Golf is full of distractions.
In this episode I want to go through two scientifically proven ways you can improve your attention span and equip you with tools to use while you’re on the course and give you the best chance to play well for a whole round, not just part of one.
In 2013, the USGA did a study on the average length of a round of golf. On weekdays it takes an average of about 4 hours, and on weekends it’s an average of 4 and a half hours. Compare that to studies that show the average attention span of an adult is around 47 seconds to focus on one single thing. So how can we expect to focus for an entire round of golf?
We live in a distracted time. Our attention is constantly challenged by all of the easy distractions around us. We can often get what we want almost instantly.
When we scroll social media, if we don’t like something within a second or two we can scroll to the next thing to see if we like that thing more. A lot of people won’t make it more than 30 seconds into this episode before clicking to the next thing.
Something I often say is “Everything is training.” Everything you do trains your brain to either do more or less of that thing in the future. When we do things that don’t require sustained focus, we’re training our attention span to be shorter and shorter. And we’re training ourselves to need more and more of those quick hits of dopamine to continue to stay “high” on the experience. The more we get, the more we need.
The toughest part about this for us is that while our attention spans are getting shorter, the length of a round of golf isn’t. And in fact, most of our experiences are showing us that rounds of golf are taking longer, with courses being more crowded, and newer, less-skilled golfers filling those golf courses. So the need for a long attention span is getting higher, while the actual span of our attention is getting shorter. This is obviously a losing battle.
Why is focus important?
So why is focus important in the first place? Because being present is important. Think of these two scenarios—both where you’re about to hit a golf shot:
1. In one of the scenarios, you’re thinking about the strategy of what you have to do, the type of motion you’ll have to perform to hit a good one, and are intently focused on the task at hand.
2. In the other scenario, you’re thinking about past shots and your future score and what other people are potentially thinking about you, how quickly you need to hit this shot so you can get over to the beverage cart, etc.
Which of those two will give you a better chance to hit a good one? Hopefully this line of questioning seems obvious to you.
Decision Fatigue
Another thing working against us in this attention span battle is what’s called “decision fatigue”. You can think of it like this: Every day, our decision-making meter starts at 100%. But every decision we make decreases that meter. Small decisions, like what to wear to work in the morning, decrease it just a little. Weighty decisions like choosing what team member would be best suited to work on this project decrease it a lot.
In golf, little decisions like driver or 3 wood on a wide open par 5 are easy, but still decrease it a little. Decisions with more gray area and higher consequence decrease it more, like choosing between 3 wedges and what trajectory and what landing spot and what slope and break to account for and how far to hit it so you don’t roll off the back into the hazard.
And with that decreasing decision meter, it gets lower and lower throughout the day, and takes a hit when you get physically fatigued, malnourished, or dehydrated. All of these things play a role in lowering our ability to focus, and incidentally they all are factors that happen during a round of golf. A round of golf is full of gray area decisions, can be physically taxing, can be a tough environment to stay nourished and hydrated, and can last a long time. So your focus gets lower and lower as you get deeper into the round. Aka- your focusing ability tends to be lower on the 18th hole than it was on the first hole.
Distracting Ourselves on Purpose
And I want to address another form of distraction that we encounter as golfers. This is what I would call “intentional distraction”. Distracting yourself on purpose.
There’s a proliferation of mental game advice out there that would tell you if you’re having negative thoughts, or you’re nervous, or you feel some pressure, that distracting yourself away from the thoughts will alleviate the feeling.
I can see where this advice is coming from. I’m having this thought, I don’t like this thought, so I’m going to inject another thought in its place and just think about that instead. Sounds like it would work.
But the problem is, as Raymond Prior says in his book Golf Beneath the Surface,
“Distraction is just another way of saying ‘avoidance’…and trying to avoid our inner experience—especially unpleasant thoughts and feelings—doesn’t work and usually makes things worse.” p. 88
So those techniques that some might suggest, like singing a song in your head or counting or thinking happy thoughts, all sound good, but they actually just add to the problem. Because you’re essentially telling yourself that thoughts are bad and need to be avoided, which creates an internal battle any time you think. And now you’ve got the thoughts of trying to hit a good shot, and your nervous thoughts, and Wonderwall by Oasis all piled up in your head. So those intentional distractions are really just… distractions. Not exactly a great strategy to rely on.
The Challenge
So our challenge is set up for us:
So how can we fight this battle?
We are going to go through two ways we can face these challenges and give ourselves the best chance to play well throughout an entire round of golf. One is off-course, and one is on-course.
Two Ways to Improve Focus
Let’s start off-course. Our off course exercise is meditation. There are thousands of studies on the value of meditation, and increasing our ability to focus is just one of those benefits. The actual exercise of a basic meditation makes this clear: sit in a quiet environment, close your eyes, bring your focus to your breath, notice when your attention leaves your breath, then bring your focus back to your breath. And do this for 5-10 minutes.
