5 ways hypnotherapy can help your sporting performance

Top athletes use many different strategies to maintain and improve performance. Alongside nutrition and body conditioning, psychological tools are a key part of that approach. In fact, talk to most professional sportspeople, and they will say that their mental conditioning is often more important than physical training or diet.

Whilst most of us are never going to be elite competitors, if we take part in any kind of sport, we probably want to improve our game, win a few more matches, make that long putt or just get a better time in the Parkrun.

In amateur sports, we tend to focus purely on our fitness and maybe skills or technique. But can tools like hypnotherapy help us overcome common mind-based issues that we often overlook, and which may be impacting our performance? 

Overcoming performance anxiety

Feeling nervous before a game or race is perfectly natural, but sometimes our bodies go into anxiety overdrive. Before we know it, we can be overwhelmed with unhelpful thoughts, we begin to question our abilities and at the critical moment, our performance dips as a result. 

Nerves don’t only affect the mind. An increased heart rate is the last thing you want when you need a moment of stillness and calm before, for example, a key tennis shot. Tense muscles are unhelpful when you are asking them to respond quickly through their full range of movement, also leaving us prone to injury. 

Negative thoughts can easily sabotage our best physical technique, and so we choke on that golf shot that we have made hundreds of times before, miss the easy goal, or simply feel we can’t finish the race.

It sometimes only takes one or two bad performances before we slip into a vicious cycle of unhelpful negative thinking and self-criticism, where we constantly dwell on the poor results, rather than revisit the good. Often, that behaviour can easily become an ingrained habit as part of your preparation, making it so much harder to shift. 

Simple hypnotherapy techniques can help you to: 

• reframe anxiety and fear as anticipation and excitement
• reduce destructive rumination
• replace negative self-talk with positive thoughts
• stop unhelpful habits.

Improving focus and getting you into the zone

Being totally focused and able to ignore distractions can be critical in any sport. When we are fully absorbed in a task, what psychologists call flow states, everything seems easier. Many of our actions become automatic, rather than forced or laboured.

Hypnotherapy can teach you how to: 

• tune out distractions  
• heighten awareness in key moments
• enhance and maintain focus 
• readily access flow-states for regular and repetitive physical actions

Building stronger self-belief, self-reliance and confidence

Even professional athletes experience self-doubt, particularly during performance dips, following injuries or because of comparing themselves to others. In hypnosis, we become more receptive to helpful suggestions, so sessions often centre on challenging and reducing negative beliefs, while introducing and reinforcing positive ones and using motivational mantras.

Comparison is often described as the thief of joy. It can also demotivate and undermine, which is why most sports professionals are coached to only compete with themselves, for example, by improving on personal bests. Stoic philosophers suggest we should simply attempt to control the things which we can directly influence, yet we often find ourselves becoming overly fixated on the performance of others, wasting effort and because we tend to compare ourselves to those who are better than us, invariably sapping our confidence. Our emotional reactions to either our own performance or that of others can also be demoralising and exhausting.

Hypnosis can be really beneficial in supporting you to: 

• embed positive beliefs and motivational phrases
• stop unhelpful comparisons and instead zone in on what you can influence for the better
• strengthen resilience to minimise emotional reactions that demotivate and drain us

Visualising good technique and successful outcomes

Visualisation is a powerful tool for rehearsing techniques and picturing successful outcomes. When we vividly imagine doing or seeing something, studies have shown that the brain responds in exactly the same way as it does when that thing is actually happening in the real world.

Visualisation can therefore help to build confidence and efficacy by using it to practice sports techniques. It can also enable us to recall times when we have previously achieved success, reminding us of what we are capable of. By using a tactic called anchoring, we can train ourselves to access the good feelings, behaviours and thoughts associated with past events, instilling a positive mindset in the here and now or whenever we need it. 

Using visualisation in hypnotherapy is useful for: 

• rehearsing and perfecting technique
• reinforcing training and coaching
• building confidence in our existing skills and capabilities
• accessing the mindset we associate with previously successful results 
• motivating us by imagining what future success will look and feel like

Supporting rest and shifting between moments of calm and being full-on 

Sufficient rest and recovery are essential to achieving good sports performance. Fortunately, entering deep states of relaxation is a fundamental element of hypnotherapy. As a result, it can be a valuable aid to supporting quality sleep and managing overall stress and anxiety.

In sports, we also often want to move from moments where we might be hyper-aroused, energised and have a high heart rate to a state of calm and stillness or vice versa. With my clients, I often use the example of Nordic Biathlon, which combines the high cardiovascular demands of cross-country skiing with the need to quickly bring the heart rate down to accurately shoot targets with a rifle. Hypnotherapy techniques can help us make that switch effortlessly.

Hypnotherapy can help:  

• support good quality sleep, rest and recovery
• reduce overall stress and anxiety 
• move us easily between a state of high energy and one of calm, or the reverse

In summary, hypnotherapy provides a toolbox of techniques that can be used tactically to enhance sports performance, whatever your level. We may not be able to mirror the achievements of our sporting heroes, but using hypnotherapy to train our minds can help us unlock untapped potential and go beyond where only training our bodies can take us.