Last week, multiple people sent me the same viral video clip, understandable given how closely the subject aligned with my interests.
The video was an interview with a hockey player (my other favorite sport) on the psychology of performance (my favorite subject). When describing his 34-save effort to beat the reigning Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes on Sunday, Calgary Flames goalie Devin Cooley cited quieting his mind under pressure. “I have to let my unconscious brain do the work, because it reacts a lot quicker,” Cooley said. “When I’m having too much fun, and I’m smiling and I’m talking to everybody and I’m hanging out, what happens is that shifts me into a more conscious-brain goalie. Then I can’t react in time, I’m slow, I’m behind the play, and then I give up seven goals.”
The clip took off for several reasons, starting with how honest and informed a hockey player sounded on such a cerebral topic. Most non-hockey fans are surprised when players have teeth, but Cooley used words like dopamine and serotonin, and was candid about how easy it is to get in his own way under pressure.
Over years bouncing between the two sports, I’ve always noted how playing goalie is the closest experience to playing golf. Like golfers, goalies seek to limit mistakes and have a short memory. While regular skaters play hockey at a frenetic pace, goalies have to find ways to fight overthinking during idle moments. At every hockey game, you can tell who the goalie parents are, because they wear the same expression as anyone who’s watched their kid play golf.
When Cooley referenced tapping into his “unconscious brain,” he was describing what is commonly referred to as “flow.” Golfers talk about flow, too, and you can probably think of examples where you’ve experienced a version. Flow is when the game feels simple, and the mind is uncluttered. In a video last year, I talked about Tiger Woods’ 12-shot win in the 1997 Masters as an example of the game coming easier than usual, even for him.
The opposite of a flow state is what Cooley means when talking about games in which he feels slow and gives up seven goals. Dr. Jeremy Jamieson, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who specializes in stress research, says in sports like hockey or golf, athletes develop a specific “proceduralized motion” that can break down when focusing too much attention on one part. The more thought, the greater the disruption to the movement.
“This is why people do things a long time, to sort of get that sort of repetitive knowledge about procedural movement, but thinking can degrade that,” Jamieson said. “Even with the best intentions of trying to execute something well, it can actually lead to some negative outcomes.”
There’s little question that a flow state can help performance. Yet as Cooley and others have referenced, that doesn’t mean you can enter it on command. If anything, experts have noted that chasing flow can be counterproductive, because on days when your mind is unusually active, you’re signaling you can’t adapt.
“If we promise ourselves that we have to be in flow in order to compete, what we do is we undercut our competitive capacity,” sports psychologist Dr. Bhrett McCabe said. “Why would we ever want to take that away from ourselves as competitors?”
In the absence of perfect clarity in these moments, performance experts usually advocate tactics that at least channel focus more constructively. This is why so many athletes talk about focusing on their breath, or fixing their gaze on the horizon, even wiggling their toes. Some of this is because of what it can do in terms of calming your nervous system. But it’s also about what your brain is not doing: by focusing on something like your breath or your toes, you’re not thinking about the importance of sinking a putt or stopping a puck. Whether on ice or grass, thinking helps only up to a point.
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