Why Golf F#@ks With Your Brain

Ever wonder why you feel calm on the range but like you’re fighting for survival on the course? In this episode, we break down how golf hijacks your brain—from fight-or-flight reactions and perfectionism to obsessing over what everyone thinks.

Learn why golf feels so personal, why your nervous system goes haywire, and how to stop letting it mess with your head.

If you’re tired of finishing 18 holes feeling exhausted and frustrated, this one’s for you.

Tired of Underperforming? I'll walk you through the skills. Join me in YourMentalCaddy.com

Mastering Your Golf Brain - A Guide to Self-Coaching

Mastering Your Golf Brain - The Workbook

Mental Golf Journal - A Range for Your Brain

Are all available at KathyHartWood.com/book

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Website: KathyHartWood.com

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Mastering Your Golf Brain - A Guide to Self-Coaching

Mastering Your Golf Brain - The Workbook

Mental Golf Journal - A Range for Your Brain

Are all available at KathyHartWood.com/book

Email Kathy at Kathy@KathyHartWood.com

Website: KathyHartWood.com

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Above Par. I'm your host, Kathy Hartwood. I show you how to take more of your talent to the golf course without practicing harder, taking more lessons, or buying new equipment. I show you how to end the frustration of underperforming so you can start playing to your potential. This is where you are gonna learn how to think above par so you can play below par. Let's get to it. Hello, my golf friend. How are you? So I have a spicy episode for you today. It really goes back to the first episode I ever recorded, which is why golf is so mental. But I'm just gonna rephrase it and it's really about why golf F's with your brain. Do you feel that? Do you ever feel like what the heck is wrong with me?

unknown 0:51

Why?

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Why does golf mess with our brains so badly? So much. So randomly, I guess we could say. And you might feel like you're the calmest, most put-together person on the planet, and you walk on the golf course and you become this different person. Right? Your nervous system goes into high alert, you get frustrated, all of a sudden all these different characters that you never knew existed in you come out. You wonder what happened to you. What did golf do? Why is it effing with your brain so much? Well, today I'm gonna break it down for you on why this happens. And why your brain goes on red alert when you pull the driver out on the first tee, and there's a couple people standing out there watching you hit, why you suddenly care way too much why three strangers in khakis wearing a baseball cap care about your seven iron. Golf isn't just a test of your swing, it exposes and reveals your ability to manage your mind. It is a test on how fast you can manage your mind when everything feels so personal and permanent. So if you wondered why you can stripe it on the range, if would you just totally implode on the golf course while you finish 18 and feel like you need a nap and to isolate yourself for a week, or a therapist or a coach like me to help talk you through it, I'm gonna break it down for you in this episode. Okay, so the first way that golf acts with your brain is that your brain sees danger everywhere. It's the way it's designed. You go to the range and there's no danger, right? You can hit the ball wherever the heck you want. You can top it, you can miss it. There's no consequence. There's no out of bounds or water when you're out on the range. There's not a lot of people watching you. You have an endless supply of golf balls for the most part in front of you to get it right. But then we go on the golf course and your brain sees water and out of bounds and people and scores as danger. It puts you into fight or flight. Like literally, it puts you into fight or flight, and your nervous system gets all jacked up. And so that person who on the range that I call calm or certain or confident disappears. And now you're dealing with all these emotions of pressure and stress and anxiety and fear, and your nervous system is all wired and you can't think clearly. And you're like, where did I go? Where's my swing? Where were those great drives that I just hit? Our brains are designed to keep us safe and keep us alive as a species. So if it perceives danger, it's gonna put us into high alert. Now, granted, you're not gonna die playing golf on the first hole. There's not tigers that are going to eat you alive, right? There's not predators out there. You're not gonna run out of food the way that we are designed to go into fight or flight when we think that's gonna happen. But your brain perceives social pain and emotional pain as if it was life-threatening. So if you go out on the golf course on the first tea and all of a sudden you see out of bounds and water, and that's gonna create a lot of emotional pain for you or social pain for you, you go into fight or flight. Your brain Fs with you just a little bit. All right, the second way that golf feels like it messes with your brain is that off of the golf course, if you aren't having a great day, or if you're in a place where you're a little down, or you're angry, or you're disappointed, or if you have fear, you have lots of time to deal with it. You can go get a glass of wine and sit outside and relax. You can do some shopping on Amazon, you can call a friend and talk to them, you can just sit there and wait until it passes. Whatever you do, you've learned a way to deal with all those emotions off the golf course. You could avoid them totally. Just like I'm not gonna put myself in a situation where I'm gonna have all those different emotions. But guess what? On the golf course, you don't have time. It's your turn to hit, especially if you topped it. You're up. You can't sit there and go, I'm I'm still pissed off. Can you give me a couple minutes? I need to call Kathy. Like, no, you gotta hit. It's your turn. But you're still reeling from the last shot that you just missed, or you're reeling from the six or the eight you made on the hole before, and you know it's not going to serve you if you swing from that place, but you don't know the skills on how to process it quickly enough for the game of golf. Even though golf is a slow sport where we have lots of time to think, we don't have a lot of time to process our emotions when it's our turn to hit. Especially if we don't own that skill. So I say that golf has a tendency to rip the band-aid off and expose our ability to manage our mind. We're off the course, we can dilute it, we can avoid it, we can buffer through it. We don't have many options when they're out there playing golf. So the third thing that I say this phrase all the time is how you do one thing, you do everything, which means you bring your brain with you to the golf course. So if you have tendencies off of the golf course, like perfectionism or people pleasing, or you have social anxiety, or you have a fear of failure, or maybe impatience, or judgment, or fear of judgment, or worrying about what other people think, you bring that with you to the golf course. And you're forced to deal with it. Off of the golf course, you might be able to get work your way around it, but on the golf course, it is there in your face for you to deal with. Pokes its head up and it doesn't serve you and create the results that you want. Golf is like a giant mirror. Whatever is lurking there shows up on the golf course, it'll surface. So if you think that you need to do things perfectly or you don't like how it feels if you make a mistake, golf, which is a game of misses, is going to expose that to you. And it's become really raw and feel very palpable out on the golf course. The fourth thing is that it's just you. There's no team, there's no escape. Golf for the most part, even though you can have a partner, is basically a solo job, a solo sport. We can't blame a ref, you can't blame teammates. Your performance is fully exposed. So it exposes you, it becomes very vulnerable, and it creates that breeding ground for disappointment and embarrassment that you gotta manage. And you don't get to manage it just for a blip of a moment. You've got four to five hours to deal with it. The other way that golf messes with your brain is that your brain loves certainty. It wants to control things, it wants to know that it has safety. And golf is full of uncertainty. And especially if you're a person who loves to have control, there are so many things in golf that you cannot control. You can't control the weather, you can't control your playing partners, you can't control course conditions or the pace of play or words that people say or bounces or good luck or bad luck or lies, aerated greens, the wind stopping, the wind blowing. You can't control any of that. You can't control scores that other people shoot. You gotta manage all that. We like to argue with it. Like my ball shouldn't have been in the bunker, I shouldn't have hit that shot. The wind stopped blowing. I can't believe it started raining on me on number seven. I was doing great until it came to a screeching halt. There are three groups on one T. Your brain just can fixate on controlling things that aren't controllable to feel safe. And it doesn't serve you, messes with you. There's a lot of stuff going on in your head. It's a distraction from the things that you actually can control, which is basically your thoughts and your emotions and your own personal pace of play, your course management, and your pre-shot routine. That's about it. You can't even control the number that you shoot. Messes with your head. Another thing that can be very challenging about the game of golf is you are in a container with three other people, let's say you're playing in a foursome, for four to five hours, and you may or may not know these people, and you are forced to have social interactions with them and manage other people. There is no escaping that while you're trying to manage yourself. So if this is a challenge for you, it's another thing to layer on trying to play this game of golf, is managing other people. You gotta get really good at it. And if you're not very good at it off of the golf course, you are not gonna be very good at it on the golf course, especially if you start getting irritated and frustrated because your game isn't showing up. Another way that golf messes with you is that it's a game of opposites.

