NHL Goalie Devin Cooley on the Subconscious Mind: Overthinking, Confidence and Playing Free
“My Conscious Brain Is Really Bad at Playing Goalie”: What an NHL Goalie Teaches Us About Overthinking, Confidence and Playing Free
Every so often an athlete says something in a post-game interview that sounds like a joke and turns out to be one of the wisest things you’ll hear all season.
Calgary Flames goalie Devin Cooley did exactly that this month. After stopping 34 of 36 shots in a 3-2 win over the defending Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes, he was asked how he felt. His answer was that he felt nothing. Then he explained that when he starts having too much fun, he slips from an unconscious goalie into a conscious one, and “my conscious brain is really bad at playing goalie.” Oct 19, 2026 8:07 PM +2
People laughed. I nodded.
As a Registered Clinical Counsellor, former elite hockey player, and mental performance specialist who has worked with athletes from youth hockey to the NHL, PWHL, and Olympic level, I hear versions of that sentence in my office every week. Cooley just said it better than most sports psychology textbooks.
When Thinking Gets in the Way of Sports Performance
Cooley’s point is simple. He believes every second spent thinking about yourself is a second you’re distracted from what’s in front of you, and that the game moves too fast to let the conscious brain decide. When he’s stuck in that thinking mode, he says he can’t react in time, falls behind the play, and the goals start piling up. thehockeynewsgolfdigest
That’s overthinking. And it’s one of the most common drivers of performance anxiety I see in hockey players and athletes across every sport.
But overthinking isn’t only a sports problem. It’s the student who freezes on an exam they studied for. The employee who rehearses a meeting so many times they stumble through it. The teen replaying one awkward moment from lunch all night. The hockey parent lying awake running through every “what if” before tryouts.
Our conscious mind is wonderful for planning, learning, and reflecting. It is not built to handle a puck coming at 90 miles an hour, and it’s not great at managing anxiety in real time either. When we try to control every moment by thinking harder, we usually get slower, tighter, and more anxious. That’s the opposite of flow state.
The Subconscious Mind and Flow State
What Cooley is describing has a name in sports psychology: flow state, or being “in the zone.” It’s when skills you’ve repeated thousands of times run on their own, without the conscious mind interrupting. Athletes describe it as playing free. Time slows down, decisions feel automatic, and composure comes naturally.
You can’t force flow. But you can stop blocking it. And the biggest block is usually a busy, critical, overthinking mind.
“The Past Is Dead”: Letting Go of Mistakes
Cooley also said something I’d love every young athlete to hear: “The past is dead, there’s nothing for you there.” thehockeynews
In counselling, we’d frame that a little more gently, but the heart of it is true. Rumination, replaying mistakes over and over, keeps us stuck. It feels productive, but mostly it keeps the nervous system on high alert and chips away at confidence.
I learned this firsthand as a player at Shattuck-St. Mary’s, where we won two USA Hockey national championships, and later as an NCAA Division I athlete at Ohio State. Hockey, like life, is a game of mistakes. The goal isn’t to never make one. It’s to let it go fast enough that it doesn’t become five more. That’s composure, and composure is what builds consistency.
Trust the Work You’ve Already Done
Here’s the part that matters most for young athletes, and for anyone who struggles with anxiety. Playing “unconsciously” doesn’t mean not caring or not preparing. It means you did the thinking ahead of time, so you can trust yourself in the moment.
For a goalie, practice is where the conscious brain belongs. That’s where you work with intention: hands out, staying square, tracking, depth. In a game, those same cues become noise. When the puck crosses the blue line, the work is already done. Trust it.
The same is true off the ice. We do our thinking work in calm moments, in counselling, journaling, visualization, and honest conversations with people we trust. Then when the hard moment comes, we lean on what we’ve practised instead of trying to solve everything on the spot.
Sports Psychology Strategies to Quiet an Overthinking Mind
If you or your athlete tend to overthink, start with these mental skills:
Do your reflecting when you’re calm, not in the middle of competition or stress. Use visualization and mental imagery before games, picturing three specific plays going well, then let them go. Pick one simple cue word, like “next” or “see it,” to bring your focus back to what’s in front of you. Use a slow breath out, in for four and out for six, to tell your body the moment is over. And notice when you’re narrating yourself instead of experiencing what’s actually happening.
These are the same tools I use with youth, AAA, junior, NCAA, and professional athletes, and they work just as well in a classroom or a boardroom.
When Overthinking Becomes More Than a Performance Problem
Sometimes overthinking is more than a slump. If worry is affecting sleep, school, relationships, or the joy your athlete used to feel in their sport, it’s worth talking about. Athlete mental health and sports performance are deeply connected. You can’t separate the person from the player.
Our team at Alive Counselling supports athletes, teens, and families in Kelowna and online throughout BC. And for athletes who want to work specifically on confidence, consistency, composure, and playing free, w offer online mental performance and hockey mindset coaching for athletes across Canada and the US.
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