This sounds pretty easy and maybe even oversimplified, but if you’ve never tried it before, it’s way harder than it sounds. Our brains are fast and powerful, so when there’s a void, our brains will fill it. And when we’re sitting in a non-distracting environment, there’s nothing but void to fill. So our brains will inject all sorts of thoughts.
But the act of noticing the drifting of our attention, and focusing on one singular thing like our breath, exercises our attention span muscle. Over time, we can get better and better at holding our attention on that one thing.
The value of this for golf is clear. We really only need to focus for about 2 minutes at a time during a round of golf. Each golf shot has that couple of minutes where we’re choosing the shot we want to hit, and then the pre-shot routine, and then hitting the shot, and then a post-shot routine. That truly isn’t a long amount of time. But that time can have a lot of opportunity for other thoughts to pop in, or our minds will tend to wander to other places in time and space. And because our brains hate a void, it will be filled as quickly as possible, if we haven’t trained it to stay focused on what we want.
Research shows that doing meditation like we’ve described for about 5-10 minutes a day for 30 days has a huge effect on the physical structure of our brain. Just like working out grows the physical size of our muscles, meditation changes our physical capacity for focus. You can look at meditation as “range balls for your brain”.
So here’s a really simple meditation you can start doing right away:
So that’s our off-course exercise.
Habit-mapping
Our on-course exercise for focus is called habit-mapping, which is an idea I first heard from author and neuroscientist Judson Brewer in his books *The Craving Mind* and *Unwinding Anxiety*. What we’re going to do is track our common habit loops we get into. Habits are made up of three steps: trigger→behavior→reward
This is the cycle that we go through that creates habits. The trigger is the environmental cue (like making a birdie which means you’ve got a good round going). The behavior is the actual habit you do as a result of that trigger (like fast forwarding in your head and counting your score and how you’ll need to play to finish off the good round). And the reward (aka the result of the habit) is what you get from doing the habit (like feeling like we’re doing something to make the good round happen). So if the habit we’re trying to look out for is distraction, then we need to see what triggers the behavior of distraction, and then what reward we get for being distracted.
So what are some common triggers that can cause distraction? What things in our environment can distract us? Things like sights and noises can be “overt” distractions—distractions that are very obvious. But more “covert” distractions that are less obvious can be things like thoughts of score, thoughts of bad shots, thoughts of other people, thoughts of past and future. These all serve as triggers for being distracted.
But why do we get distracted? If we know it’s unhelpful, why do we still do it? Because of the reward it gives us. Or at least the reward we think it gives us. Being distracted isn’t all bad. It can serve a physical safety purpose. If we hear a noise, being distracted by it can help us survive whatever made the noise. Which can be helpful when we’re in a life or death situation.
But the golf course isn’t exactly a life or death situation. So there’s no real helpfulness for being on edge about noises and getting distracted by them on the course (other than the occasional fore! from a neighboring hole).
But what about the more subtle, covert distractions, like thoughts? How is it rewarding to think about past bad shots, or future score, or other people? What purpose could those thoughts serve? What I’ve noticed is when I think about these things is it can feel like I’m doing something about them. Being anxious about something I don’t really want to do in the future feels like I’m doing something to fix it. I’ve done a few public speeches in my life, and I get anxious about how it might go. That anxiety feels like a version of caring about it and working on it, but it’s not actually doing anything other than making the present less enjoyable, and what it’s actually doing is distracting me from what’s important in the present.
How can Habit Mapping Help?
So what is habit mapping? How can it help me focus better on the course? When we’re on the course, and we get in the situation that triggers us, this is our time to map the habit. We first catch the trigger. It could be something like making birdie on the 11th hole to get you on pace to breaking 80 for the first time. You know this can be a trigger for you, so you notice it.
Then the next step in the habit cycle is the behavior itself, which in our case is a distraction from the present. You notice the urge for your mind to go into the future and start thinking about total score. And I think we should run this like an actual experiment. For purpose of this experiment I want you to let yourself get distracted, just so you can observe it. And then you can see clearly the reward you get from thinking about future score. I want you to notice two things about the reward: what you think you’re getting as a reward, and what you’re actually getting as a reward for the behavior.
There’s a key difference here. When you worry about the future, you think you’re doing something about it, but you’re actually just getting distracted. Noticing both of these is key to unwinding the habit. By showing your brain what you’re actually getting from doing the habit, you prove the unhelpfulness of the behavior to your brain, making it a less attractive activity to do in the future. The research found that doing this process enough will eventually get you to where you just don’t want to do it anymore.
Again, I’ll point you to Judson Brewer’s books and research if you want more on this concept of habit mapping and changing habits. Not golf-specific, but then again psychology isn’t golf specific. Golf is just one of the things we do with our psychology.
So we’ve got our two-pronged plan for staying focused throughout an entire round of golf: 1. Off-course meditation, and 2. On-course habit mapping. The combo of these two will ensure we are systematically addressing our tendency to get distracted, and building the mental strength and skills to combat the distraction and stay more focused to the very end of the round.