Flipping the Mind: How Hypnosis Helps Gymnasts Overcome the Twisties

While traditional therapy can take months, hypnosis may offer a faster resolution for certain athletes, preserving both safety and career longevity.

By: Ethan Lim Jean En

What Are Twisties?

“Twisties” is a term used in gymnastics and other aerial sports to describe a sudden loss of spatial awareness mid-air. The athlete becomes unable to accurately sense their body’s position in space, which can cause dangerous disorientation during complex aerial movements. While this phenomenon is rarely mentioned in medical literature, it gained public attention during the 2020 Olympic Games.

Psychological Causes

High-level athletes are particularly vulnerable to Twisties due to the extreme demands on body awareness and spatial self-recognition. High levels of stress and exposure traumatic events (getting disorientated in the air) often lead to the following:

• Dissociation (loss of awareness of one’s presence)

• Depersonalization (feeling detached from oneself)

• Derealisation (feeling detached from surroundings)

These traumatic events ingrain themselves in athletes’ psyches, impairing their cognition and functioning of certain brain regions when facing skills related to those traumatic events.

These involve brain regions such as the insula, precuneus, anterior cingulate, thalamus, and cerebellum

Symptoms

Athletes experiencing twisties may:

• Lose orientation mid-air.

• Be unable to complete practiced skills safely.

• Feel detached from their body or environment (D&D symptoms).

• Experience heightened anxiety about performing aerial elements.

• In sports like gymnastics, diving, and ski jumping, twisties can result in severe physical injury if the athlete lands incorrectly.

Hypnosis

In their research, Casiglia and Tikhonoff (2021) identified hypnosis as a potential therapeutic approach may improve symptoms within one or two sessions, if the cause is purely psychological and addressed effectively—especially for twisties with psychodynamic origins.

• Inducing and resolving D&D symptoms: Hypnosis can deliberately create and then dissolve dissociative states. Under guidance from a trained hypnotherapist, the athlete is brought into a relaxed, focused state.

• Age regression: Helps identify and process repressed trauma quickly. They mentally “revisit” a key past memory (e.g., a bad fall) in a safe, controlled way. This allows them to process the fear, reframe the event, and reduce its hold on current performance.

• Therapeutic suggestions: Reinforce body awareness and reduce the trauma’s pathogenic impact. For example: “You can feel your body’s position clearly in the air” or “Your movements are steady and controlled.”

Note: If you consider exploring hypnosis as a therapeutic option, be sure to seek guidance from trained professionals who adhere to strict ethical standards.

Twisties are a rare but serious issue in high-level gymnastics, blending elements of physical disorientation and psychological dissociation. While traditional therapy can take months, hypnosis may offer a faster resolution for certain athletes, preserving both safety and career longevity.

Reference: Casiglia, E., & Tikhonoff, V. (2021). “Twisties” and Olympic Games: A role for hypnosis in top-level athletes who have lost the sense of the self in aerial space? Psychology, 12, 1379-1383. https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2021.129086