Of Habits and Golf Swings and Who You Are. Installment 2 of the mental game

Entry posted by EnderinAZ in The mental game November 25

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https://forum.mygolfspy.com/blogs/entry/36-of-habits-and-golf-swings-and-who-you-are-installment-2-of-the-mental-game/

Before we get back into the discussion about golf, we need to clarify a couple of things first. Number one is a little piece of information you could use on Jeopardy. Your brain is the single largest consumer of energy. The harder it works, the more energy it consumes.
Number two is that habits are the way your body conserves energy by pulling tasks it deems learned from your conscious thought and running them on autopilot.
Number three is that, according to neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, the human brain has four separate and distinct thinking centers. Each of these thinking centers has access to its own separate habit stack.

That information will be useful in a moment.

Now, let’s talk about habits. As I stated earlier, habits are your body’s energy conservation. You do not need to actively think about forming all the letters as you sign your name; you just do it. The same could go for tying your shoes. These are fairly simple examples. But you probably do much more complicated and dangerous things by habit as well. I know I do. Down here in the Phoenix metro area, traffic laws are more like thinly veiled guidelines that can be obeyed or ignored at the driver’s discretion. So driving down here in rush hour can be pretty harrowing. Making a right-hand turn after a stop on a busy 16-lane intersection is a fairly standard procedure for most drivers. But, when you think about it, especially during heavy traffic, making that turn is very complicated and dangerous. Think about just the steps it takes to slow to the stop.
The light is red, and I need to turn right, turn the turn signal on -habit-
Begin to slow - how much? Habit
Get in the turn lane while checking around to ensure no one is there. Habit.
Move your foot from the accelerator to the break. Habit.
Apply breaking -how much? Habit.

Without too much difficulty and a little time, you can probably think of 30 different items that are habitualized in making that turn. Your brain is very good at running habits in the proper sequence and making this turn with the appropriate application or removal of force. It also controls your hands, eyes, neck, legs, and feet, all at different times or simultaneously doing different things.

Another way to look at a habit is that it is a well-established synaptic response to a situation.

Back to golf. I watched lots and lots of different videos of my own swing and ones on the internet, trying to get an idea of how many little moving parts are there in a typical driver swing off the tee, from stepping up onto the tee box to dropping the driver back into the golf bag. I came up with somewhere between 40 and 70 different individually controllable motions. Thinking about just the start of the backswing:
When do I start my weight shift?
Once started, does it go back?
Or sideways?
Do I shift by bending my knees?
Do I shift by putting my weight on my toes? My heels?
If you break the swing down into the tiniest things you can control, the list gets long and daunting. But if you are trying to change your swing, you must break it down to the item you wish to change to the smallest common denominator. But that is fodder for another installment. For now, it suffices to say the golf swing is a complicated series of events that your body, in its need to conserve energy, has habitualized.

Now that we have established that the body can do amazing things from habit, we need to talk a little about how a habit is turned on. According to James Clear in his Atomic Habits book, habits are built and fired off by:
A cue. The ball is 150 yards from the green; pull out your seven iron.
A craving. Use the seven iron because past experience says that club will send the ball the 150 yards you need.
The response. Swinging the club
The reward. The ball lands on the green.

Unfortunately, habits are neither good nor bad. They simply are. With that in mind, here is another golf habit scenario.
A cue. Your ball is in a deep greenside bunker full of very wet sand with the consistency of cold oatmeal.
A craving. You HATE this shot. As you clamber down into the trap all you can think about is not hitting this sand shot fat. Because you always hit wet sand shots fat. You can feel the tension in your shoulders, and the anxiety in your stomach as you step up to the ball
The response. And, hit the first shot fat. The ball bumps forward a foot.
The reward. A fat sand shot.

Scientists have mapped synaptic responses in the human brain and found four distinct and separate areas where things happen depending on the test subject's “mood.” In Whole Brain Living, the author breaks down these four areas into two thinking sides and two emotional sides. When looking at the two habits above, you can see the first would be a thinking habit, and the second, sand shot, is an emotional habit. The hate, the negativity, the doubt all build into a strong defensive feeling that fires off the habit from your defensive or always seeking safety quadrant of your brain.

For me, getting stuck in this seeking safety quadrant is the surest way to a high score. That is because the little voice that comes out of this area of your brain is all negative, well all negative for me at least. This voice tells me, “Oh no, the ball is six inches into the deep Bermuda rough.” Or that the pin is tucked in stupid close behind that deep bunker. Or the water seems very close today. Or a myriad of other complaints that all arise from previous bad shots. What makes this much worse is two subconscious things are happening as I walk up to the ball in the deep rough, noting that I can clearly see about a dime-sized circle of ball above the grass. The first is that while working out of this quadrant of your brain, the release mechanism for negative fight or flight brain chemicals is the size of a fire hose and is on a hair trigger.

The second, and here is where it gets really ugly, the habit that comes out of the negativity quadrant. If your normal habitual swing response to this ball lying deep in the rough is to swing so the club digs into the grass low and behind the ball so the ball just pops up and goes 11 feet the chances you will repeat that swing and results are nearly 100%.

If you golf much at all and think back to a shot you really hate, you know this sequence of events very well.
I hate this shot
I feel the chemicals in the form of tension, butterflies, negative self-talk, predicting bad results, and others.
Swing, miss, bad results.

Here is the good news: no mental state is permanent. You do not have to stay in the negativity of the safety quadrant.

Brain chemicals will fully burn out of your system in about 90 seconds.

Here is what you do, and yes it is WAY easier to write this than actually accomplish it. First, if you hear that little voice telling you how horrible the lie is, feel that little burst of tension. Stop listening! Instead, override that voice with a positive spin by telling yourself you can and will make this next shot work. Speaking it aloud works best, but let me tell you, from experience, loud positive self-talk can make your foursome partners find a table with only three chairs at the 19th hole. Next, do whatever you can to wait out those 90 seconds. Let those negative brain chemicals burn out of your system. Then pick your shot and swing away. If you have successfully put the negativity out of your mind you will most likely hit a shot that is acceptable. It might not be, or most likely will not be a great shot, but that is to be expected. After all you did put the ball under the low branches of a palo verde tree. (Think long, stiff, and VERY pointy thorns) There was no way to swing a club under there without getting skewered, but you did get the ball back on the fairway and moved it forward a bit.

In my opinion, personal negativity is the single largest killer of enjoyable golf. A crier of woe can bring down the whole foursome and make everyone have a poor day on the links. But the biggest reason to stay out of the negative zone is your brain's constant dribble of cortisol into your system. These brain chemicals reinforce the synaptic connections of the shot that made you angry in the first place. So, as you ride from the green to the next tee box and bemoan that bad chip from the rough, you are actually hard-wiring that same bad chip into your chipping habit.

Golf is supposed to be fun. Find a way to keep it fun and you will enjoy your round more and play better as well.