If you watched the Genesis Invitational, it was as if there were two Jacob Bridgemans. One was the confident player who staked a six-shot lead going into Sunday against the best players in the world. The other was the jittery golfer struggling to two-putt from 20 feet on the final green.
“Normally when I'm over the ball, I know exactly what my body's going to do, and I had no idea,” Bridgeman said after making the clinching three-footer for his first PGA Tour won.
This shouldn’t be surprising. The subject of my latest “Mind Games” video is nerves—where they come from, why they can surface in both big moments and inconsequential golf rounds, and how to best deal with them. On that last point, the recurring point from experts on the brain is that trying to suppress nerves is worse than ineffective, because it tends to exacerbate their impact.
“Some people get stressed about the idea of being stressed,” said Dr. Jeremy Jamieson, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and a leading authority on stress. “As in, ‘the only way I can do well is if I get rid of this stress.’ And so now you're spending time, you're spending energy, spending resources on just trying to get rid of your stress response when you don't need to. It’s something that's there to help you. “
Bridgeman’s final-hole adventure underscored why we’d always prefer calm to the sweaty palms and rapid heart rate we experience under pressure. But the real trouble starts when we conflate those sensations with something being “wrong,” because then the signal we’re sending our bodies is we’re overmatched.
One of Jamieson’s colleagues in stress research is Dr. David Yeager, the author of the best-seller “10 to 25”, which includes a helpful graphic he and Jamieson created distinguishing between two types of stress responses. The first is a “challenge-type stress response”, the other a “threat-type stress response.” The difference looks like this.
While it’s impossible to know what precisely Bridgeman was experiencing, he had seen a comfortable lead frittered away over the closing holes, and later reported he couldn’t feel his hands. As Jamieson says, this is consistent with a threatened response because our blood flows away from our extremities to our core. It’s the same reason people get cold feet.
All of that when we’re just trying to make a putt? Sounds crazy, but yes.
“Most of the things we're looking at in the modern world are social threats,” Jamieson says. “Like, ‘Am I gonna be evaluated negatively by this person? Am I gonna lose this golf tournament to somebody else?’ You're not going to be harmed in any way, but your body is responding like it is going to be.”