What causes a gymnast to lose confidence and how hypnosis can remedy this:

1. Performance Anxiety

Every athlete goes through these emotions at some stage during their career. It typically gets easier as the gymnast matures and, like any other skill, learns how to integrate strategies to alleviate it If you under-perform in meets compared to how you perform in practice, then you most likely have performance anxiety. Fear of failure can cause many performance barriers for gymnasts. Gymnastics tends to be a perfectionist sport, so many gymnasts struggle with fear of failure. Instead of thinking about the actual performance, they become more focused on the outcome, and what score their performance will receive. To overcome performance anxiety, you want to first understand the underlying fear. Whether it’s a need for approval, perfectionism, or fear of embarrassment, you need to address that specific issue.

How Hypnosis Can Help

During hypnosis, the subconscious mind is open to accessing information. Defining the issue leads to developing the strategy to address it. The relaxation response created by hypnosis can be profound and replace anxiety with excitement and confidence. Not only can the gymnast feel this during the hypnotherapy session, but they can quickly learn how to induce this state rapidly prior to a performance.

2. Self-made limitations or blockages

A mental block on one skill can quickly spiral into a loss of confidence. It can create a fear that can spread to more than just the skill in question, but to an entire group of skills, such as any backwards skill, for example. Mental blocks are a type of fear that usually comes from one of two different causes – your brain keeping you safe from danger through a primitive response known as fight-or-flight, or your mind being afraid of the unknown or what might happen. Unfortunately, sometimes your brain cannot recognize when a threat poses a real danger versus when the threat can be used as a learning experience. For example, when you are trying to perform a skill in gymnastics that your body perceives as a threat, your fight-or-flight response might kick in. This is a prevalent emotion after coming back to practice from an injury. If the mental block is the result of the fight-or-flight response kicking into overdrive, how can we stop this response from happening? To get past a mental block and perform the skill in question, we make it clear to our brain that the threat is no longer there.

How Hypnosis Can Help

Using hypnosis/imagery techniques can “trick” your brain into believing your body can do something. When you feel stuck and are unable to perform a skill you once could perform, one of the best ways to get past this is to spend time re-imagining yourself performing the skill you’re struggling with. See yourself going through each of the motions of your skill in slow motion. Make it as realistic as possible. What sounds do you hear? What does the gym smell like? How do your muscles feel? The more details you can add to your imagery, the more likely you are to convince your brain that you can do the skill again. During hypnosis you can do your routine successfully as many times as you like. Not only are your neural pathways stimulated as though you are currently performing, but your limitations, blockages, and self-doubt dissolve. Hypnosis can have a profoundly positive effect on the gymnast’s general wellbeing. Hypnosis creates a conducive environment for suggestibility. The hypnotist creates a dialogue of suggestions, rich in positively embellished detail and emotion, for using during the suggestible state. For example, those suggestions may include memories of achieving short- and long-term goals or reflecting on prior challenges—and how the gymnast vanquished those difficult and seemingly unobtainable goals. My work is to constantly find small opportunities to build confidence. I build in the memories of the positive interaction with teammates and coaches, with an emphasis on self-focus, and not on comparison with others.