unknown 8:38

Right?

SPEAKER_00 8:38

You gotta hit down on an iron to make the ball go up. The harder you swing, sometimes the shorter it goes, the harder you try, the worse you do, the more you practice doesn't necessarily directly correlate to your results. And so if you're a high achiever, if you're someone who has put in a lot of effort into other areas of your life and seen a direct correlation between that and your results, golf will f with your brain. Because we don't always get those results. So what happens is that we end up going to the range thinking, I'll just practice harder, I'll work harder, I'll get it. And then you become obsessed with practicing and your mechanics, track band, and numbers. You become exhausted with it. Thinking, what is wrong? Why doesn't this work? It works in my job, it worked in other sports, it works in every other area of my life. The more I put in, the more I get out. Golf's opposite of that, and that Fs with your brain. So, bottom line, golf is a perfect game for mental chaos to just F with you. It's slow, it's social, it's solitary, right? Which is actually kind of weird. While it's social, it's also solitary, it's uncertain and it feels so personal. And that's why it can feel so hard. That's why it feels like golf is Fing with your brain. But it's actually why it's such a powerful tool for your growth, for your self-growth, for your personal growth. If you are noticing all the different ways that you just have a human brain interacting with the game of golf and exposing areas for you to do some work. And in that, you could actually start enjoying the process of getting better at the game of golf. Because if you are going about and noticing all these things, the way that your brain, your human brain, everybody's brain is dealing with the game of golf and you are knocking them off and learning how to manage it, you're able to take that out with you off of the golf course. And things will start shifting out there too. If you want to get curious, if you want to be self-aware, and if you want to do the work. And if you do, I hope you join me inside your mental caddy where I'll show you all the ways to get this done. Just go to yourmentalcaddy.com and get started today. All right, my friends, have a beautiful week, and I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Bye.