Choking, Yips and other Mental Aberrations - June 5, 2002

You may want to call this edition of our newsletter "Rantings from Mumford." It is becoming a matter of sheer consternation to me and some of those familiar with the Double Connexion, Clear Keys and our approach to the mental game (actually, it's been that way for me for quite awhile) to see, read and hear the sounds of missed realities, misrepresented principles, zealous overstatements of self-aggrandizement suggesting that whoever is speaking is the only "true word" about golf and everyone else is slipping somewhere along the road to the nether regions. All I can say, in the least offensive way possible, is "Show me the evidence, the references from research and investigation. Don't just throw opinions and wive's tales around. Everybody has one or more of those. Let's get some truth into this arena."

The following subject is not the private venue of any one sport or activity. For our purposes here, however, we will look primarily at golf. Much shows up in print about "yips," "choking," "anxiety," "performance anxiety, " "fear" and "panic." Some say they are the same, or at least come from the same box. Others protest that they are different, even to the point of having no similarity. So let's look at some evidence.

We have watched closely the claims that come out of the Mayo Clinic and The U. of New Mexico, in particular, over the past year or so. Neither of them gives any recognizable clue that they fully understand the issues, but they continue to publish one assertion after another. (I understand that there even may be some enmity between them, which surely points to the fact that much other than genuine research and a quest for truth is going on).

If you take time to examine studies and papers going back to the 50's and 60's, you will notice that anxiety is the major player in all of the "expressions of choice" that we pointed to above. There is fairly common agreement among credentialed authorities that anxiety precedes "choking," precedes "yips," precedes "performance anxiety," and indeed is even a precursor of "panic." Anxiety is the basic engine of all the others. In fact, it will be found that anxiety is the primary under-carriage of all of the other "named dysfunctions." So anxiety is not a synonym for the other named "agents of doom." It is the parent, the precipitant, the driving force behind the others.

Some want to believe, and seem to need others to do the same, that fear and anxiety are the same. While they are shirt-tail relatives, they are different. Fear relates to something that is present and accounted for. You can see what causes fear. Anxiety arises from imagined threats. You won't see it. It just floats free all over the place, because it is related to something out of the past. It is not visible because it relates to things a person has long since transformed through repression of some other, probably childhood, terror, singular or multiple.

In their book, "Introduction to Psychopathology, Frazier and Carr define anxiety as "an affect characterized by feelings of apprehension, uncertainty, and helplessness which are not attached to a real, external danger." An "affect" is defined as follows: "a subjective feeling state or emotion, e.g., depression, guilt, anger, anxiety."

All of the states of angst that get popular press have some things in common, but they also have some distinguishing marks, mostly to be found in intensity. Anxiety is at the root of all of them. Choking is less intense than yips, and performance anxiety is just short of the yips, but more intense than choking. Panic is the advanced and crippling stage of anxiety. It is more intense and debilitating even than yips.

In other words, we are dealing with a continuum here, not totally separate issues.

Yips is what you get from anxiety in situations in which one feels personally threatened (tight tee shots, bad lies, important short putts, etc.) and is a result of some form of inward, personally experienced pressure emanating from long ago. It tends to isolate itself in chronic relationship to some kind of physical movement (as in putting or swinging a club). Choking is also a result, but not quite as severe as yips. It is more processive than yips and falls more into the realm of playing the game rather than swinging a club. It can, if unabated lead to yips, but it is more identified with subtle psychological distraction than with physical disability (starting to think about results, worry over something in the swing, etc). Yips shows up as a physical manifest. Choking causes a person to loose mental tracking and have breakdowns in thinking and planning, with either a flood of thoughts or an outright vacuum. Yips changes the motor activity. Choking may look like it changes the motors, but it only binds or over-clutches the steering wheel.

Panic is even more debilitating than any of the others. It strikes at both the thought process and motor activity, and renders them highly lacking, if not non-functional. Panic has most of the charateristics of both fear and anxiety, thus causing sharp disorganization and erratic behavior.

Performance anxiety is a social disorder. It is derived from a fear that one may look bad to others or somehow fail to measure up. Performance anxiety and choking may look a lot alike, but they come from different stimuli. Yips does not require social implications, nor does panic, although that may be involved with either. Choking, while presenting a less drastic form, can issue either from the presence of other people and fear of shame or from a totally ego-centric mis-perception that comes out in the form of self-chatisement.

With yips, a physical manifestation may cause hesitation in and malfunction of a putt or any other shot. With choking, misses may be a matter of disorganized execution or something as mundane as mismanaging the distance and direction factors coming from disturbances of normal planning functions.

Our reckoning is that all of these are cut from the same basic fabric, with anxiety at the root. They are, therefore, amenable to a common solution - that is, if one is willing to look very carefully at what is going on. If that solution is aimed at the parent - anxiety - it will take care of the others in the process. We suggest that if you know how to manage anxiety, you will, in effect, have managed all of these manifestations, no matter where they come from or by what name you choose to identify them.

Why? Because the common etiology of all of them is found in anxiety signaling the immune system to do its job. The function of the immune system is to defend us - our life and health. In doing so, it throws up a blocking action against anything it perceives as an invader, and it makes no distinction between what we may believe to be "good" or "bad." It is non-discriminatory. It doesn't make any difference to the human system what that indicator is, how it looks, whether it is real or imagined, what size or shape it has. It only knows to do its job. (See any of the works on "stress" from Hans Selye, MD). It is that blocking action by the immune system that manifests itself in what we may variously refer to as choking, yips, panic, etc. Anxiety is the chief "invader" for all of us, in life and golf. It is not going away, so learn to manage it and coexist with it.

Take further note. The management process is the very same for all of these apparent culprits. It is not necessary to see them as different and suppose that different solutions are required. One solution is sufficient. It is only necessary to keep one's self in the present. There is no anxiety in the present . Anxiety is found only in the future and the past. If you wish to curtail anxiety, you must do it in a way that refrains from arousing the immune system when it gets thrown a dose of anxiety by a golfer (or anyone else) facing water on the left or OB on the right (for instance). Certainly, there are some players out there who have suffered human insults sufficient to undermine even the most normal approaches to everyday emotion and thinking. But we will guarantee that even so, if one knows how to keep the mental processes in the present, even those who have suffered unreasonably will be able to contend in balance and without undue ill effects from any of the above named malefactors.

That's the reward for developing an understanding of, and ability to manage, anxiety.