A chain is only as strong as its weakest link and when it comes to your golf swing breaking-down under pressure, the first thing to go is not your mental game nor your technique but your nervous-system, which controls both.
Contrary to popular myth, performance deterioration is not a psychological phenomenon but results from a dramatic change in bio-chemistry.
This change produces an increase in adrenaline which causes the feelings and thoughts of anxiety, produces increased mental interference (analysis paralysis), followed by an inevitable collapse of technique as the mind~body connection is all but destroyed.
Yet anxiety itself is the result of chemical changes in the brain and nervous-system which can in fact be halted by controlling the ‘stress response’ and restoring the bio-chemistry to a state of calm neutrality, known as the ‘relaxation response’.
Both these states are hard-wired into your physiology and just as you can unravel under pressure, so too do you have the ability to take control of your state and re-establish your equilibrium.
When things start to come apart and you find yourself playing poor shot after poor shot, the best thing you can do is bring yourself back ‘in the now’ – a state akin to the Zen Mind of relaxed concentration, also known as ‘the zone’.
Coming away from ‘the now’, either by castigating yourself for your poor performance, worrying about what you need to do over the following holes or even getting ahead of yourself by thinking ‘just one more birdie’, all flag up the ‘stress response’ which makes you feel tense, nervous and hesitant and invariably wreaks havoc with your swing.
The quickest way to restore equilibrium and activate the ‘relaxation response’ is to focus on your breathing and take long, slow, deep breaths. As simple as it sounds, this is the key to maintaining consistency and performance.
