On this episode we talk about anger.
Anger is basically synonymous with golf. I’ve never met a golfer who didn’t get angry at some point, let alone every round. I do, and I’m sure you do.
But I want to go through some reasons why anger should be avoided. Why it’s actively bad to get angry. I actually learned a thing or two in researching this, so I’m confident you’ll learn something.
On today’s episode we’re going to be talking about anger. Anger is almost synonomous with golf. I’ve never met a golfer who didn’t get angry at some point, let alone every round. I do, and I’m sure you do. But I want to go through some reasons why anger should be avoided. Why it’s actively bad to get angry. I actually learned a thing or two in researching this so it helped me too.
Have you ever played an important round of golf where you knew you had to get off to a good start in order to do well? Maybe you’re playing against a player who you know is a little better than you, but if you can just start strong then you will get the mental edge on them and build the momentum and take them down. Or maybe you’re playing a tournament and you’re a few shots back going into the final round, playing in the final group. If you start out with a couple birdies early on, the tables could turn and you now have the upper hand.
It’s the morning of the final round of the club championship. You’ve played well so far, sitting only 3 shots back going into the final round. You’re playing in the final group, and you know the player who’s leading. He’s a good player, but you’ve beat them before. You know that if you start out with a couple birdies early on, the tables could turn and you now have the upper hand.
It’s your tee time now. You step up on that first tee knowing this needs to be a good one, because if you start off with a bad tee shot it’ll show how anxious you are and how much pressure you’re putting on yourself, not to mention make the potential bad start more likely.
You get over the ball, and all you can think is “don’t screw this up.” So you make a really guidey swing, but you survive and get the ball out there in the fairway. It didn’t go very far because the tight swing caused a pretty bad miss-hit. You’ve left yourself a really long approach shot, while the leader seemed completely unfazed and smashed one down the middle. Now you know you have to hit this one good or you will really be putting yourself at an even deeper disadvantage. This pressure again makes you try extra hard on the shot, which leads to you getting in your head and you hit another bad one, but this time it doesn’t get so lucky. It finds the pond to the left of the green.
You’re mad, but you try to keep it all in and you go up and take your drop and you make a good bogey, and the leader makes par. The damage was limited, and you’re only 4 shots back going into the second hole. This high tension stressful golf continues on for the next several holes, leading to every time you have a significantly difficult shot the pressure gets to you and you hit some really squirrelly shots, and your anger is sitting right below the surface.
Eventually, you just can’t keep it in any longer. You hit another defensive shot, it catches a tree limb, and kicks hard into a hazard. That does it. You’re full on angry now, and it comes out. Whether you snap a club, let out some expletives, or simply just internally boil in your rage, you’re full on angry, and the rest of the round is affected by it. You implode the rest of your round and end up finishing outside the top 10.
Most of us see this kind of example (or we live this kind of example) and think that the final bout of anger is what did this player in. They kept it together so well, but when they finally let it boil over that’s when things unravelled.
But what the research shows is that where the player went wrong was much earlier in the round. Even the early frustrated responses weren’t the issue. It was how the player managed the stress they were experiencing that started the dominos falling, to the point where eventually they couldn’t contain it anymore.
I’m going to to take you through three ways to work on this, but first we need to understand why stress causes anger, which causes bad golf shots.
As we love to do on this podcast, let’s get neurological. When you’re stressed, your body does two things: it releases catecholamines, and it creates adrenocortical arousal. Examples of these are hormones like dopamine or adrenaline. Both of these combine to be that fight or flight, ready for action, blood pumping, heart racing feeling. It’s the feeling you get when someone cuts you off in traffic, or you get in a heated argument with someone, or for our purposes you’re about to play a deeply consequential round of golf. Another word for this is endangerment. Aka, you feel like you’re under threat. From the book Emotional Intelligence: Endangerment can be signaled not just by an outright physical threat but also, as is more often the case, by a symbolic threat to self-esteem or dignity: being treated unjustly or rudely, being insulted or demeaned, [or one that’s particularly relevant for us] being frustrated in pursuing an important goal.
So when you’re playing golf, and you have a goal of playing well and winning a tournament (or winning that league match, or beating your opponent, or closing out a major championship), and things happen that block you from getting closer to reaching that goal, you start to have that feeling of endangerment, which makes your body release those readiness chemicals.
And what happens when you’re ready for a fight? When something bad happens, you want to start fighting. And since you’re not going to actually physically fight your opponent on the golf course (I at least hope not) then that fight gets channelled into anger.
So you’ve not put yourself two or three levels deep, far away from that competitive yet composed frame of mind where we all play our best.
But why is it bad to be angry? I’ve heard players say they play best when they play angry, like it makes them more aggressive and freed up. Or they just need to let their anger out and get it out of their system. But the idea that someone plays well when they “play angry” is a myth. When you’re angry, your mind starts to dart around between past and future, hoping to gather information to put up a good fight and aid in the survival of the threat. And since you’re mind is in past and future, you’re by definition not present. And being present is where we play our best. When we’re immersed in the task at hand, not trying to survive some future threat that doesn’t even exist yet.
