Devin Cooley picked a good night to give the most interesting postgame interview of the young NHL season. The Calgary Flames goaltender stopped 34 shots in a 3-2 win over the reigning Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes on Sunday, then told reporters that his conscious mind is essentially the enemy of his job.
“Every second that you spend thinking about yourself through your conscious brain, it distracts you from what’s happening out in front of you,” Cooley said, according to an account of the interview published by Sport & State, the outlet founded by Clay Travis.
Cooley, 29, described training himself to “stop thinking” during games β letting his subconscious take the wheel rather than steering through fun, fear or the emotions of the moment. The clip spread quickly online, with at least one prominent hockey account calling him possibly the best interview in pro sports right now. (In the video he said “unconscious brain,” then clarified he meant subconscious β a distinction that, as Sport & State noted, otherwise would have meant he’d passed out on the ice.)
A Different Kind of Pro Athlete
Cooley’s background makes the answer feel less like a quirk and more like a worldview. The California native studies linear algebra for fun and keeps a pet rabbit named Tito. According to one former college classmate posting on X, he spent free time during undergrad building an AI-backed natural language processing tool aimed at predicting stock price movements.
That profile β a 6-foot-5 goalie who started playing the position at age 5 and dabbles in quantitative finance β is exactly the kind of person who would interrogate how his own mind works under pressure.
And that question, as Sport & State frames it, isn’t unique to hockey: What if the conscious mind is what keeps athletes from reaching their best?
Thousands of Hours, Then the Brain Interferes
The premise is familiar to anyone who has missed a short putt or bricked a free throw. The harder you think about a movement you’ve practiced ten thousand times, the worse it tends to go.
Denise Shull, a performance coach who works with elite athletes and hedge fund managers, told Sport & State the core challenge is simple: “If you’re a professional athlete, you’ve spent your whole life learning how to do your thing. The challenge is getting out of your own way.”
Shull runs The ReThink Group and draws on neuroeconomics and modern psychoanalysis; she also helped inspire the Wendy Rhoades character on Showtime’s Billions. She argues that much of conventional sports psychology β think positive, visualize success, keep a short memory β gets the emotional equation backwards.
“It’s just not that realistic to expect anyone to be able to block out the so-called negative feelings,” she said. Suppressing discomfort, in her view, is what lands athletes in trouble. “When you can identify and accept what you’re feeling, the intensity of the feeling tends to dissipate. But if you tell yourself not to feel a certain way, it usually gets worse.”
Her framework treats emotions as data: frustration signals something needs correcting, fear flags risk, disappointment marks the gap between expectation and result. Process the information, then move on. Applied to Cooley, Shull suggested his postgame emotional flood is simply how he handles the input β and that his in-game approach “probably allows him to play in a flow state.”
The Physics of Not Thinking
The case for instinct in the crease is partly arithmetic. A 90-mph slapshot covers the distance from stick to net in roughly 0.4 seconds. There is no time to consciously read the trajectory, account for traffic and select a response. The only option is pattern recognition built over years β what psychologists call automaticity.
The same principle shows up everywhere high stakes meet trained skill: returning a serve, reading a blitz, hitting a baseball. Deliberate thought belongs in practice, where technique gets built and corrected. In competition, extra attention to detail can unravel the whole mechanism. Musicians improvise without directing every finger; surgeons lock out the world during hours-long operations.
None of this makes intuition infallible, and Shull isn’t arguing analysis never helps. The skill is knowing which mode a moment calls for.
That’s the lesson Sport & State draws from Cooley’s viral answer. There’s a time to study and prepare, and a time to trust the preparation. When a puck is coming at your face at 90 miles per hour, there’s no room to be anything but in the way.
Source: www.dailywire.com β https://www.dailywire.com/news/is-your-brain-holding-you-back-how-elite-athletes-unlock-peak-performance