Thursday, May 5, 2011

Sports:Psychology - Choking Not The Physical Kind

Choking may be caused by your conscious mind invading your unconscious mind.


A recent article pointed out that choking may occur when an expert athlete moves from one "brain system" to another.  The article postulated that there are different brain systems for the differing levels of athletes.  Expert athletes, for example, function from "implicit memories."  The implicit memories are developed from countless hours of practicing skills.  Also when an expert athlete performs, he or she develops a sort of "self-induced amnesia", which acts to suppress performance detractors like the noisy chatter coming from the conscious mind.  On the opposite end, the non-expert frequently consults the conscious mind to analyze performance in an attempt to get it right.  The non-expert is still developing the neural maps necessary for performing.


How do you undo choking?  Try to turn off your conscious mind and turn on your unconscious mind.  What is the best way to do that?  There are probably a number of ways to get your mind back on autopilot, but developing specific techniques to quiet the mind is probably best addressed in another post.    

Instead of focusing on what to do after chocking, it might be better to focus on developing the ability to realize when your conscious mind is over-thinking something your unconscious mind has already figured out.  

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