And venting your anger as a way to get it out of your system? Turns out that’s also a myth. This is something I’ve actually learned in researching this episode. I would’ve said it’s for sure healthy to vent your anger, get it out, let the pressure out of your body. But the problem with venting your anger is anger breeds more anger. Each time you get angry, your body surges out those catecholamines, which build on those already-surged catecholomines. Since you’ve already got those stress hormones flowing, and you’re already in that heightened state of readiness, and then you add more of those same chemicals, you’re only going to make yourself more stressed, more ready for a fight, more likely to get even angrier, less present over golf shots, and therefore less likely to hit good shots.
So let’s work through the three work on this: one preemptive, one in action, and one long-term.
First, the preemptive way we can work on getting less angry is to forecast struggles and failure. We’ve talked at length about this on the podcast, I encourage you to go listen to those episodes, I’ll link them in the description. But we’ll cover it briefly here.
What does it mean to forecast struggles and failure? That doesn’t exactly sound like a great thing to do. Why are we thinking about failure, won’t that make us more stressed? Actually, thinking ahead to what failing would mean and feel like can set you more at ease, because you’re making that failure feeling less vague. When the future is vague, it can get blown out of proportion. We tend to catastrophize. But when we stop and think “ok what would failure actually be? And what would it actually feel like” we almost always see that it in fact wouldn’t be catastrophic. We show ourselves that it would be disappointing for sure, but not the end of the world.
And by forecasting struggles, we set ourselves up to be less surprised when struggles inevitably happen. Because I don’t know about you, but I’ve never played a round of golf that didn’t have some struggles. And I often feel like the very act of playing golf is a struggle. Heck, getting a tee time is a struggle. So when you say “there are going to be struggles, and this is how I plan on handling them”, and then you inevitably encounter those struggles, your brain won’t go into that fight or flight mode, because it’s much less threatening to you. Because you were already ready for them to happen. Being surprised is a great way to experience stress and put you into fight or flight mode, so doing what you can to eliminate surprise is a good place to start.
Our second way to work on decreasing stress, and ultimately eliminating anger is one we can do in the moment: it’s to cool down. Both literally and figuratively. When you’re stressed, the chemicals that get released cause that increased heart rate. A good cool-down exercise is deep breathing. This helps on a physical and psychological level. When you breath deeply it changes your body from that high arousal state to much more relaxed. It lowers your heart rate and therefore lowers the level of cortisol surging through your body, meaning you won’t be experiencing that feeling of stress. You’re not as on edge anymore. And when you breath slowly, it reads to your brain as “things are ok here, there’s no threat to be ready for.” This psychological change allows your mind to come back to the present, rather than searching out for info to survive the threat.
Our third and final way to work on being less angry is the deepest and longest-term one. It’s to undermine the underlying convictions that can cause anger in the first place; to address why we’re angry. The first step to doing this is, you guessed it, awareness. From Emotional Intelligence again: use self-awareness to catch cynical or hostil thoughts as they arise, and write them down. Once angry thoughts are captured this way, they can be challenged and reappraised. What the author means by reappraised is to reframe the situation in your mind. An example he gives is being cut off in traffic. You can choose how you respond to being cut off. You can get ticked off and start fuming and want to inflict some road rage. Or you can reappraise it. The author’s version of reappraisal is to empathize: maybe it’s an emergency and they’re trying to get their as fast as they can. That one sounds a little too out there for me, so I like more of an internal reframing. Something like “why am I angry? They cut me off, but everything’s fine. No that wasn’t kind, but it’s ok. Everything’s ok.”
On the golf course this would look like you hitting a bad shot, noticing the cynical or hostile thought, and feel where your mind wants to go. It probably wants to go to self-judgment and anger, but you can choose to undermine this conviction. You can choose to see bad golf shots and just another shot that lives within the realm of your current skill level. It’s something you can work on in the future, but right now you need to focus on getting the ball in the hole.
This one will take time and practice, as all of these will. But it’s a worthy goal to start to eliminate anger as a emotional go-to for you on the course. And then you’re in a much better place to be present and composed.
Quiz
Ok quiz time.
Question 1: What does getting angry during a round negatively impact performance? a) It makes you more aggressive and focused b) It causes you to lose presence and focus on past or future threats c) It helps release built-up tension and stress
The answer is B- It causes you to lose presence and focus on past or future threats
Question 2- Which one of these is a common myth about anger in golf? a) Playing angry improves performance b) Deep breathing helps reduce stress c) Forecasting struggles reduces surprise
Answer: A- Playing angry improves performance
Question 3- What is described as a long-term strategy for managing anger in golf? a) Venting your anger to release tension b) Undermining the underlying convictions that cause anger c) Avoiding challenging situations on the golf course
Answer: B- Undermining the underlying convictions that cause anger
Ok how’d you do?
Summary
Alright let’s summarize.