
Athletes need activation. You don’t want to be completely relaxed before an explosive athletic performance; energy, intensity, adrenaline, focus, and competitiveness can all be incredibly useful.
The goal isn’t to make “calm” good and activation bad. The goal is flexibility.
Can your system mobilize when it’s time to perform without becoming disorganized? Can you recover after a mistake, settle between performances, and return to the present instead of remaining stuck in what just happened?
For many athletes, peak performance isn’t about achieving one permanently calm state. It’s about becoming better at moving between states and accessing the state that the moment requires.
Why One Bad Experience Can Become a Mental Block
Sometimes the performance problem isn’t actually the original mistake. It’s what the nervous system learned from it.
An athlete misses an important shot, falls during a routine, strikes out, double-faults, gets injured, loses a race they expected to win, or freezes during a critical moment. The next time a similar situation appears, the brain doesn’t necessarily approach it neutrally.
Sometimes the memory is conscious: What if it happens again? Other times it shows up primarily through the body as tightness, breath restriction, hesitation, a spike in heart rate, or an inexplicable sense of dread.
This is where sports psychology can overlap with some of the same processes we see in other forms of anxiety. The nervous system learns from experience, but it can also update what it has learned.
Where EFT Tapping Can Fit
One practical tool I frequently use with athletes is Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), often called tapping. EFT combines focused attention on what you’re experiencing with tapping on specific acupressure points on the body.
One reason I like EFT in performance work is that it’s practical. An athlete can learn to recognize activation and have something concrete to do with it rather than getting caught in the secondary struggle of, “I shouldn’t be nervous right now.”
We may use tapping while working with fear of failure, a recent mistake, pressure from expectations, frustration, physical tension, or the anticipatory anxiety that begins before competition. It can also become a short reset practice that an athlete learns to use independently when appropriate.
I don’t view EFT as a magic technique that makes anxiety disappear. I use it as one tool for helping an athlete notice what’s happening, reduce the fight against the experience, and create enough space for a different response to become available.
Where EMDR Can Fit
Sometimes a current performance response is connected to a more specific experience: an injury, humiliating performance, coach screaming at you, major mistake, collapse under pressure, or embarrassing moment in front of teammates.
Even when the athlete consciously knows, “That was then; I’m capable now,” the nervous system can continue reacting to reminders of the earlier experience. In those situations, EMDR therapy can sometimes give us a way of working more directly with how that experience has been stored and what continues to get activated in the present.
EFT and EMDR can also complement one another. EFT may give us a flexible way of working with activation and helping an athlete regulate in the moment, while EMDR can allow us to work more deeply when a particular experience, belief, or emotional memory continues driving the performance response.
You can read more about how I approach that work in My Whole-Person Approach to EMDR: Why Trauma Healing Is More Than Processing a Memory.
Confidence Isn’t Something I Want Athletes to Manufacture
Athletes are constantly told to “be confident,” but confidence becomes difficult when we treat it as an emotion you have to produce on command. I’d rather help an athlete accumulate evidence.
Evidence might sound like: I can recover after mistakes. I can perform while anxious. I don’t have to feel perfect to compete well. My body knows what to do. I can notice pressure without fighting it. I can return my attention to the next relevant cue. I can trust my training.
That’s a more durable kind of confidence. It isn’t, “I know I’m going to win.” It’s closer to, “Whatever happens, I trust my ability to respond.”
What Sports Psychology Work Can Actually Involve
Because athletes are different, my work isn’t built around one universal mental-performance routine. Depending on what’s happening, we might work with performance anxiety, perfectionism, fear of failure, confidence, attentional control, pre-performance routines, visualization, breath and nervous-system regulation, overthinking mechanics, injury-related fear, pressure from coaches or parents, emotional regulation during competition, or recovering quickly after mistakes.
We may use tools such as EFT tapping, EMDR, visualization and mental rehearsal, nervous-system regulation practices, and neurofeedback when they fit the athlete and the problem.
The point isn’t collecting as many techniques as possible. It’s identifying what interrupts this particular athlete’s ability to access their performance, and then working there.
Where Neurofeedback Can Fit
Neurofeedback gives us another interesting avenue because it allows us to work not only with thoughts about performance, but with patterns of brain activity and self-regulation. Through repeated feedback and training, the brain gets opportunities to practice particular patterns of activity.
For an athlete, I’m not especially interested in producing “better brainwaves” for their own sake. I’m interested in capacities like: Can you settle? Can you activate without becoming disorganized? Can you sustain and shift attention intentionally? Can you recover? Can you move more flexibly between states?
I use clinician-guided at-home neurofeedback in my practice, which allows much of the ongoing training to happen outside the office. You can learn more in At-Home Neurofeedback in Lubbock: How It Works and Who It May Help or see the complete process on my Neurofeedback services page.
The Athlete Is a Person Before They’re a Performer
There’s another layer of performance work that I don’t want to miss. Sometimes performance anxiety isn’t only about the sport.
