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be there a few times to understand how to handle it. I mean, I was just as nervous today as I was last year at the U.S. Open. My hands were shaking just as bad, my stomach was churning just as bad. But I reminded myself of what I had to do, to hit the golf ball, to make the putts and keep myself focused, and I got through it. If it wasn’t for the times that I haven’t won, made the mistakes, and learned from them, I don’t think I could have made it. I could have double-bogeyed those last three holes the way I was feeling. But, I played them good because I had been there before and lost it before and knew what that feeling felt like.
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    Fear can change your entire perspective, and worse, it institutes a downward spiral that resupplies its own strength. Golfers with lower self-confidence (or what we come to know as “self-efficacy” in later chapters) who interpret physiological arousal as fear produce more of a stress hormone called
norepinephrine
whose job is to tense the muscles. It is worth reading that passage again: Norepinephrine tenses the muscles. Every teacher of the golf swing in the world will tell you that a proper golf swing cannot be executed with tightness in the muscles. Tight muscles are not compatible with a relaxed, smooth, flowing, seamless, and full golf swing. In a phrase, the difference between being psyched up or psyched out often has to do with the meaning we assign to these physiological states. As psychologist Albert Bandura has written, “The difference between being psyched up or psyched out is a matter of interpretation.” When an event is interpreted as exciting, the body relaxes. When it is interpreted as frightening, the body tightens.
    The cycle commonly known as the “downward spiral” you see when golfers choke nearly always begins with a dip in self-efficacy. The spiral goes something like this: Low self-efficacy results in interpreting physiological change as fear rather than excitement. Fear feeds on itself and triggers the sympathetic nervous system to do two key things detrimental to golf. First, norepinephrine is produced and muscles tense up. Second, capillaries in the hands constrict, making golfers lose feeling in their hands such that they grip the club really tightly. Tense muscles and tight hands restrict the golf swing, often producing bad shots (jabbed putts or blocked full shots). Bad shots decrease self-efficacy and increase fear, and the cycle simply repeats and insidiously feeds on itself over and over. And there you have it, a psychological breakdown that produces the dreaded downward spiral.

    fear and physiology

    In my research there are four important and destructive ways that fear impacts the physiology of the golf swing.
    Tightening muscles is fine for sports such as football, where all you need to do is hit someone really, really hard. But tight muscles do not work for golfers, whose movements, while forceful, must also be delicate and precise, often all at the same time. The physiological aftereffects of fear influence the golf swing in four distinct ways. Only by knowing these ways can golfers understand how to combat this resulting tightness and make fearless swings at good targets.
    Later, we’ll talk about how to attack these four problems both from a physical and a mental standpoint.

    Problem 1: Golfers’ Hands

    The first and by far most important way that fear-induced bodily changes influence the golf swing is by altering a golfer’s hands. Have you noticed that when people get nervous they fidget with their hands? Anxiety usually makes its first appearance in our hands. When blood flows away from our extremities, the result is that we often lose feeling in our hands. To regain the ability to feel the club in their hands, golfers do what comes naturally—they grip the club tighter. Studies show that golfers who are nervous change their grip pressure equivalent to the amount of tension they feel. The more nervous they become, the tighter