How to unfreeze in sport by Dr Josephine Perry
Most of us are well aware of the fight or flight response but have you heard of the other two: fawn and freeze? What we saw in the Women’s Final at Wimbledon on Saturday is being talked about in the media as a freeze response. Let’s find out why.
Fight, flight, fawn or freeze response?
Those who naturally go to ‘fight response’ don’t usually get aggressive in sport – you’ll see them actually get very chatty, like they are trying to talk away their nerves.
Flight responders quit early on in their sporting careers as their threat system has decided the discomfort is not worth it for them.
Fawn responders tend to have had horrible coaching previously so are now treading on eggshells to people please.
Freeze responders? Well, their bodies have a strong physical response to negative emotions (like threat, fear, frustration, risk of imperfection or anger) so stop responding in the way they would like them to. It comes from the primal idea that if you are in survival mode and have no control over a situation you may as well play dead, hoping the threat doesn’t see you and goes away, leaving you immobile.
Why do we freeze in sport?
To understand how to deal with freezing we firstly need to understand what triggers us to freeze. And it helps to start with the fact that our brains are not designed to make us brilliant in sport. They have some functions which help us perform well (habits and logical decision making) but at their very core they have a much more important role: your survival. And survival and high performance require our brains to do very different things which manifests very obviously when you are under pressure.
As your brain is designed to ensure your survival it has developed four incredible ways to do so:
helping you predict possible outcomes,
body budgeting so you run efficiently,
prioritizing negative memories and
activating a threat system in emergencies.
All these together aim to ensure your survival. When they combine, they push you towards staying in your comfort zone (for safety) and so you don’t get to stretch yourself or try new things and this limits your ability to perform at a high level.
Possible outcomes
One way for your brain to keep you safe is to be able to figure out all the possible outcomes of a specific situation in advance and decide the least risky thing for you to do. It does this through prediction, trying to automatically predict our needs before they arise; saving headspace and speeding up reaction times.
But, we can over predict (and the more intelligent you are as an athlete the more you tend to do this) and this means we focus on the negatives, and the likelihood of everything going wrong which feels very uncomfortable.
Brain budgeting
The second survival function that your brain relies upon is budgeting.
Your brain is constantly trying to figure out what resources you do and don’t need to use. As an athlete your brain needs to balance out your daily physical energy needs so that it can use energy for the essential elements but conserves resources when they are not needed. Every action you take will be one that your brain will have assessed is a worthwhile action. It sounds fairly simple but it can be an incredibly difficult balancing act and long sporting seasons or doing well in a sport like tennis means you play match after match, fatiguing you so your body holds you back to save energy and stops you working towards what you want to achieve.
Prioritizing negative memories
A third element of the survival function comes from thousands of years ago when human survival was constantly threatened by physical risks. To handle this our brains developed a negativity bias. It came about because, in order to survive, you need to remember very clearly all the things which can harm you; our caveman cousins needed to know that a big animal with sharp teeth might well eat them so that they should stay away from it. They needed to know the tribe in the next-door village was more likely to steal their food than share so they should hide their supplies.
This knowledge is very helpful for physical survival but a negativity bias around psychological elements (what if I lose a match in front of all these people?) can give us lots of negative head chatter and hamper our success.
Threat system
Finally, the most dramatic function that your brain has to keep you safe is your threat function, an alarm system for the body, constantly on alert looking out for things that could physically or psychologically harm you.
It needs to be speedy to protect us and uses that prediction element so jumps very quickly to conclusions and the decisions might not be based on evidence but on feelings so can be rather emotional and impulsive. When the threat system perceives some sort of threat (physical or psychological) it releases two chemicals (adrenaline and cortisol) and sends them off to flood your body; facilitating you to do one of those four things we began by discussing; fight, flight, freeze or fawn.
Physical impacts
Physically, when we freeze (or fight, flight or fawn) the adrenaline and cortisol that flood the body can have a really strong impact:
• A nauseous tummy: causing sickness, diarrhoea or battling butterflies.
• Increased breathing rate: Rises from around 13 breaths a minute up to around 21. This means you only fill the top of your lungs and so develop shallow breathing, reducing the amount of oxygen circulating in your body.
• Higher heart rate. This can harm concentration and limit endurance.
• Tight muscles. This can cause injury or poor movement patterns.
• Loss of senses: This could be your touch, taste, smell, hearing and in particular your peripheral vision.
All of these are actually helpful in allowing you to focus and escape if being chased by a big animal with sharp teeth, incredibly unhelpful when playing a final at Wimbledon.
The biggest issue for tennis players is that threat-system triggering causes their back and shoulder muscles to tighten up so they cannot hit the ball in the way all those hours of practice should allow them to. And then mixed in with the negative head chatter more and more chemicals flood our body until we get into a place where our threat system is continually triggering; creating a very unhelpful feedback loop and a body that is just not playing tennis the way we want it to.
How to prevent freezing in sport
To reduce our risk of freezing we need a three-pronged approach:
1. Having grounding and breathing tools to soothe our threat system so that our own physiology helps it to feel calmer and more in control.
Colourful breathing is my favourite. Here you pick two favourite colours and breathe that first colour in through your nose for 4 counts, hold for 2 and then breathe out that second colour through your mouth for a count of 6. It lowers your breathing rate and helps you focus on the moment you are in (possible future outcomes tend to be threat system triggers) which helps break the unhelpful feedback loop.
2. Focusing on inputs to your game. Inputs are within our control – it is outputs that tend to be outside of our control and more likely to trigger the threat system. Start by thinking of three things you could do in your next match or event that you are in total control of.
3. Learning to accept that we will feel out of control and uncomfortable at times. Rather than hiding from these feelings or trying to ignore them accepting that is it how you feel and being able to sit with the discomfort allows us to then work hard on the court in the serves of what really matters to us, even if it feels scary.