It may connect with perfectionism, fear of disappointing people, identity, family dynamics, shame, achievement, or the feeling that being exceptional is what makes you valuable. When that’s the case, another breathing exercise or visualization isn’t necessarily going to reach the thing that’s actually driving the response.
This doesn’t mean we turn every performance problem into years of psychotherapy. Sometimes an athlete really does need three practical tools and a better pre-performance routine. But sometimes the nervous system is responding so strongly because something important is underneath the performance itself, and good sports psychology needs enough flexibility to tell the difference.
Performance and Identity
One distinction I often want athletes to learn is the difference between “I performed badly” and “I am bad.” Those statements look obviously different when they’re written on a page, but under pressure they don’t always feel different.
When identity becomes fused with performance, every competition carries enormous emotional weight. A mistake isn’t simply information anymore; it becomes a threat to worth. If the nervous system believes that much is at stake, it makes sense that it becomes highly activated.
Paradoxically, separating inherent worth from performance outcome can free an athlete to perform at a higher level. They become more able to experiment, make mistakes, recover, take appropriate risks, and remain present because their worth isn’t being decided by the outcome.
The goal isn’t caring less about your sport. It’s being able to care deeply without your worth being on trial.
Release, Reprocess, Rewire
I often describe my broader therapeutic approach through three overlapping movements: Release, Reprocess, and Rewire. I think the same framework can be useful in performance work.
Release means helping the athlete recognize what’s happening under pressure and develop ways to work with the activation rather than fighting it. EFT tapping, breathing, body awareness, attentional practices, and other nervous-system tools can all fit here.
Reprocess means working with experiences, fears, beliefs, or emotional patterns that continue hijacking present performance. This is where EMDR and deeper experiential work may become useful when an old experience is still showing up as though it’s happening now.
Rewire means practicing something different often enough for another response to become increasingly available. That can include attentional training, visualization, mental rehearsal, new responses to mistakes, neurofeedback, pre-performance routines, and—most importantly—repeated real-world experiences of “I can be here without doing the old thing.”
Understanding matters, but ultimately we’re trying to help the nervous system experience something different.
What I Want Athletes to Walk Away With
I don’t ultimately want an athlete dependent on me, tapping, a breathing exercise, neurofeedback equipment, or the perfect pre-game routine. Those can all be useful tools, but they’re not the destination.
The deeper goal is increasing the athlete’s own capacity to notice what is happening, regulate what needs regulating, trust what they’ve trained, recover when something goes wrong, and return to the present moment.
That’s psychological flexibility. And in my experience, it’s often far more useful than trying to force yourself to feel confident all the time.
Sports Psychology in Lubbock, Texas
I work with athletes in Lubbock around sports psychology, mental performance, performance anxiety, confidence, nervous-system regulation, mental blocks, and the psychological side of competition. My approach integrates practical performance work with tools such as EFT tapping, EMDR, nervous-system regulation, visualization, experiential approaches, and neurofeedback when appropriate.
You can learn more about my work on my Sports Psychology & Performance page.
If you’re an athlete—or the parent of an athlete—and you’re wondering whether what you’re experiencing is something we could work with, you can book a free 15-minute call with me here.
We can start by understanding what happens when the pressure goes up, what you’ve already tried, and what you’d like to be different.
Frequently Asked Questions
What can sports psychology help with?
Sports psychology and mental-performance work can address performance anxiety, confidence, focus, perfectionism, fear of failure, recovery after mistakes, competition anxiety, mental blocks, injury-related fear, emotional regulation, and other psychological factors that interfere with athletic performance.
Why do I perform well in practice but struggle in competition?
Competition can change arousal, attention, breathing, muscle tension, and self-monitoring. Skills that normally operate automatically can become harder to access when pressure causes an athlete to overthink, become overly activated, or move toward a freeze or shutdown response.
Can EFT tapping help with sports performance anxiety?
EFT tapping can be used as a regulation and emotional-processing tool when athletes experience performance anxiety, pressure, frustration, fear of failure, or difficulty recovering from mistakes. I use it as one potential part of a broader, individualized performance approach rather than as a guaranteed stand-alone solution.
Can EMDR help athletes?
EMDR may be useful when a previous injury, embarrassing performance, major mistake, or other distressing experience continues to trigger a strong response in current performance situations. Whether EMDR is appropriate depends on the individual athlete and what is driving the current difficulty.
Can neurofeedback be used for sports performance?
Neurofeedback is sometimes incorporated into mental-performance work to train aspects of attention, arousal, and self-regulation. Research on neurofeedback specifically for athletic performance continues to develop, so I view it as one possible tool rather than a guaranteed performance enhancer.
Do you offer sports psychology in Lubbock?
Yes. Ryan Hayes Therapy provides sports psychology and mental-performance counseling in Lubbock, Texas, with an approach emphasizing performance anxiety, nervous-system regulation, confidence, attention, and whole-person psychological performance.