Coaches Ask a Sport Psych, Episode 09, Do Over Thinkers Have a Place in High-Performance Sports?
I'm excited to share the ninth episode of our "Coaches Ask a Sport Psychologist" series. Today, we're exploring an intriguing question:
"It seems like some people literally don't think much. Is there a spot for overthinkers in high-performance sport?"
In this episode, I delve into the dynamics of thought processes among athletes and how they impact performance. We'll discuss whether being an "overthinker" is a hindrance or if there's a valuable place for deep thinkers in high-performance sports. I challenge some common perceptions and share insights on how different thinking styles can influence an athlete's effectiveness on the field.
Join me as we explore the role of thought in athletic performance and how to harness it for success.
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Edited Video Transcript:
The question provided today is:
"It seems like some people literally don't think much. Is there a spot for overthinkers in high-performance sport?"
I'm going to push back a little on the idea that some people don't think much. Pretty much everyone thinks a lot. But I suspect what the coach is asking about is this:
Some people tend to balance engaging with their internal experiences—like thoughts and feelings—with engaging in their external experiences—responding to the world and taking action. Other people might spend more time with their internal experiences and less time actually doing and engaging in observable behaviors.
It can be easy to categorize these two groups as "overthinkers" and "not overthinkers." But when it comes to high-performance sport, it's not about how much we think so much as how our engagement with thoughts and feelings results in beneficial action.
I think the key skill the coach is trying to identify here is whether there are ways to have a robust internal experience—lots of thoughts, feelings, and emotions—and still engage in enough effective behavior, meaning external actions, to be a competitive high performer. And I think the answer is an astounding yes.
This conversation about the amount we engage with internal experiences versus outward action actually reminded me of one of my favorite papers ever published: a 1993 Journal of Abnormal Psychology paper called "Effects of Changing Contingencies on the Behavior of Depressed and Non-Depressed Individuals" by Rosenfarb, Burker, Morris, and Cush.
This paper did something novel, at least for me. In some ways or another, it's been replicated quite a few times since then. The researchers had individuals take a psychometric evaluation to measure levels of depression—basically, to categorize their behavior as depressed or not depressed. Then they did a task on a computer where participants had to press a button, and a cursor moved for every so many presses. They were told to move the cursor from the upper right-hand corner of the screen to the lower left-hand corner by pressing buttons.
The underlying rule of how many button presses or which button to press would change without telling the participant. They'd be pressing, pressing, pressing—the cursor moving, moving, moving. Eventually, the cursor no longer moved with that button press, and they had to try pressing other buttons or pressing at a different rate. These were the changing contingencies—what we might call unsignaled contingency changes.
What they were analyzing was how long participants would keep pressing the button in the original way before they stopped and thought, "Hmm, maybe the rules have changed. Maybe I should try something else." It turned out that on both ends of the depression spectrum—those who tested as not depressed at all and those highly suffering from depression—we saw them continue to engage in this button pressing without considering that the rules might have changed.
It was only in the middle—neither very sensitive nor very insensitive—that individuals would press for a bit, notice the cursor wasn't moving, and then try something else. They regularly detected that contingency shift.
I find this paper fascinating in the context of sport performance because we can be both rather insensitive or overly sensitive to the sport contingencies—the rules of the game in the moment—and it doesn't guarantee that we're going to respond in an effective way.
When we're trying to conceptualize what's useful, it tends to be that learning to be sensitive to a certain degree—to notice how the game is going without over-focusing or over-ignoring—and being flexible with the fact that the rules of the game can change at any given moment (at least the underlying rules of the situation) is probably the most effective approach.
Whether we have lots of thoughts about that or very few thoughts doesn't matter as much as how we engage with those thoughts to produce useful behaviors. So, overthinkers just as much as underthinkers—as the coach frames it—both have places in high-performance sport. It's not about how frequently we have thoughts; it's about how we engage with them to produce effective action.