Simone Biles withdrew from several finals at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 after losing the ability to track where her body was in the air. She described not knowing where she was mid-twist and hoping to land on her feet, and said publicly that she did not think people realised how dangerous that was on a competition surface. [cbs-2021-biles]
What the twisties actually is
It is a gymnastics term for a temporary loss of the automatic spatial awareness that skilled aerial movement runs on. The skill has not been forgotten, the strength and technique are intact, and the gymnast can often perform simpler versions of the same movement. What stops working is the unconscious tracking that tells them where they are without having to think about it.
In most activities that would be a performance problem. In a sport where a mistimed twist means landing on your head from height, it is a physical danger. This is the distinction that most of the commentary at the time missed, and it is the reason her own framing was about safety rather than about nerves.
Why stopping was the informed decision
The public argument treated withdrawal as a failure of nerve at the decisive moment. The person with the actual information described something different: a specific, identifiable loss of a capacity that her safety depended on, occurring in a discipline with no margin for it.
She also said the episode led to therapy that she remained in afterwards, and that gymnasts are not generally viewed as people who have weaknesses. [cbs-2021-biles] That last observation is the more transferable one, because the assumption it names is not confined to gymnastics.
The mechanism, outside sport
The general pattern is well described: a well-learned skill runs automatically until sustained pressure directs conscious attention onto it, and conscious monitoring of an automatic process degrades that process. Musicians lose passages they have played for years. Drivers suddenly have to think about a manoeuvre they have not thought about in a decade. Speakers lose a rehearsed opening.
Prolonged pressure is the background condition rather than an incidental detail. The physiological load of sustained stress has broad effects on regulation and cognition, which is one reason these failures cluster at the end of long, high-demand periods rather than arriving at random. [mcewen-1998-allostatic]
Is something automatic becoming effortful?
For anything you normally do without thinking: driving, playing, presenting, a physical skill.
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This is well established, and the avoidance in particular tends to entrench it. If the activity carries any physical risk, stopping is the first step rather than the last. Sustained poor sleep alongside it is worth taking to a doctor.
Several features fit, particularly if trying harder is making it worse. That combination is the signature, and it responds better to reducing load and rebuilding from a simpler version than to more repetitions of the failing one.
Little here matches the loss of automaticity this article describes. An ordinary bad run at something is a different thing and usually resolves on its own.
A reflection prompt, not a clinical measure of anything.
What actually helps
Pushing through is the instinct and it is the wrong move, particularly where the failure carries physical risk. Repeating a skill that is currently unsafe accumulates failed attempts, which strengthens exactly the conscious monitoring that broke it.
What is generally recommended instead is dropping back to a version of the skill simple enough to execute without attention, and rebuilding upward from there. Reducing the surrounding load matters as much as the technical work, since sustained pressure is part of what produced the problem and leaving it in place tends to reproduce it.
And where the stakes are physical, stopping is not the last resort. It is the first step, and the fact that it reads as a failure of nerve from outside is a fact about the audience rather than about the decision.
When to seek help
Speak to a doctor if a skill you rely on for work has become unreliable and it is not recovering, if you are avoiding situations because of it, or if it arrived alongside weeks of poor sleep, low mood or anxiety. Bring the specifics of when it started and what makes it worse, because the pattern around it is what distinguishes this from ordinary variation in performance.
How MyFreud can help
Tracking sleep and pressure alongside the days the skill worked and the days it did not is usually the fastest way to see that it is not random, and load is the part you can change. Our stress guide covers what sustained pressure does, including physical symptoms of stress.
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