Stressing about

Thank you all for the guesses on the previous post.  I’ll do my best and play as many rounds as possible between February 1 and 15 and then we’ll see who’s closest.  This is a lot of fun for me and hopefully it is fun to follow along

I wanted to write a short post about dealing with stress on the course.  I’ve been doing a lot of work on the mental side of the game lately as the greens have had frost delays and the sun sets so early that there is more time for extracurriculars.  It’s a good time of the year for mental game and working out.

Here is an excerpt from Dr. Fran Pirozzolo’s Mental Toughness book.  This is about stress reducing thoughts:

“””A key to mentally coping with stress is an awareness of the role that your own thoughts play in generating distress.  Whenver you feel yourself becoming upset, the first thing you should tell yourself is: ‘I am creating this feeling by the way I’m thinking.  How can I stop myself from being upset?’  This statement, or one like it, will not only serve to place things in proper perspective by reminding you that your thinking, not the situation, is causing your feelings, but will also cause you to focus on your own stress-producing thoughts and on how you can substitute stress-reducing thoughts.  It immediately alerts you that it is time to use the physical relaxation and mental coping techniques that are essential stress management tools.

We often catastrophize when things are not the way we want them to be and thereby create our own stress.  In fact, we often change our desires into demands: preferences become musts, shoulds, or dire necessities.  Indeed, we can go even further and suggest that any time we experience unpleasant emotions (stress, anger, fear) it is because things or people (including ourselves) are not the way we want them to be.  Thus, the idea that things should or must be the way we like them is an idea that we can focus on in developing stress-reducing thoughts.  Here  are some examples of self-statements that can be used to stop the irrational idea from triggering stress:

1. “I may not like this situation, but I certainly can live with it.  No sense getting strung out.”

2.  “There’s no reason why the world should revolve around my needs.”

3. “If I catastrophize about this, I deserve to be upset.”

4. “Life is too short to make things like this make me miserable.”

5. “If I can change this situation, I should do so.  Thinking about what I can do about this situation is better than getting upset.””””

Those are some of Fran’s words.  It’s a pretty common sense idea, really.  Be aware of your stressors and open with yourself about what you can and can’t control and then instead of further upsetting yourself with overreactions and internalizations, ask yourself how you can change the situation.

During a golf round, the amount of stress you put on yourself after a couple of bad shots can be enormous, especially if something is on the line (in my case, that something, at times, feels like everything as I’ve gone all in so to speak).  But, in the verbiage from above, that is just me catastrophizing the situation.  The healthy way to approach this is to stand back and realize at the onset of each shot that the only thing I can do to better my situation is to execute the shot at hand instead of fretting about what did or didn’t happen in the past.  There’s unfortunately a lack of time machines in the athletic world so whatever you did do is stuck in the record books.  Now, it’s best to get over that by not making it a big deal and focussing on the task at hand.