Rory McIlroy reveals key skill for managing on-course nerves<\/a><\/p>\nThis is why the most challenging golf conditions are not the kind featuring wind or rain, but self-doubt and panic. The presence of stress on its own isn\u2019t the issue for golfers. The real trouble starts when we interpret it to mean something is wrong.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome people get stressed about the idea of being stressed,\u201d said Dr Jeremy Jamieson, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and a leading authority on stress. \u201cLike that the only way I can do well is if I get rid of this stress. And so now you\u2019re spending time, you\u2019re spending energy, spending resources on just trying to get rid of your stress response when you don\u2019t need to. It\u2019s something that\u2019s there to help you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two similar golf shots triggering vastly different reactions is a reflection of our intricate stress systems, which we explore in our most recent \u201cMind Games\u201d video [below]. This is where nerves come from, but golfers commonly interpret the sensation as misplaced. We can accept the need for a \u201cfight or flight\u201d response \u2013 racing heart, sweaty palms \u2013 when being chased by a bear. But why do we feel the same thing when simply trying to save par?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
As Jamieson says, the reaction traces to an earlier era, when a heightened sense of danger primed our bodies to protect against threats. \u200a\u201dWe\u2019re kind of catching up still in the evolution,\u201d he said. Maybe golf isn\u2019t about survival, yet our brains still recognise something important is at stake.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur greatest need as humans is to be loved and accepted, and we have an ego that\u2019s always threatened, always comparing, never satisfied,\u201d said Jim Murphy,\u00a0a performance coach and author\u00a0who works with a number of tour players. \u201cThe fear is that if I miss this putt, if I perform poorly and get a bad score, then I\u2019m gonna get rejected, which is our greatest fear.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s only when golfers understand why this anxiety surfaces that they can develop strategies on how to respond, the most important being accepting nerves versus trying to suppress them. The temptation is to want those unpleasant feelings to disappear. But when we resist against a core human instinct, we tend to make things worse, because the signal we\u2019re sending our bodies is we\u2019re overmatched.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour stress response is about taking care of that thing that could harm you,\u201d Jamieson says. \u201cBut if we feel like we\u2019re worried about something, like, \u2018I can\u2019t handle this,\u2019 or \u2018I don\u2019t have the ability to take on this challenge,\u2019 we\u2019re just telling our bodies like, \u2018Hey, I don\u2019t have the resources to address this demand.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Think about how often this happens: you\u2019re playing a match and the hole is over, but just for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":497663,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[4225,64,63,250457,755,138747,36416,250458,250459,16949,85],"class_list":["post-497662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-article","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-dr-jeremy-jamieson","tag-golf","tag-golf-digest","tag-how-to","tag-instincts","tag-jim-murphy","tag-nerves","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497662\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}